Nextcloud vs SharePoint: Why European Organizations Are Switching to Self-Hosted Collaboration

Something has shifted in the way European organizations think about collaboration infrastructure. For over a decade, SharePoint was the default -- the platform you adopted because it came bundled with your Microsoft license agreement and because nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft. But in boardrooms and IT departments across Europe, a different conversation is now taking place. Organizations are questioning whether the complexity, cost, and sovereignty trade-offs of SharePoint still make sense when alternatives like Nextcloud offer a fundamentally different approach to the same problem.

This is not a story about ideology or open-source purism. It is a story about organizations running the numbers, examining the architectural realities, and concluding that self-hosted collaboration on dedicated infrastructure delivers better outcomes than continuing to pay the SharePoint tax.

The SharePoint Pain Points Driving Migration

SharePoint's licensing structure is, by design, labyrinthine. SharePoint Online requires a Microsoft 365 subscription -- either as a standalone plan (SharePoint Online Plan 1 at approximately $5/user/month or Plan 2 at $10/user/month) or bundled within a Microsoft 365 Business or Enterprise agreement. For an organization with 500 users on an E3 plan, the annual Microsoft 365 cost alone exceeds $200,000 -- and SharePoint is just one component of that bundle.

On-premises SharePoint is no simpler. You need SharePoint Server licenses, SQL Server licenses for the backend databases, Windows Server licenses for every machine in the farm, and Client Access Licenses (CALs) for every user. A mid-size SharePoint Server deployment with SQL Server Enterprise edition, proper redundancy, and the required Windows Server infrastructure can easily surpass $150,000 in licensing alone before a single document is uploaded.

Beyond licensing, there is the administrative overhead. SharePoint is not a product you install and forget. It is an ecosystem that demands constant attention: farm topology management, service application configuration, search index maintenance, content database grooming, and an endless cycle of cumulative updates and security patches that must be tested in staging before production deployment. The average SharePoint administrator salary carries a 20-30% premium over general systems administrators, and most mid-size deployments require at least one dedicated SharePoint specialist.

Performance at scale introduces another category of frustration. Large document libraries with tens of thousands of items hit SharePoint's list view threshold, requiring workarounds like indexed columns and filtered views that add complexity without solving the underlying architectural limitation. Search can become sluggish as content databases grow, and the recommended remediation -- content database splitting and search topology redistribution -- requires significant planning and downtime.

Then there is the sovereignty problem. SharePoint Online data is stored in Microsoft's datacenters, and while Microsoft offers regional data residency options within the EU, the legal reality is more nuanced. Microsoft is a US-headquartered corporation subject to US law, including the CLOUD Act, which grants US law enforcement the ability to compel disclosure of data stored abroad. For European organizations subject to GDPR, NIS2, or DORA, the question is not just where the data physically resides but who has legal authority over it. The answer, with SharePoint Online, is ultimately Microsoft and the jurisdictions under which Microsoft operates.

Feature-by-Feature Comparison

A fair comparison requires honesty about what each platform does well and where it falls short. SharePoint is a mature, deeply integrated enterprise platform. Nextcloud is a focused, modular collaboration suite. They overlap significantly, but they are not identical.

Let us be direct about where SharePoint leads. Its workflow automation through Power Automate is significantly more capable out of the box, with pre-built connectors for hundreds of third-party services and a visual workflow designer that business users can operate without developer assistance. SharePoint's managed metadata service and content type hub provide enterprise-grade taxonomy management that Nextcloud does not natively replicate. And the depth of Microsoft 365 integration -- the seamless flow between Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint -- is genuinely impressive when it works.

But here is the critical question: how much of that capability does your organization actually use? Industry surveys consistently show that 70-80% of SharePoint deployments use the platform primarily for document storage, sharing, basic team collaboration, and simple approval workflows. For these use cases, Nextcloud's combination of Files, Deck, Talk, and Office covers the requirement at a fraction of the complexity and cost. The organizations that genuinely need Power Automate's full connector library or SharePoint's managed metadata service are a minority -- and even they may find that pairing Nextcloud with a dedicated automation tool like n8n delivers equivalent results with greater flexibility.

