On May 18, 2026 I cancelled my Google Workspace subscription after three weeks running a self-hosted Nextcloud built from my own Ansible roles. The verdict is sharper than I expected: for EU SMBs that care about jurisdiction, Nextcloud Hub 26 Winter has crossed the line from "credible alternative" to "the obvious default." It is not without rough edges, but the parts that matter for running a business are quietly excellent.
TL;DR
- Why I moved: the CLOUD Act and the May 2025 incident where the International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor lost his Microsoft email after a US executive order. That made the cost of US-headquartered SaaS legible to me in a way the abstract debate never had.
- What I'm running: Nextcloud Hub 26 Winter (server v33), self-hosted from my own Ansible roles, with Files, Talk, Calendar, Contacts and Collabora Online. Mail moved to Soverin under Dutch jurisdiction.
- What works: file sync is boring. CalDAV and CardDAV are boring. Federation between Talk rooms works.
- Where it falls short: iOS and Android apps still feel a half-step behind Google's, and Collabora's real-time co-editing is not yet as fluid as Google Docs.
- The wider picture: this is no longer a fringe choice. Schleswig-Holstein, French ministries, SURF and a unanimous Dutch parliamentary motion sit on the same side of this argument now.
Table of contents
- Why I left Google Workspace
- What I am actually running
- What just works
- Where Nextcloud still trails Google
- This stopped being a fringe choice
- When self-hosting is not worth it
- Key takeaways
Why I left Google Workspace
The seed was planted by a single sentence. On June 10, 2025, Microsoft's chief legal officer for France told the French Senate, under oath, that he could not guarantee the data of French citizens stored in Microsoft's European data centres would not be handed to US authorities. The Hamburg data protection commissioner put it even more plainly two months later: "in the case of a formally correct US data retrieval under the CLOUD Act, the company is legally obligated to hand over data to US authorities."
That has been technically true since the CLOUD Act passed in 2018. What changed in 2025 is that it stopped being theoretical. On February 6, 2025 the Trump administration signed Executive Order 14203, authorising sanctions on the International Criminal Court. A week later, OFAC added Karim Khan, the ICC's chief prosecutor, to the SDN list. In May, AP reporting (since denied by Microsoft, partially confirmed by ICC behaviour) said Khan lost access to his Microsoft email and switched to Proton Mail. By November 2025 the ICC was replacing Microsoft entirely with Open Desk, the German state-developed open-source workplace suite.
Whether Microsoft proactively cut services or the ICC pre-emptively migrated is still contested. Microsoft denies the active cut. The point is that for a six-figure-budget international institution, the question stopped being academic. For me, sitting in the Netherlands and running a business that handles client data, the asymmetry is the gating fact. As long as my productivity stack is owned by a US-incorporated entity, my clients' data lives under US law regardless of which European data centre Google's marketing page points at.
I covered the broader legal picture in why "hosted in Frankfurt" doesn't mean GDPR-compliant. My take has not changed. The infrastructure for owning your own stack matured faster than the legal protection for renting someone else's.
What I am actually running
Nextcloud Hub 26 Winter (server version 33), released February 18, 2026, deployed from Ansible roles I wrote, behind a reverse proxy I run. The apps in daily use are Files, Talk, Calendar, Contacts and Collabora Online (the CODE edition).
Mail is the one piece I deliberately did not self-host. My mailbox moved to Soverin, a Dutch mail provider (Soverin B.V., Amsterdam, ISO 27001, infrastructure in Europe), at €3.25 per month. I covered why running your own SMTP in 2026 is a poor return on time in my piece on self-hosted email in 2026.
One naming note worth flagging because it confused me too: Nextcloud abandoned the sequential Hub 1 to Hub 10 naming halfway through 2025. After Hub 10 comes Hub 25 Autumn, then Hub 26 Winter (current), then Hub 26 Spring in June 2026. The Hub number now tracks the year, not the count. There is no Hub 11.
Why I write my own Ansible roles instead of running the official All-in-One Docker image? AIO ships a master container that needs access to the Docker socket to orchestrate the other containers. Putting a Docker socket proxy in front of it helps a little, but the API surface AIO actually needs (CONTAINERS=1, POST=1, EXEC=1, ALLOW_START=1) is precisely what a PHP-side RCE would need to start a new container with -v /:/host. From there the bind mounts of every other service on the host are open. That is more blast radius than the install-time convenience is worth. The same isolation logic drove my Forgejo setup: minimise the surface a compromised process can reach.
What just works
The pleasant surprise of the move is how little there is to say about it. File sync from desktop and mobile is boring. CalDAV and CardDAV sync directly into iOS Calendar and Contacts. Sharing a file with a client over a public link takes the same two clicks Google Drive takes. The ADA engine added in Hub 26 Winter, a rewrite of the file access layer in PHP, Rust, and Go, is the kind of change you only notice because everything is suddenly faster: photo previews 40 to 90 percent cheaper to render, chat data 20 percent faster to load.
Federation is the underrated feature. Two Nextcloud servers operated by different organisations can join the same Talk room, and as of Hub 26 Winter the federation extends to Deck, Calendar and Teams. Email-style identity, business-grade collaboration.
End-to-end encrypted Talk calls now work in the browser, not just the desktop client. Mobile E2EE is still pending. It is the kind of feature you would not pay extra for, until you need it, at which point the absence is the only thing you notice.
