A decade of privacy, sovereignty and collaboration

Ten years ago, we built Nextcloud to solve a problem that is even more pressing today: the dependence on centralized, proprietary software that threatens our privacy and sovereignty. Organizations need a future-proof framework to replace centralized, legacy collaboration tools. One that only open source can provide. 

From home clouds to large-scale enterprises, governments and industries, people are increasingly adopting Nextcloud as their digital workspace. It gives you choice: who controls your data, what tools you use and what it costs, how much privacy for you is enough privacy.

True to the open source way, Nextcloud is a platform running on joint stewardship: our contributing community, our partners and our customers, and Nextcloud as company – a guarantor of stability and direction. We share what we build, so it’s built the best possible way. Innovation minus the Big Tech economics.

Today we present Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring, our anniversary release. It gives you even more choice for your tools, a refined UI, stress-free collaboration, and the new platform strategy that enables developers to benefit even more from our vast ecosystem.

Built together 🤝

Since 2016, Nextcloud GmbH has steered the direction, while Nextcloud and its platform remain a dedicated work of thousands. Developers, testers, translators, writers, and designers, some shaping Nextcloud from its inception, some joined us along the way.

Customers and partners, service providers, universities and research organizations, and a variety of public entities contributing to Nextcloud and giving it valuable guidance. Nextcloud is here because we all care.

Thanks to the best community in the world 💙

Nextcloud is not owned by anyone,it is owned by everyone. There’s no single entity that is more powerful than our community.

We want to thank everyone who has been part of this movement over the past 10 years. Every contributor to Nextcloud and to this latest release. Together, you have shaped Nextcloud and advanced the entire open source movement.

Great design, further refined

In Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring, we elevate the interface with a refined, lighter design and multiple subtle improvements. Consider it a birthday glow-up!

Your apps are now available via focused waffle menu for centralized access to all your apps. It reduces distraction and uses the interface space efficiently as your your library grows.

We adjusted the shades in the left-side app navigation to reduce distraction and avoid visually competing with the primary button.

Active tab in the right sidebar is now tinted and features a smaller, animated highlight bar.

Based on the feedback from our community, we also improved usability and design in the settings and across many apps in Nextcloud Hub, including multiple minor papercut issues.

Your choice: Nextcloud Office powered by Collabora or Euro-Office

We have always offered multiple office suite options, letting you choose the integration that best fits your interoperability needs, user experience or security preferences. Today we are introducing a new office app and a range of improvements around Nextcloud Office.

Today we are introducing Euro-Office. It is available as second default office suite option in Nextcloud Office, alongside Collabora-based suite of apps.

If you run a Nextcloud AIO, you can easily switch between two office options in the Nextcloud AIO web interface.

Lets find out what’s new in the office apps in Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring.

Customization, AI chat, and interoperability: Updates in Collabora Online ✨

The Collabora-based suite in Nextcloud Office gets updates across all editors with Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring, improving interoperability and delivering smoother experience.

AI chat sidebar 💬

The new sidebar lets users chat with Nextcloud Assistant alongside the document. Like all AI tools in Nextcloud, it is optional and fully configurable.

Customizable status bar ⚙️

Choose which indicators you want to see in your status bar, like word count, zoom controls, language selector, page numbers. Your preferences are remembered between sessions.

Presentations: Slide sections and dynamic zoom 🏞️

The presentation editor now supports slide sections, making it much easier to structure and navigate larger presentations by grouping the slides.

When you resize your window, presentation zoom is now re-calculated automatically to give you the optimal fit in both dimensions.

Spreadsheets: smoother calculations and data organization 🔢

Need to quickly randomize data for sampling, demos, testing, or even selecting a winner? Spreadsheet editor now includes a new Shuffle action in the Sort split button.

Cleaning sheets is safer now: deleting a cell that breaks formulas elsewhere triggers a warning so you can confirm or undo before the broken #REF! references affect calculations.

You can now resize the autofilter dropdown in spreadsheets. Drag its edge to make it taller or wider so you can see more entries at once without scrolling. It’s particularly helpful for filters with long item lists.

There are many other improvements in the Collabora Online-based Nextcloud Office app. Find the full list of key updates in the section below this blog.

Euro-Office, a sovereign open source office built in Europe 🇪🇺

Euro-Office is here. It is a complete office suite with a set of collaborative editors for text documents, spreadsheets, presentations and PDF files.

It features seamless collaboration, maximum compatibility with Microsoft Office files, and, thanks to its distinct architectural approach, delivers excellent browser performance while reducing server load. Features like Undo/Redo and Track Changes mode work independently in collaboration, making it flawless for multi-user editing sessions.

