The latest Nextcloud Hub 25 Autumn brings a polished new interface, streamlined workflows, and a host of usability upgrades—check out our screenshots of the refreshed user experience.
Yesterday in Berlin at Nextcloud Community Conference 2025, Nextcloud raised the curtain on Nextcloud Hub 11 Nextcloud Hub 25 Autumn, the successor to Nextcloud Hub 10. A new versioning system had been announced in a blog about a week earlier.
If you don’t know, Nextcloud Hub is a platform that allows individuals and enterprises alike to host their own clouds, complete with all the whiz bang collaboration features found on the customer and employee facing portals operated by major Fortune 500 companies — but without the expense or vendor lock-in. Hosting companies use it too, as a way of offering potential enterprise customers a turnkey way to launch a fully functional cloud portal in a few minutes.
“When we started Nextcloud nine years ago, we had a small team and a big dream: To give people control over their data,” Frank Karlitschek, Nextcloud co-founder and CEO said in a statement. “Today, Nextcloud is the most deployed collaboration platform in the world. Ten releases since introducing the Nextcloud Hub numbering, we felt the need to adopt a naming scheme that scales better.”
What’s New — Other Than the Numbering
At a pre-release press event on Monday, Nextcloud co-founder and communications director Jos Poortvliet said that something like 94% of the changes to this release are “under-the-hood,” and address things like performance, database loads, and security rather than added features. Many of these changes aren’t hidden away out-of-sight however, but are quite noticeable, as a major overhaul to Hub’s UI is included in the mix.
According to Nextcloud, this not only brings the benefit of making workflow patterns more intuitive for hub users, it also makes new configuration options available — while making some already existing options easier to find. In other words, Nextcloud has made this edition of Hub boring, in the same way that Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda worked to make Kubernetes boring back when they ran Heptio.
Boring is good. It means that everything runs smoothly and without unexpected hiccups. Figuring out how to do everything you need to do is intuitive, and it’s a snap to delegate permissions in a way that doesn’t hand systemwide control over to half your users. In other words, Nextcloud Hub 25 Autumn is boring in a way that’s actually pretty exciting.
Also, not everything about this new release is under the hood. New features have been added, including some cool new capabilities for Hub’s AI assistant. If you’re taking this new release out for a test drive, here’s a long list of things for you to notice:
- Fresh redesign and usability lift: This would be the already mentioned cleaner interface and improved workflows that make it easier than ever to navigate, organize and collaborate.
- New office UI: This one’s joined-at-the-hip with the other design and usability changes, and includes fresh colors, intuitive tabs, and simplified navigation bars that provide a modern, distraction-free editing experience.
- Increased performance and stability: Here we’re in totally under-the-hood, you can’t see it but you know it’s there territory. Platform-wide optimizations accelerate loading times and promise a smoother experience for all users, performing all tasks.
- AI agent tools: Nextcloud Assistant’s been taking its smart pills, and now comes to the table with added features, which means it’s now able to offer smarter support for daily tasks while respecting user privacy.
- Talk threads & live transcription: Conversations in Nextcloud Talk become clearer and more structured with the addition of threaded discussions. Also, live transcription of video calls offer a range of new possibilities, starting with making them easily searchable.
- Calendar date poll: This is a new feature that’s bound to be handy — a new poll function in Calendar that allows teams to suggest and confirm meeting times right on the calendar, reducing email back-and-forth.
- Intuitive file search: The UI changes include a new search interface to help you find documents, conversations, and other information more quickly.
- Teams 2.0 & quick guest accounts: You definitely don’t want to confuse Teams with a similarly-named platform from a proprietary software vendor based in Washington State. Teams is Nextcloud’s group-management and collaboration tool, and with this release it can be organized more flexibly. Also, guest accounts can now be set up in seconds for a faster onboarding experience for partners and external collaborators.
- Quick presets & admin updates: New presets and expanded tools for administrators have been added, simplifying setup and maintenance for large deployments.
- Developer upgrades: With this release Nextcloud transitions to Vue3, the latest major version of Vue.js, a popular open source JavaScript framework used for building modern web interfaces and single-page applications. This has allowed Nextcloud devs to introduce WebSockets for real-time interaction, and expands OpenAPI support, providing a robust foundation for custom apps and integrations.
“The renewed design is meant to make you feel at ease in your digital workspace,” Nextcloud design lead Jan C. Borchardt said in a statement. “The subtle changes made the interface of Nextcloud Hub lighter, more approachable and polished, while the new contrasting elevation and depth of clickable elements feels almost physical.”
Nextcloud and Open Source
First and foremost, Nextcloud is an open source company.
Since Nextcloud began as a fork of OwnCloud in 2016, the biggest thing it’s been selling is open source. At first, it was the open source alternative to OwnCloud, an open core project that used — and continues to use — open source as a way of selling proprietary licenses.
As a Dropbox alternative, which it was in its early days, Nextcloud provided users with a way to affordably store and share files locally without the need to trust a third-party cloud platform.
“Nextcloud Hub 25 Autumn shows that open source is not just an alternative, but the most innovative and sustainable solution for modern collaboration,” is how Karlitschek put it in a recent statement. “It’s easy to collaborate while staying in control over your data, whether you are seeking a privacy-friendly solution for home or a secure, enterprise-scale setup.”
These days, Nextcloud offers much more than a mere file sharing platform, which is the result of an evolution that began almost from the day that the project announced its independence from OwnCloud (and which was made official in 2020, when Hub was introduced with the release of Nextcloud 18). Since then, the project has been adding new collaborative capabilities at breakneck speed.
This new release, with its new versioning, seems to signal an increased focus on ease-of-use, which should be welcome to Nextcloud users.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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