OwnCloud & Pydio

You may have heard of OwnCloud at least, if you’re not using one already. it with more than a couple users.

Thanks to a very fine web frontend, and several standalone clients allowing to to use your shares as a network file system, OwnCloud is user friendly, and could be trusted hosting hundreds of accounts, if not thousands.
The solution was installed in Smile, by Thibaut (59pilgrim). I didn’t mind that much, back then, I was using Pydio, and pretty satisfied already. We had around 700 users, not all being active, yet I could see the whole thing was pretty reliable.

Pydio is a good candidate to compare with OwnCloud. Both offer pretty much the same services. OwnCloud has lots of apps to do everything, Pydio has plugins. Both are PHP-based opensource projects, with fairly active communities.
Small advantage to OwnCloud though, with his native S3 connector. And arguably, a better linux client and web experience.

Recently, disappointed by Pydio – something about having \n in file names, preventing files from being uploaded to my Pydio server – I gave a shot to OwnCloud.
I haven’t lost hope in Pydio yet, but OwnCloud is definitely easier to deal with: I could even recommend it to a novice Linux enthusiast.