Nextcloud, ownCloud Infinite Scale, OpenCloud: not which one does more, but which one stays maintained

Of the three, exactly one publishes an end-of-support date per version. Nextcloud does: twelve release lines on record here, each with a date, three of them still in maintenance. For ownCloud Infinite Scale we hold no support cycles at all, because the vendor publishes none; OpenCloud is not in our catalogue yet, and its lifecycle page carries no end-of-support date per version either. That is the comparison the feature tables never run, and it decides the operating cost of the next few years.

Nextcloud: the schedule is public, and it is tight

New major releases appear roughly every sixteen weeks and each is supported for one year through periodic maintenance releases, which keeps several majors in maintenance at once — three of them in our data today. The manual is blunt about the end: maintenance ceases on the one-year anniversary, after which the version “will not receive any further bug fixes or corrections for security vulnerabilities” (docs.nextcloud.com, release schedule). In our data on 19/08/2026, the three lines still covered looked like this:

The nine lines below those are past their end date, the oldest by more than three years. The arithmetic that follows is simple and unforgiving: you have to go up once a year, every year. And postponing does not cost linearly, because major releases cannot be skipped — the manual says so in as many words (docs.nextcloud.com, upgrade) — so a year of drift turns one maintenance window into two or three. The version drags its foundation along as well: the currently documented system requirements list PHP 8.3, 8.4 and 8.5 (docs.nextcloud.com, system requirements). Nextcloud GmbH sells extended maintenance on top: its enterprise page advertises “up to 5-10 years of long term support for stable Nextcloud releases” (nextcloud.com, enterprise), without naming an end date per version. The publicly documented schedule is the one above.

ownCloud Infinite Scale: release types, but no dates

ownCloud documents its release model carefully. Infinite Scale ships as Production (about every six months, commercially supported, with an SLA), Rolling (every three weeks, no SLA) and Daily. Only Production gets overlapping support — and that is where the trail ends. The lifecycle page states the overlap “will be announced separately and will be aligned with customer needs” (owncloud.dev, release life cycle). We found no published end-of-support date for any version. If you run the community build, “how long do I have” is not a date you can plan against — it is a conversation you were not invited to. When we retrieved that page on 19/08/2026, the newest dated entry in its release table was Infinite Scale 7.0.1 from February 2025, while the GitHub releases page was already at 8.2.0.

Behind that sits the ownership question. ownCloud belongs to Kiteworks, a US vendor. In January 2025 more than a dozen staff from the Infinite Scale team left and joined the newly founded OpenCloud GmbH in Berlin, a subsidiary of the Heinlein Group; Kiteworks threatened legal action over the fork (heise online, 23/01/2025). Kiteworks answered with structure rather than silence: in May 2026 it launched an Open Source Program Office under the ownCloud brand, replaced the contributor licence agreement with a DCO, published a governance charter, and stated that ownCloud Classic — the PHP line — stays actively maintained and moves to PHP 8.3 (kiteworks.com, 06/05/2026). Delivery has continued: the newest Infinite Scale version we recorded is 8.2.0, dated 10/08/2026.

OpenCloud: young, German — and the long promise costs money

OpenCloud is a fork of Infinite Scale by the people who built it; version 1.0.0 appeared in February 2025. Its lifecycle page is the clearest of the three about what a channel means: Rolling every three weeks with community support, Production about every six months with professional support, and LTS with backports for two years — available “exclusively to customers with a service and support entitlement through a professional or premium subscription” (docs.opencloud.eu, release lifecycle).

Two years of backports is the longest span any of the three lifecycle pages puts a number on. It is also tied to a subscription, and the page lists release dates but no end-of-support dates. In the free channels you end up exactly where ownCloud leaves you: an upgrade rhythm you can read off the release history, and no date you can write into a plan. For an eighteen-month-old project that is normal rather than alarming — but it is not the same thing as a published schedule.

The four questions, in the order that matters

• How many branches are alive at once? Three means you may lag one version without falling out of support. One means every release is a deadline.
• How long does a branch live? One year of maintenance with a new major every sixteen weeks is a different operating plan from a six-month cadence with an unnamed overlap.
• Where is the date written down? A page with dates on it, kept current, is something you can quote in a change request. “Aligned with customer needs” is not.
• What does the long promise cost? If the multi-year commitment exists only inside a subscription, the honest comparison is not free against free — it is your upgrade labour against their licence fee.

Keeping track without checking three sites

For Nextcloud the published schedule sets the window; for Infinite Scale and OpenCloud the releases are the only signal there is. Neither is a judgement call — both are a list. For two of the three, patchletter keeps it: tick Nextcloud or ownCloud Infinite Scale and you get an email when a new version ships — free, no account, one-click unsubscribe. The documented Nextcloud support cycles, including the one about to expire, are on the end-of-life overview.

The honest limitation

Three things this article cannot do for you. OpenCloud is not in our catalogue yet, so we cannot watch its releases for you today — the research above is all we have on it for now. patchletter notifies on new releases, not on support endings; the cycle data is reference material on the product page, not an alarm clock. And the imbalance in this article is real: twelve support cycles for Nextcloud, none for Infinite Scale. That is not us looking harder at one vendor. It is what happens when one vendor writes the dates down and the others do not.

Cycle table and recorded versions from our own dataset, as of 19/08/2026 — 12 recorded Nextcloud release lines, 3 of them in maintenance; Nextcloud 34.0.3 of 13/08/2026, ownCloud Infinite Scale 8.2.0 of 10/08/2026, no recorded support cycles for the latter. Vendor statements from docs.nextcloud.com (release schedule, upgrade, system requirements), nextcloud.com (enterprise), owncloud.dev (release life cycle), docs.opencloud.eu (release lifecycle), github.com/owncloud/ocis, heise.de and kiteworks.com — all retrieved 19/08/2026. The figures carry that date deliberately and are not updated afterwards.