For several years, I've relied on NextCloud as a substitute for Google services. The time has come to say goodbye and move on in life. I've decided to replace my NextCloud instance with separate services for files, calendar, photos, notes, and to-do lists.
I've already found alternatives for all services, except for the calendar.
Does anyone have experience with FOSS projects that would allow me to self-host a calendar? I'm looking for something that supports CalDAV, has its own (pretty) user interface (webui), caters to multiple users, and supports multiple calendars.
And if anyone is interested in the alternatives I've found for each NextCloud component, here's the list:
+1 for Baikal. Also, radicale is very simple to host in docker. Thunderbird works great with calDAV and will give you desktop notifications, davx5 is a great bridge to get your CALDAV server into android calendars. Hope that helps!
I'm using nextcloud for files and photos/videos sync from mobile, Joplin for notes and tasks, baikal for calendar (with sharing with my wife which using iOS/macOS).
There is nothing better than Nextcloud for files, I was trying to use syncthing and seafile - both sucks in one way or another.
Also, I was using vikunja for tasks but it's UI and UX... Well, strange and not eye-candy. I hope someday they'll rewrite it.
There is nothing better than Nextcloud for files, I was trying to use syncthing and seafile - both sucks in one way or another.
Syncthing is a sync utility wich is different from a cloud service. They both have different purpose and are for different tasks. IMO as cloud service go, they all suck (nextcloud, seafile, owncloud) if you're just looking for a simple and unbloated selfhosted cloud service.
Also, I was using vikunja for tasks but it's UI and UX... Well, strange and not eye-candy. I hope someday they'll rewrite it.
I find it's UI and UX pretty good, I really like it ! But with the new editor update it fucked up the caldav integration with jtxBoard, but it's in the backlog and he/they are already working on it !
Me too, the question is if the web UI is "pretty", but I personally only use it to sync between devices; all I see is app UIs. Hardly ever open the web interface.
Just follow this tutorial and you will have Radicale setup via docker. Radicale is lightweight and really does help me to get away with all the caldav/cardav necessities.
I see radicale recomended, but in what ways is it better than nextcloud? I moved to nextcloud for calendar due to syncing issues when sharing calendars. So far it seems to be fine, but this question got me wondering about what can be done better.
The only thing I've found that bothers me is that to add someone to the event he needs to also have nextcloud otherwise it gets weird.
The problem with separating Calendar + Mail + Contacts is that they work best together. Although to be far I am not aware of an open-source system that effectively combines them.
Calendar event invites an updates go over mail. So you want your calendar application to automatically be able to get those. Also options like "automatically add invites from contacts to my calendar" is an awesome feature. Contacts can also be used for spam filtering (although this integration is a bit easier to do externally).
So currently I am using Nextcloud (self-hosted) although I don't really like it because it is pretty slow on my low-powered VPS. But even still it doesn't actually have proper email integration. There are bugs open and slowly moving but I'm still using Thunderbird to process most of my calendar stuff.
Not to mention JMAP which is slowly progressing which would be a huge improvement, especially for mobile clients. It also combines these three services.
I recently switched from etesync to a self-hosted solution and didn't want to install a full Nextcloud on my tiny home server just for that. So I initally tried out radicale as well, but I didn't like the default user handling (no authentication at all) and the project had been unmaintained until very recently (two weeks ago). I switched to baikal then and I am quite happy with it so far.
I’ve never used Radicale, but I just looked it up and the homepage talks about enabling authentication. It also supports auth via reverse proxy headers, which is great for anyone who wants to use Authelia, KeyCloak, or another similar solution. By contrast, as far as I can tell, Baikal doesn’t support reverse proxy auth, though it does seem to let you set up auth through the web interface.