Nextcloud is now ten years old. The anniversary release, Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring, introduces features that deliver more control, freedom of choice, transparency, and a more attractive product. The new version was announced during the Nextcloud Summit in Munich.
Nextcloud is growing rapidly, particularly in countries such as the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark. A full office suite has proven to be the next step for a company that once began as a solution for Enterprise File Sync & Share (EFSS). It is built on the basis of Euro-Office or Collabora Online, with a free choice of modular solutions for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and more. With the latest release, Nextcloud aims above all to strengthen the whole, both in terms of content and visuals.
Overview, and aesthetics matter too
The Hub 26 Spring release largely revolves around overarching improvements to Nextcloud. Consider Nextcloud Governance, which offers a comprehensive compliance overview. In addition to managing access rights, users can also see whether they are adhering to specific compliance goals, such as checking the type of data being managed and where it is available. Reviews can be scheduled periodically, with an option to search for instances where users are sharing risky data. Administrators can look under the hood and see who accessed, modified, or deleted which data and when.
Nextcloud acknowledges that this is just the beginning of Governance. We can therefore expect more general management features in future releases. This has undoubtedly been a question that has arisen now that Nextcloud adoption has surged. According to the company, it is experiencing annual growth of 50–75 percent.
Aesthetics matter too, and that’s evident in the updated design. A “lighter feel” is intended to make it easier to focus on the data in Nextcloud Files, for example. The app switcher in Nextcloud Hub will now look very familiar to Google users. Following Google’s lead (albeit from 2013), Nextcloud has opted for a button with a 3×3 grid, followed by a scrollable list of available apps that resembles app icons on a phone screen. Another clearly “borrowed” feature is the AI chats (based on open models that you can also run locally), which don’t take you out of the context of your application. Instead, a chat can be initiated within an application without changing its location. With transparency regarding model selection and how an LLM arrived at its answer, Nextcloud is already prepared for the rollout of the EU AI Act.
Easier, interoperable
There are also specific improvements to the modular Nextcloud solutions. For example, it is now possible to start a Nextcloud Talk call from any application, such as by clicking the Talk button, which is now always located near an avatar. Organizations also frequently collaborate on various projects within Talk chats. With the new release, users can group these chats using tags, sort them, and search through them. Another feature that many will recognize from other chat apps is the ability to quote a message when replying.
Nextcloud Mail now also supports JMAP. The JSON Meta Application Protocol (JMAP) is a “web-friendly” alternative to IMAP and is designed to feel more modern and run faster than before. Behind the scenes, Files has also become faster. ADA, the engine introduced in last year’s Winter release for faster performance, makes Nextcloud solutions suitable even for larger organizations in complex IT environments. It has been further integrated and made more stable in the Spring release.
Interoperable
We cannot cover every individual improvement within the Nextcloud suite in this overview. The company’s own blog is already comprehensive enough for that. However, it is clear that the new features are both community-driven and the result of a larger scale for this digital workspace. A European open-source solution fits perfectly into the paradigm of sovereignty that has become commonplace by 2026. Nextcloud responds to this by making its own solution more mature and versatile.
Interoperability is a key component of this. However, this has also drawn criticism, particularly from LibreOffice. The support for Euro-Office on top of Collabora Online means that Nextcloud supports the standard document format OOXML. According to LibreOffice, this effectively promotes Microsoft’s lock-in strategy. Setting this criticism aside: Nextcloud retains the freedom of choice it previously had. In doing so, it accepts and embraces the reality of everyday users who use a different provider for their calendar, email, or spreadsheets than their employer does, for example. Something as simple as the color choice for Nextcloud’s equivalent of Excel/Sheets (green) simply helps to eliminate that friction, in addition to technical support.
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