Euro-Office lets you edit Nextcloud documents not only in the browser, but also on the go, directly within the Nextcloud app available on iOS and Android.

For example, we already integrated the Smart Picker so you can insert links to content all across Nextcloud like Deck cards, calendars, chat rooms, files, locations and more. We also integrated the Nextcloud Assistant and Euro Office works with the Nextcloud file conversion API. That allows it to convert documents into other types, like a spreadsheet in a CSV or a markdown file into a PDF.

Spotty connection? Nextcloud Text has your back 📶

We are constantly improving our markdown editor to make it more robust when your connection is unstable. Now it simply works even if you go fully offline, for up to 5 minutes.

In Nextcloud Collectives, our knowledge sharing app based on Nextcloud Text, you can now browse pages from your cache even while offline, if you have opened them before.

Easier data organization and sharing in Nextcloud Tables ♟️

Organizing data in your tables now takes less effort. You can now reorder, sort and pin table columns in a few clicks. Easily reorder views in your Tables-based applications. And additionally, you can delete and duplicate rows.

Get more done together: share tables via public links with an ability to edit table contents.

And finally, you can turn on notifications to get alerted about new actions with table or view data.

Improved search and Smart Picker in Nextcloud Collectives

Finding and sharing pages is now easier. We made search results better and more relevant by using a new database search in Nextcloud Collectives. When using Smart Picker to share a page, you will see page suggestions based on recently changed pages.

Stress-free teamwork

Let’s find a better balance in fast-paced teamwork. For those of you in motion between chats, emails, events, and projects, Nextcloud delivers one connected experience. With Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring, we make it even more integrated, adaptable, and simple.

Call from anywhere and organize conversations 💬

When a task calls for quick question, start a call instantly from anywhere. Just click on the avatar of the person you need to reach, start the call, and chat while keeping on with your work.

Are you a chat person? We also made organizing all your conversations a lot easier. First, you can sort conversations alphabetically or by recent activity to find relevant chats easier.

Now your project chats, team conversations and off-topic rooms are nicely grouped. Assign tags to your conversations and group them by these tags.

More in Nextcloud Talk: private replies to group messages, Voice Rooms, desktop client improvements

By popular demand, we added a few more features in Nextcloud Talk. For example, you can reply to a group chat message privately to keep the conversation focused, and the reply will include the quote of the original message.

We also added Voice Rooms with ongoing calls, allowing you to join a call instantly, and improved noise suppression with a more advanced option.

In our desktop client, we added support for connecting multiple accounts, so you can add your work, personal or other Nextcloud Hub instances. We also enabled automatic updating of the client.

Nextcloud Groupware: delegate more, collaborate better 🤾

In a big team, the more dependencies, the more you need to delegate. Managing a shared inbox, covering for a colleague on leave, or handling customer communication on someone’s behalf, delegation in Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring keep things moving:

• Nextcloud Mail: you can read and reply to emails on behalf of another person.
• Nextcloud Calendar: you can create events on behalf of another person and accept event invitations.

Now you can also forward calendar invites to others and they can accept them, adding an event to their own calendar. Event organizers can disable invite forwarding to protect sensitive meetings.

Better interoperability in Nextcloud Mail 📮

We enabled full read-write support for external CalCAV and CardDAV, adding an ability to connect external calendars and address books to yours respectively. For example, you can browse events from Zimbra, OpenXchange, or a private calendar server, and all the events you create in Nextcloud will appear there.

Nextcloud Deck: Gantt charts, card dependencies, and more 📊

More for your project management in Nextcloud Deck. We introduce card dependencies and start dates in addition to end dates, so you can get a better overview of your tasks’ timeline.

You can build Gantt charts based on your Nextcloud Deck boards, mapping all the task dependencies and timelines onto one view. Drag’n’drop cards, choose between day/week/month views and color-code your timelines.

That’s not all updates for your next project. Assign whole teams and groups to cards and see card authors. Choose a board to open by default when launching Nextcloud Deck. Customize your boards: define column for completed tasks and add custom card backgrounds.

New agent tools and improved performance in Nextcloud Assistant 🧠

Nextcloud Assistant helps you be confident about what happens to your data tomorrow. It gives you what data-hungry cloud chats can’t: control and choice. Know how your AI works, choose where it runs, and pick only the tools you need.

With Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring, we give it more hands and make it even more powerful.

Universal Search and more app data 🔎

Nextcloud Assistant can now use Unified Search in your Nextcloud Hub to find any items based in fewer steps. This works via Context Agent feature.

