Nextcloud vs Join.Me: Which is a better fit?

Randy: Hi, my name is Randy. I'm a user experience researcher, and I'm reviewing Nextcloud. I give it a five star rating. And for more reviews, click below. Originally, I was trying multiple different cloud storage solutions, things like Dropbox and some others. I'm sorry. I can't remember the names. And the problems were that either the free account was very limited. Fair enough. Free is free. But then it got very expensive very quickly, or the features were lacking where if I wanted to share with some people, but not with others, if I wanted a gated, tiered access, depending on role, most of the online solutions didn't allow for that. So it was a struggle and this was in support of a nonprofit where I wanted to share with people easily across the cloud larger files. So I had a set of very definite requirements, and I couldn't find anything that met all of my requirements. When I found Nextcloud and started experimenting with it, I was finding that it was ticking all of my boxes. It was a cloud-based solution. It was open-source, which I very much respect and appreciate the open-source model and I'm an open-source enthusiast. It is under very active development and has been under continuous active development for, gee, I guess at least five years now. Don't trust that number, but something like that. So they just keep adding features that gets better and better. It is very a flexible. And what I really appreciate is that it has a flexible storage model. So instead of just buying a web server storage from a host, it will connect to any Amazon S3 compatible storage service. So I have used it with AWS, Amazon Web Services S3. I have used it with Wasabi, which is an S3 compatible service. And now I'm using it with a hosting provider that provides block storage. I actually used it with two different providers that do that. So it provides that great flexibility, and what that means is by being compatible with other storage services like that, you can bring the storage costs down. So instead of just paying typical web hosting server storage rates, which are pretty expensive, you can have a much more reasonable storage cost. Oh, and the other thing is, is it does have that complex user model where I can set up different users and groups and give some people access to A and others access to B, and things like that. So it meets all my needs, both in terms of cost management and flexibility and capability. It's pretty easy getting started. There are multiple ways. There are services, and I've used one of these in the past and kind of my early days getting set up, where it's a turnkey hosting service that implements Nextcloud. So you just pay a little bit a month and you get an account. That's great. If you're at all familiar with installing server applications, which I would say most people probably are not, but if you have any experience with that, it's relatively easy, especially in the days of containerization. So now you can get it as a snap package for example, and install it on a Linux server very easily. And many hosting services, since it is a popular enough package, many hosting services will have, okay, here are packages that we've got pre-installation scripts made for you. And so that is... Nextcloud is often available on those kinds of hosting marketplaces, all of which makes it pretty easy to set up. If you want to do a lot of customization, then you're going to want to do it manually yourself. And it's a little bit more tricky. It's not something for the average user to do, but in general, I mean, I guess my point is there are many ways to use it starting off from a very easy third-party service. You just sign up and you're good to go. One thing I didn't mention yet, that's the server side, but on the client side, it's really easy. You just go download the desktop app, the phone app they have. And I guess that's really important for me because that's a big part of my use case is I work across multiple machines. I like to have my cloud storage... I guess I didn't mention that in my use case earlier. For my personal use case, that's the way I synchronize my files and make them available across all my devices is I sync everything up to a Nextcloud instance. So that ability to download and install a desktop client or a phone client is essential for that, and that's as easy as any other application you would install. My recommendation is just to try it out. As I was mentioning before, there are various ways to try it. You can... If you just want to try it out, I would say the quickest way would be to go with one of the hosted services. And if you go to their website, you'll see they give information on providers who host it for you, if you want to do that. And that's the easy way to get started and to try it out. And then there are so many cloud service providers these days that provide cloud servers and, like I said, that have those pre-built install scripts where you can install it yourself. That's an easy way to experiment with it as well.

Grant: Hi, my name's Grant. I'm a financial advisor. I'm the only one in my business and I give join.me a three out of five. I actually wasn't using any similar tool to join.me before I started using it. The employer I was working for at the time was doing a lot of video calls, and this is the one that they recommended the entire team use. So I use join.me because it was really, really easy for clients to join. It doesn't have any kind of obscure name or anything like that. You literally just go to a website, join.me. You give them a code and they enter it and they can join a meeting. It's really just easy to think about and integrate in that way. You just say, "Hey, you're going to join me for a meeting, let's go to join.me." It's really easy to get started. Literally, yeah, join.me, you go to the website, it prompts you to enter the code to join the meeting. The only downside is if the person that you are having join the meeting doesn't already have the app, then they have to download it. At least that was the case when I was a user of join.me. I believe that now it can be web-based, but in terms of simplicity, it's really just that simple. When I was a solid user of join.me, they had a free plan, and that was really great because I wasn't having tons of meetings and it didn't really warrant paying a subscription. There is only a subscription option now, so you can't have a free plan if you just need to join meetings every now and again. It does have good security features if that is important to you, but honestly, if you're just looking for regular meetings, it doesn't really have anything that stands out. If you do need those extra features though, it does integrate with third party software and different tools as well. So it really just depends at the end of the day if those things are important to you or not.