The Hidden Cost of SharePoint

Licensing is just the visible portion of SharePoint's total cost of ownership. The hidden costs are where the real financial damage accumulates.

Consulting and Customization

SharePoint's flexibility is also its curse. Out of the box, SharePoint does very little that an average user would recognize as useful. It must be configured, customized, and tailored to each organization's needs. This work almost always requires external consultants. SharePoint consulting rates typically range from $150 to $300 per hour, and a mid-size deployment project -- covering information architecture design, site structure, permission model, branding, custom web parts, and workflow development -- commonly runs $50,000 to $200,000 before ongoing maintenance begins.

Training Overhead

SharePoint's interface is not intuitive for non-technical users. Document libraries, content types, metadata columns, check-in/check-out workflows, and the distinction between team sites and communication sites all require training. Organizations typically invest one to three days of training per user during initial deployment, plus ongoing refresher sessions after major updates. For a 500-person organization, training costs alone can reach $25,000 to $75,000.

Administration Complexity

A production SharePoint environment requires dedicated administration. On-premises deployments need farm administrators who understand service application topology, content database management, search configuration, and the intricacies of SharePoint patching. SharePoint Online reduces hardware management but introduces its own complexity around tenant configuration, compliance policies, sensitivity labels, and the ever-expanding Microsoft 365 admin center. The average salary premium for a SharePoint specialist over a general systems administrator is 20-30%, and most organizations of 200+ users need at least one full-time SharePoint admin.

The Nextcloud Alternative on MassiveGRID Infrastructure

Compare this to a Nextcloud deployment on MassiveGRID's dedicated hosting infrastructure. Nextcloud's administration is straightforward: a web-based admin panel for user management, storage quotas, app configuration, and system monitoring. There is no farm topology to manage, no service applications to configure, no content databases to split. Updates are applied through a built-in updater or a single command-line operation. And when questions do arise, MassiveGRID's 24/7 direct human support provides guidance from real engineers -- not chatbots, not tier-1 script readers, and certainly not $200/hour consultants.

The total cost differential is substantial. A 200-user Nextcloud deployment on MassiveGRID infrastructure -- including the server resources, Nextcloud Enterprise licensing, and managed hosting -- typically costs 40-60% less than an equivalent SharePoint deployment when all hidden costs are included.

Sovereignty Through Infrastructure Architecture

The sovereignty question is not abstract for European organizations. GDPR imposes strict requirements on data processing and transfer. The Schrems II ruling invalidated the EU-US Privacy Shield. NIS2 and DORA impose additional security and resilience requirements on essential services and financial entities. For organizations in regulated sectors -- healthcare, finance, legal services, government, defense -- the question of who controls your collaboration infrastructure is not a philosophical debate. It is a compliance requirement.

SharePoint Online means Microsoft controls your data infrastructure. Microsoft decides which physical servers host your data, how those servers are secured, who has administrative access, and under which legal jurisdictions access can be compelled. Microsoft's data residency commitments are contractual, not architectural -- your data may reside in an EU datacenter, but Microsoft's US-based employees can access it for support and maintenance purposes, and US law enforcement can compel disclosure under the CLOUD Act regardless of physical data location.

SharePoint on-premises gives you architectural control but imposes the full burden of infrastructure management on your IT team. You must procure, deploy, and maintain the physical servers, storage, and network infrastructure. You must handle patching, backup, disaster recovery, and capacity planning. For many organizations, this is simply not feasible -- which is precisely why they end up on SharePoint Online despite the sovereignty concerns.

Nextcloud on MassiveGRID's single-tenant hosting and private clouds offers the middle path that resolves both problems simultaneously. Your Nextcloud instance runs on dedicated infrastructure -- not shared, multi-tenant virtual machines. Your data stays in your chosen jurisdiction, hosted in MassiveGRID's data centers in New York, London, Frankfurt, or Singapore. The infrastructure is professionally managed by MassiveGRID's engineering team, eliminating the operational burden of running your own hardware. But the critical difference is this: your data is isolated on dedicated resources with no multi-tenant exposure, no foreign government legal jurisdiction over the infrastructure, and no third party with the administrative ability to access your files.