It also knows data in your apps better, helping you find items and perform new actions in file system, emails, tasks, forms, Nextcloud Deck boards and cards, and more.

Chat and context menu action on mobile 🤳

You can now chat with Nextcloud Assistant on mobile. And it’s better integrated with your device: use the context menu on iOS or Android to ask the Assistant to work with any text you come across.

Improved performance and backend interoperability ⚡️

Nextcloud Assistant receives better background job scheduling and configurability, delivering faster replies from context-enabled tasks and many other performance improvements. We also worked on the architecture, enabling support for Kubernetes for Context Chat features and LLM2.

Flexible UI 📍

You can now drag and resize the Nextcloud Assistant UI. This let’s you work in any other apps while using Nextcloud Assistant on the side.

Where apps become a team: Nextcloud platform for developers

Nextcloud Hub highly adaptable across industries and use cases. It’s designed to be extended, integrated and adapted, rather than limiting the choices of the administrator to a single vendor or a controlled selection of integrations. We empower independent developers and vendors even more through Nextcloud platform.

Empowering independent developers 💙

Nextcloud is built together, and we want to make it easier to participate. We are revising our developer support strategy, which includes cleaning up our documentation, improving tutorials, introducing more stable APIs and establishing better communication channels with developers.

To put this into practice, we are launching a dedicated Developer Relations team led by Anna Larch. Say hi!

Announcing Nextcloud ISV program 🌱

Nextcloud is more than a company or a product. It’s a platform, one we shape together with our community and organizations in our ecosystem. In the next chapter, we want to be good stewards and do more than just offer our app building tools. We are introducing the Nextcloud ISV program to help independent software vendors (ISVs) grow their audience, promote apps and provide support to their customers via the Nextcloud platform.

How the Nextcloud ISV program empowers vendors:

• We promote your apps in our App Store, offer subscriptions, and facilitate support and documentation.
• You provide stable, scalable apps with long-term support that answer our standards in privacy, security and run locally.

Read more and become an Independent Software Partner of Nextcloud. Let’s collaborate!

API updates 👩‍💻

Key API updates in Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring include:

• info.xml requirements
• Unified sharing
• Navigation styling revisions
• Sidebar tabs redesign
• Settings title left-alignment
• Several removed back-end and front-end APIs and libraries

Read more details about critical API changes in our documentation.

New integrations 🧩

We have also worked on accessibility features of Nextcloud App Store, improving the experience with navigating the pages.

Featured new community apps 🎁

Mastermind

Developer: Marc Schwartz

Nextcloud version of the popular game Mastermind. Crack a code consisting of five colors within a fixed number of turns.

Linkboard

Developer: Andreas Busslinger

Customizable service dashboard to organize your services in categories, monitor status, and access everything from Nextcloud.

Countdown

Developer: Felt

Your most anticipated releases, in one place! Manage countdowns for games, movies, series, and personal events.

Week Planner

Developer: Sören Johanson

A simple weekly planner inspired by Tweek, living right inside your Nextcloud. Easy planning with full control over your data.

Pantry

Developer: Chen Asraf

Household management app to keep your house organized collaboratively with checklists, photo boards, notes and more.

The upkeep is on us 🧹

It’s a lot of features, but it’s only 4% of what we’ve done. To live up to the trust millions of people are putting in Nextcloud, in this release we focused on stability and refinement.

We invested in bug fixing, performance work and improving reliability across everyday workflows. 96% of code change done in this release across all repos are maintenance work, including translations, small UI fixes, stability, security and performance.

Compliance for enterprises with Nextcloud Governance

Large organizations that deal with specific regulations like complex archival rules or freedom-of-information guidelines need more advanced data governance tools. For such organizations we are introducing Nextcloud Governance. This functionality provides tighter control over access to sensitive information, data lifecycle management and compliance processes.

Nextcloud Governance provides an overview of the compliance setup in an organization, and offers a series of tools to track and control data:

• Sensitivity labels that control access rights
• Ability to enact legal hold on files and create rules that control data lifecycle
• Documentation and tools to track the compliance tasks that need to be done

Looking back at these 10 years together, we also want to look ahead to what’s next. Nextcloud is 100% open source, it’s built together and belongs to everyone and you. Nextcloud Hub ensures your data remains yours forever. And no matter what happens, Nextcloud is here to stay.

Stay confident with Nextcloud Hub. Get started today!

Once the update is available, Nextcloud AIO users can upgrade to Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring directly from the Nextcloud AIO interface with a button.

*The Nextcloud Enterprise version of Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring will become available soon, once we successfully run the additional testing and complete certification.

Explore all Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring features