Nextcloud Hub 10 replaces Google Workspace for the price of a VPS

On February 25, 2025, Nextcloud shipped Hub 10 — the tenth iteration of its self-hosted collaboration platform. The number that tells the story: 4,600 merged code changes across the core repositories (Files, Talk, Groupware, and Office), and fewer than 5% of those were feature work. Everything else went into performance, stability, and security hardening. By May 2026, field reports confirm what the numbers suggested: a €6/month VPS runs five users comfortably, while Google Workspace bills €12 per user per month. The math isn’t close.

What Nextcloud Hub 10 actually changes

Nextcloud Hub is not a self-hosted Dropbox clone. It is a full collaborative suite spanning file sync, videoconferencing, email, calendar, contacts, kanban boards, notes, and document editing — all inside a single interface, with over 400 apps available in the store. Version 10 focuses on three pillars: raw performance, end-to-end security, and local AI.

On performance, the metric every admin notices first: a 10 GB file that took 195 seconds on Hub 9 now transfers in 45 seconds. That’s 4.5× faster uploads thanks to chunked transfers that resume automatically after a dropped connection. Talk calls place less load on the server when mobile participants join, the Dashboard and Unified Search load faster, and background jobs received a deep optimization pass.

Security didn’t stand still either. Hub 10 introduces end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for Talk calls — available through both the web client and the new native desktop client — and makes E2EE-encrypted files accessible in the browser, with a transparent caveat that the browser executes server-side code, temporarily weakening the E2EE promise. Brute-force protection now exposes configurable thresholds, and the built-in Mobile Device Management (MDM) can enforce FaceID, disable clipboard access, or block file sharing from the mobile app.

An AI Assistant that runs on your own hardware

This is the centerpiece of the release. Nextcloud Assistant 3.0 introduces what the team calls agency features: the AI no longer just generates text — it acts inside your apps. It can create a calendar event, read and send Talk messages, draft an email, query the weather, or pull information from a Collectives page, then chain those actions together in a single request.

What separates Nextcloud from every cloud-bound assistant is that this one runs entirely on-premises. Multiple open-source LLMs are supported; inference goes through LocalAI, llama.cpp, or an external provider if you choose. No data leaves your server without explicit opt-in, and the settings panel shows exactly which AI provider powers each feature.

In practice, the Assistant is wired into:

• Talk — automatic summaries when you return to 100+ unread messages, call recording summaries from transcripts
• Mail — thread summaries, reply suggestions, in-body translation
• Office (powered by Collabora Online) — text generation, rephrasing, contextual spell-checking inside the editor
• Smart Picker — one-click text templates available everywhere

Office, kanban, and video calls: one interface, no silos

The cross-app integrations are what make Hub 10 feel like a product rather than a pile of containers. From a Talk conversation, you schedule a Calendar meeting in one click — attendees pre-filled from the chat. You spin up a Deck board to track a project, and the shared files stay linked even when a team member goes on leave, because shares now belong to Teams, not individuals.

Team folders (rebranded from Groupfolders) can be assigned to a team with granular ACLs and an activity feed. This is the feature mid-sized organizations were missing before they could realistically migrate off SharePoint.

On the office side, Nextcloud Office — built on Collabora Online — embeds the Assistant in the Insert tab, adds document styles, autotext replacement, and custom dictionaries. File conversion is now available directly from the Files context menu without opening the editor.

The real cost: one VPS vs. per-head subscriptions

This is Nextcloud’s killer argument against Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. Here’s the comparison for a five-person team over twelve months:

An entry-level Hetzner or Netcup VPS with 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, and 160 GB SSD costs around €6 per month. Add a 2 TB storage volume at ~€10/month and you’re at €16/month for five users — versus €60/month on Google. The gap widens with team size: for twenty users, Google charges €240/month versus ~€25 for a suitably upgraded Nextcloud VPS.

To be fair about what the VPS price doesn’t cover: you need to administer the server, manage backups, monitor updates, and configure the reverse proxy. For someone already comfortable with Docker, this represents about an hour of maintenance per month. The Nextcloud All-in-One (AIO) Docker image brings that burden down further: a single docker run deploys the entire stack with HTTPS, automatic backups, and updates.

# Single-command Nextcloud AIO deployment
docker run \
  --init \
  --sig-proxy=false \
  --name nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer \
  --restart always \
  --publish 8080:8080 \
  --volume nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer:/mnt/docker-aio-config \
  --volume /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro \
  nextcloud/all-in-one:latest

The apps that tip the scale

The Nextcloud app store holds over 400 applications. A few have become essential:

• Nextcloud Memories — photo management with facial recognition, geolocation search, and timeline view; Immich-like but inside your existing cloud
• Nextcloud Maps — geotagged photos, contacts, and routes on an OpenStreetMap layer
• Nextcloud News — self-hosted RSS reader
• Nextcloud Forms — surveys and polls with CSV export
• Nextcloud Tables — lightweight Airtable-style database, now with Teams support in Hub 10
• Recognize — object and face recognition via machine learning
• AppOrder — reorder apps in the navigation bar

These install in one click from the admin panel. None require an extra container — they run inside your instance’s existing runtime.

Verdict: who should switch, who should wait

Switch to Nextcloud Hub 10 if you already run services under Docker, your team numbers more than three, and the accumulated cost of Google or Microsoft subscriptions is starting to bite — or if EU data residency is a contractual requirement. Hub 10 delivers on its performance promises, the self-hosted AI Assistant is a credible open-source first, and the cross-app integration genuinely feels polished.

Stay on Google Workspace if you have nobody to administer a Linux server, your team depends heavily on real-time collaborative editing in Google Docs (ten people commenting simultaneously on a Sheets cell has no exact equivalent in Collabora yet), or you need 24/7 vendor support. Nextcloud offers Enterprise support, but it brings the bill close to cloud-subscription levels — the savings come from self-hosting, not from the license.

For family or small association use, a €200 mini PC running Debian with Nextcloud AIO and an external drive for backups handles everything. You recover the investment in under six months compared to a Google One 2 TB plan at €99.99/year.

References

• Nextcloud Hub 10 — Release announcement, February 25, 2025
• Nextcloud launches Hub 10: Breaking the myth of European tech dependency, February 25, 2025
• This Week in Self-Hosted — 28 February 2025, selfh.st
• Nextcloud Hub 10 Released, Here’s What’s New, Linuxiac
• Nextcloud Assistant — The first local AI assistant, nextcloud.com
• Google Workspace — Business Standard Pricing, google.com
• Hetzner Cloud — VPS Pricing, hetzner.com