For organizations subject to GDPR, this architecture provides genuine compliance rather than contractual assurances. The data processor (MassiveGRID) operates under EU data protection law when hosting in Frankfurt or London. There is no extraterritorial legal exposure. The technical and organizational measures are under your control. And the data processing agreement reflects an infrastructure relationship, not a software-as-a-service relationship where the vendor processes your data as part of their service delivery.

Reliability and Availability

Collaboration platforms are critical infrastructure. When your document management system goes down, work stops. When your video conferencing fails during a client meeting, deals are at risk. Availability is not a nice-to-have feature -- it is a fundamental requirement.

SharePoint Online Outages

SharePoint Online runs on Microsoft's global multi-tenant infrastructure. When Microsoft experiences an outage, it affects millions of users simultaneously, and there is nothing you can do about it. You cannot failover to a backup. You cannot escalate to someone who can fix it faster. You open a support ticket, check the Microsoft 365 Service Health dashboard, and wait. Major SharePoint Online outages occur several times per year, with incidents lasting anywhere from hours to, in severe cases, more than a day. For organizations that depend on SharePoint for daily operations, each outage represents lost productivity, missed deadlines, and erosion of trust in the platform.

On-Premises SharePoint Availability

Building high availability for on-premises SharePoint is technically possible but architecturally complex. It requires multiple SharePoint servers in a load-balanced farm, SQL Server Always On Availability Groups for database redundancy, redundant application and web front-end servers, and a properly configured search topology distributed across multiple nodes. This is a significant infrastructure investment -- easily doubling or tripling the cost of a basic single-server deployment -- and it requires deep expertise to implement and maintain correctly.

Nextcloud on MassiveGRID: Built-In High Availability

Nextcloud hosted on MassiveGRID's infrastructure benefits from built-in High Availability architecture. Your Nextcloud instance runs on a Proxmox HA cluster with Ceph distributed storage. If a physical node fails, the virtual machine is automatically migrated to a healthy node within the cluster. Your data, distributed across multiple drives and multiple servers via Ceph's replication model, remains intact and accessible throughout the failover process. There is no manual intervention required, no ticket to open, no waiting for a hardware replacement.

This architecture delivers measurable results. MassiveGRID provides a 100% uptime SLA -- not the 99.9% or 99.95% SLAs that most hosting providers offer and that SharePoint Online cannot match at any price. The difference between 99.9% and 100% may seem small in percentage terms, but 99.9% allows for 8.7 hours of downtime per year. For a collaboration platform that your entire organization depends on, 8.7 hours of annual downtime is not a minor inconvenience -- it is a business continuity risk.

Future-Proofing Through Independent Scaling

Organizations grow unevenly. A legal department's document archive may double in a year while user count stays flat. A marketing team's adoption of Nextcloud Talk for video conferencing adds CPU demand without increasing storage requirements. A seasonal peak in concurrent document editing during quarterly financial reviews pushes RAM utilization to the limit for two weeks per quarter.

SharePoint Online handles scaling by selling you higher license tiers. Need more storage? Upgrade to a more expensive plan or purchase add-on storage at premium per-GB rates. Need more performance? That is not something you can directly control in a multi-tenant SaaS environment -- Microsoft allocates resources according to its own throttling policies. On-premises SharePoint requires procuring and deploying new physical hardware, which means purchase orders, lead times, and rack space planning.

MassiveGRID is the only hosting provider that allows independent scaling of CPU, RAM, and storage resources. This architectural flexibility maps directly to how organizations actually grow:

• Storage scaling: When your legal department's archive doubles from 2 TB to 4 TB, add storage to your existing instance without changing your CPU or RAM allocation. No license tier upgrade, no data migration.
• CPU scaling: When you deploy Nextcloud Talk for company-wide video conferencing and transcoding demands increase, add CPU cores independently. Your storage and RAM allocations remain unchanged.
• RAM scaling: When concurrent document editing peaks during quarterly reviews and the Collabora or OnlyOffice integration needs more memory, scale RAM for the duration and scale it back down afterward.

