Google Drive vs Nextcloud

I read an online article about Owncloud and how you can make your own cloud storage.  Google has been shown to scan your data. Then use your data to market advertisement to you based on your data.  Then Owncloud forked off into a different project called Nextcloud.  When open source projects get forked in the open source community it means that developers had a different vision for the product. They broke off to do their own version.  It happens a lot from what I have seen some for the better.  An example would be OpenOffice and LibreOffice.  Where LibreOffice forked and had more features and better layout.

I wanted to see if I can become Google independent and not rely on them for everything.  What I found was the following:

• Google is heavily integrated to your Android smartphone
• Google Drive was more smoother in terms of file uploads and showing the file right away among your other devices
• Google Drive does not have a file limit on the upload other than the account limit of 15GB for your entire account.
• Nextcloud has a hard limit of 512mb per file.  When uploading video, pictures, the file gets stuck on your device.  The limit can be theoretically removed or upped in two locations via the PHP code and the web GUI.  The web host provider still has their own limits.  Where you can’t really change anything on the PHP side of things.  If you host Nextcloud on your home network, then you are limited by what I just mentioned on top of your upload limits.  Which becomes a bottleneck of sorts.
• The Google Drive Desktop app just works and whatever gets uploaded, deleted, changed it cascades over to other devices with a refresh.  Nextcloud takes a while and seems not all of your files get transferred correctly and get stuck.  The Nextcloud software seems it works and doesn’t work at times.
• Google Calendar, Google Contacts, YouTube, and other products just work on Android with the syncing of the data. (WebDAV)
• You need to pay for 3rd party software to sync via WebDAV.  My email is hosted through my web host provider and does have WebDAV.  The Calendar, Contacts, do not sync and have to do a lot more steps to get it to work.  Compared to Google it just works with minimal configuration on your device.
• There are lot of limits when it comes to server resources on your web hosting account.  Hosting videos on your account you will notice it takes up  A LOT of disk space.  You can run your videos on Handbrake and make them lighter. The storage capacity and resource drain with many viewing at your videos will punish the web host server.  I tested this by uploading family videos and sharing them via Nextcloud and Google Drive with a direct link.  Google Drive had no issues while Nextcloud just had issues.

Out of the box Google has their products very stream lined and polished.  While the opensource versions have potential and will get better with each version.  I will definitely revisit this topic with time.  I think we will get to a point where the alternative version will outperform Google.