Where Nextcloud still trails Google
Mobile apps. The iOS client was completely rewritten for Hub 25 Autumn in September 2025, with 2x faster uploads and 80 percent fewer instability issues. That is the difference between unusable and usable, and the team deserves credit. Usable is not yet on par with the polish of Google's native clients. Push notifications occasionally lag. The Files app's search is functional rather than excellent. If your daily driver is your phone, this is the friction you will feel.
Real-time co-editing in Collabora. G2 community ratings give Google Workspace 9.2 out of 10 on simultaneous editing and Nextcloud 7.7. My own experience matches the spread. Collabora's cursor-conflict resolution in a shared spreadsheet with two people typing fast is slower than Google's, and complex .docx files from clients still show layout drift. This is a LibreOffice-inherited limitation, not a Nextcloud one. The CODE edition is described by Collabora itself as not recommended for production environments, positioned instead for home use and small teams. That is partly commercial positioning toward their paid product, but the underlying concern is real: CODE is a rolling release with no SLA and no backported security patches. A one-person business sits inside the documented small-team use case, which is also why Nextcloud's All-in-One image bundles CODE by default. I would not run it for a fifty-person company: that is exactly what Collabora Online Business (€3 per user per month, with SLA and backported security patches) or OnlyOffice Docs Enterprise ($1,500/year for 50 concurrent connections) is for.
Talk video calls without the High Performance Backend cap practically at four to six participants, by architecture, not bug. With the HPB the ceiling moves to 50 to 75 active participants per call, which covers any internal meeting I would ever run. The remaining gap sits on the external-participant side: there is no PSTN dial-in number without a separately deployed SIP bridge, and Talk has no dedicated webinar mode with registration pages and post-event analytics. On Android the guest-link experience also trails Zoom's.
This stopped being a fringe choice
The argument played in Europe against self-hosted alternatives is that they are a hobby. The 2025 to 2026 evidence makes that argument harder to sustain.
Schleswig-Holstein is migrating roughly 25,000 workstations from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice plus Nextcloud-based cloud collaboration, 80 percent complete as of December 2025, saving €15 million per year. Full completion is targeted for the end of 2026.
The French Ministry of National Education has 400,000 administrative employees on Nextcloud, with a target of 1.2 million. The Ministry of Energy Transition has 50,000. Germany's ITZBund runs the Bundescloud as private-cloud Nextcloud for federal authorities. SURF, the cooperative behind Dutch academic IT, is rolling Nextcloud out to roughly 100,000 researchers, teachers and students.
The Dutch political alignment is the part that surprises European observers most. In January 2025 the Algemene Rekenkamer published "Het Rijk in de cloud", reporting that more than half of the most critical Dutch government cloud services run on AWS, Microsoft or Google, and that the required risk assessments were missing for two-thirds of them. In March 2025 the Tweede Kamer passed eight cloud-sovereignty motions in a single day. The Bruyning/Thijssen motion, demanding that essential government services not depend on non-European cloud infrastructure, passed 150 votes in favour, 0 against. Unanimous, in a fragmented Dutch parliament, on a digital infrastructure question. That number is not normal.
The EuroStack Initiative Foundation launched formally in October 2025 with 300-plus signatory CEOs, an explicit "Buy European, Sell European, Fund European" platform, and Bertelsmann Stiftung-modelled €300 billion investment estimates. Nextcloud's Frank Karlitschek is a founding member. The company pledged €250 million toward digital sovereignty by 2030 in November.
Governments and large institutions did the legal and political work in 2025 that I would otherwise have had to do alone. By the time I migrated, the move was no longer contrarian, it was mainstream. I covered the Dutch procurement angle of the same shift earlier in the Open Cloud Alliantie piece.
When self-hosting is not worth it
I would not do this if any of the following were true:
- I had no operational appetite for running a server. Managed Nextcloud is widely available for a one-person business. Procolix is a Dutch Nextcloud Platinum partner with enterprise SLA. The Good Cloud hosts in the Netherlands and offers Collabora from €3.25 per user per month, with Talk video as an add-on. Cloud68 is a German FLOSS-oriented provider that bundles Collabora by default. For file sync only without Office, Hetzner Storage Share is the budget option.
- My work was deeply tied to Microsoft Office files exchanged daily with M365-heavy clients. Collabora is honest about what it does and does not do, but it is not bit-perfect, and the back-and-forth eats time.
- I regularly hosted 200-person webinars with registration pages, or needed PSTN dial-in participants. With the HPB, Talk scales fine to 50-75 participants per call. The dedicated webinar mode and built-in PSTN dial-in that Zoom and Teams ship by default are not there.
- My team's daily driver was mobile. Try both stacks side by side for a week before committing.
A solo operator with mixed desktop and mobile, modest video needs, and clients who tolerate browser-based Office editing: yes, immediately. A 200-person consultancy with heavy Excel macros and weekly all-hands video: not yet, not without HPB and a paid Collabora contract.
Key takeaways
- Nextcloud Hub 26 Winter is a credible Google Workspace replacement for a one-person business in 2026. The polish gap is in mobile and real-time Office collaboration, not in the parts that handle file sync and calendar/contact sync.
- The political and legal case is no longer experimental. The CLOUD Act is enforceable, the EU-US Data Privacy Framework survived its first legal challenge but is widely considered fragile, and the 2025 Microsoft/ICC episode made the abstract concrete.
- The EU institutional pattern is forming. Schleswig-Holstein, French ministries, ITZBund, SURF and a unanimous Dutch parliamentary motion sit on the same side of the argument.
- Run it yourself only if you want to. Managed Nextcloud from EU-jurisdiction providers solves the same sovereignty problem without the operational tax.