Each adjustment is independent, immediate, and does not require migration to a different server class or plan tier. You pay for exactly the resources your deployment needs at any given time -- nothing more.

The Migration Path: SharePoint to Nextcloud

Migrating from SharePoint to Nextcloud is a structured process, not a leap of faith. Organizations that approach it methodically -- with clear phases, proper tooling, and realistic timelines -- consistently report successful transitions. Here is the practical path.

Phase 1: Audit and Planning

Begin with a comprehensive inventory of your SharePoint environment. Map every site collection, document library, list, and workflow. Identify which content is actively used, which is archived, and which is obsolete. Most organizations discover that 30-50% of their SharePoint content has not been accessed in over a year -- this content can be archived separately rather than migrated, significantly reducing the scope and complexity of the project.

Document your permission model thoroughly. SharePoint's permission inheritance, broken inheritance, and Active Directory group mappings must be understood before you can replicate them in Nextcloud. Nextcloud supports LDAP/Active Directory integration natively, so your existing directory structure can serve as the foundation for Nextcloud's permission model.

Phase 2: Document Library Migration

SharePoint document libraries map conceptually to Nextcloud group folders or user directories. The migration itself can be accomplished through several approaches:

• WebDAV-based migration: Both SharePoint and Nextcloud support WebDAV, enabling direct file transfer with metadata and folder structure preservation.
• Nextcloud's migration tools: Nextcloud provides built-in migration tools and APIs for bulk file import, including support for preserving timestamps and basic metadata.
• Third-party migration tools: Tools like rclone can synchronize content between SharePoint Online (via Microsoft Graph API) and Nextcloud (via WebDAV), handling large-scale migrations with resume capability and integrity verification.

Phase 3: Metadata Preservation

SharePoint's metadata columns (content types, managed metadata, choice fields) require thoughtful mapping. Nextcloud supports file tags, custom properties, and comments. For most organizations, SharePoint's metadata columns translate to Nextcloud's tag system -- a flat taxonomy that is less structured than SharePoint's managed metadata but sufficient for 80-90% of real-world use cases. Organizations with complex taxonomy requirements can leverage Nextcloud's custom metadata capabilities or implement a complementary document management system.

Phase 4: Permission Mapping

SharePoint's permission model -- site collection administrators, site owners, members, and visitors with inheritance and broken inheritance at every level -- maps to Nextcloud's group folder permissions and sharing model. The key difference is that Nextcloud's model is simpler. Group folders with ACL (Access Control List) support provide read, write, create, and delete permissions at the folder level, with sharing links for external collaboration. Integrate Nextcloud with your existing Active Directory via LDAP, and your users authenticate with their existing credentials on day one.

Phase 5: Phased Rollout

Do not attempt a big-bang migration. Start with a pilot department -- ideally one that is frustrated with SharePoint and motivated to try something new. Run Nextcloud alongside SharePoint for four to eight weeks, allowing users to work in both environments and provide feedback. Address issues, refine the configuration, and build internal champions. Then expand to additional departments in waves, decommissioning SharePoint access for each group once migration is confirmed complete.

This phased approach reduces risk, builds organizational buy-in, and produces a series of quick wins that sustain momentum throughout the migration.

Making the Switch

The case for migrating from SharePoint to Nextcloud is not about replacing one product with another. It is about replacing an architecture -- one defined by vendor lock-in, opaque pricing, and sovereignty compromise -- with an architecture defined by transparency, control, and operational simplicity.

Nextcloud on MassiveGRID's dedicated infrastructure delivers enterprise collaboration with genuine data sovereignty, built-in high availability, independent resource scaling, and 24/7 human support. The total cost of ownership is lower. The compliance posture is stronger. The operational complexity is dramatically reduced.

If your organization is evaluating alternatives to SharePoint -- or if you have already decided to migrate and need infrastructure that matches the ambition -- explore MassiveGRID's Nextcloud hosting. Dedicated infrastructure, your choice of jurisdiction, and a team of real engineers ready to help you build a collaboration platform your organization actually controls.