The 2025 is wrapping up, so let’s hit the “pause” button and look back at what we’ve been up to, where it got us, and what lies ahead.
Millions of people started using Nextcloud in 2025. This big jump only happens for a reason, and we are here to find it. If you spent this year with Nextcloud, as a user or customer, admin, contributor or a technology partner or provider, you will certainly enjoy this written journey.
We remembered every small detail for you: every release, every event, the headlines that were especially sharp, what you liked reading and watching.
And if you are reading this only by chance, it’s a great opportunity to see how important privacy and digital sovereignty have become, and the progress being made towards a better and safer digital world.
Enjoy!
Nextcloud Team
We are dreaming bigger
Let’s begin with how the impact of Nextcloud has grown in 2025. With over 500K servers running worldwide, it is very motivating to see our work make meaningful impact. Big government projects giving national ministries and institutions control of their data back, small teams using Nextcloud for valuable initiatives in the world, or home users choosing privacy when storing and sharing files away from Big Tech clouds.
With the rising global uncertainty this year, the interest in Nextcloud from potential customers has tripled. We have demonstrated that sovereign alternatives to Big Tech, and an end to global digital dependency, are not only possible, but already available.
In some of the countries, the digital sovereignty momentum is especially high. For example, in the Netherlands, we’ve had two record-breaking Nextcloud Enterprise Days this year. The inquiries from local businesses and the public sector have increased eightfold. In France, numerous organizations in the public sector boast 6-figure Nextcloud deployments.
And there are even more countries waking up to the need for digital autonomy, choosing Nextcloud as their online workspace solution. In 2025, we’ve shaken hands with many new customers in Europe’s public sector, such as at Austria’s Federal Ministry of Economy, Energy and Tourism (BMWET) and the administration of the City of Stuttgart in Germany.
People’s project: Growing international team and culture
This global success can only scale with the growth of our collective. In 2025, the Nextcloud team grew by 27%, and we have many more members joining next year.
With its strong roots in the open source community, Nextcloud is a people’s project, which is reflected in our core values. Coming from 26 countries and incredibly diverse walks of life, our team has shaped our culture to be fundamentally democratic, dialogue-driven, and inclusive.
We know that investing in people is the best way to use our resources. That’s why we hire from our community, support and encourage our employees to participate in the open source life, and to grow professionally.
We are growing further and looking for new people in some of the key positions, for example, Senior C++/Office Engineer and Content Marketing team lead. If you are inspired to join Nextcloud and help bring autonomy and freedom to even more people, let’s talk!
At the forefront of digital freedom, as always
Introducing the Digital Sovereignty Index
Digital sovereignty topic is getting more and more recognition in the world. At the same time, it’s actively becoming a marketing buzzword and, even worse, getting appropriated by tech giants.
So what does digital sovereignty really mean? And in how far is your country digitally sovereign?
Numbers always bring clarity. By launching the Digital Sovereignty Index, we could show how countries compare in actual digital independence.
You can also dive into our methods and check how our tracker works. And of course, there are some limitations and caveats. Do you have some ideas on how to overcome them? We love a good contribution or suggestion, so get in touch right away!
€250M for digital sovereignty by 2030
Achieving digital sovereignty is a long game. We support numerous political initiatives that aim to create digitally sovereign offerings for Europe, yet we believe that support from private projects can have a quicker impact. So this year, we announced our own “Sovereign 2030” initiative to invest €250 million in digital sovereignty by 2030.
Our key investment areas:
- Growing our international workforce
- Empowering the broader open source community as well as our own Nextcloud community
- Strengthening partnerships and expanding the ecosystem
- Educating and informing the public about privacy, security, and digital sovereignty
Channel Partner Program
Access to local resellers and service providers is the first step to making digital sovereignty an actionable plan for people, companies, and governments. Alongside our investment initiative, we launched the Channel Partner program to enable local companies with expert support and sovereign solutions on fair, beneficial terms, while ensuring they can control their roadmap and pricing.
Discover Nextcloud Channel Partner Program and read more about what its launch means to our resellers, service providers, and customers in our blog.
We did it: Awards in 2025
Nextcloud Awards: Who is shaping the future of digital independence?
This year, we launched Nextcloud Awards to celebrate changemakers in digital sovereignty: people, organizations, and projects that are actively working towards a future where users themselves, not corporations, control their data.
Accepting nominations in two categories in 2025, and joined by a team of expert jurors, we announced the winners:
- Category “Implementation Role Model”: Schleswig-Holstein
- Category “Special Award 2025: digital sovereignty awareness in times of geopolitical changes”: CódigoSur and Signal Foundation
Three breakthrough releases
Our team of engineers has been working all year round to make Nextcloud apps smarter, faster, and smoother. This year, we have seen three big releases that changed the way teams collaborate.
Integrated and modular, Nextcloud Hub 10
Nextcloud Hub 10 celebrated what makes Nextcloud architecture unique: smooth integration of all of your tools with modularity that lets you choose how you work and what you use. All-round UX and performance boost, enterprise-grade security with E2EE calls and web encryption, usability improvements in Nextcloud Mail, Talk, and Teams, Nextcloud Assistant 3.0 and first AI agent features, and lots more.
Resilient communication and collaboration with Nextcloud Talk “Munich”
In times of uncertainty, organizations seek resilient tools for their communication and collaboration needs. With a stand-alone Nextcloud Talk release, launched live at the Nextcloud Summit in Munich, we gave our strong answer: a modern, digitally sovereign platform for work chats, meetings, and webinars, with lower barrier to migration and extended telephony features.
Ready in no time, Nextcloud Hub 25 Autumn
Now, the big hit. Our latest launch, Nextcloud Hub 25 Autumn, not only comes under a new name but has an entirely new feel. Through refreshed branding, subtle design improvements, and great maintenance and performance effort, it combines under-the-hood and all-around visual improvements.
We focused on what matters and made it meaningfully better: more intuitive and easy-to-adopt UI, more automations, and more focus. That’s the user side, but if you speak code, a great deal of admin improvements, new frameworks, new config presets, and 6X faster file uploads.
Figuring out how to do everything you need to do is intuitive, and it’s a snap to delegate permissions without accidentally turning every user into an admin.
Nextcloud Hub 25 Autumn feels significantly faster and more responsive across the board. File uploads technically have the ability to be up to six times faster thanks to the improvements in chunked uploads, which also makes transferring large files much more reliable. And as you saw, the entire platform is snappier due to a 15% reduction in database queries.
New crisp branding
