Instead of a subscription

Self-hosted alternatives to Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365 combines mail, files and collaborative editing for a household or a company. What the catalog covers is the files-and-collaboration half: a personal cloud with sharing, calendars and document editing in the browser.

1 applicationFilter the catalog by Microsoft 365

Catalog

Recipes that cover it

Fully verified36,872

Editorial pickCloud storage

Nextcloud

Your own cloud with files, calendar, and collaboration

2048 MB RAMamd64 / arm64 / armv7PHP / JavaScriptMediumAGPL-3.0-onlyVersion v35.0.1

Alternative to: Google Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft 365, Yandex Disk

Open

Requirements

Side by side

Requirements and recipe status of the applications on this page
Application	Minimum RAM	Disk estimate	Database	Installation difficulty	Backup	Recipe verification	License
Nextcloud	2048 MB RAM	20 GB	PostgreSQL	Medium	Yes · Restore tested	Fully verifiedCheck is current	AGPL-3.0-only

The bill

The subscription against a server

Both figures are editable, because only you know which of them you actually pay. The server is sized from the figure the recipe recommends — the same one the catalog calls a comfortable fit on your profile — and not from the cheapest row of a price list.

Subscription, $ per monthReplaced byServer, $ per month

Nextcloud asks for 4 GB of RAM, 2 vCPU and 20 GB of disk — $24 a month on DigitalOcean Basic.

The difference

Per month: $15.67
Per year: $188.04
Over three years: $564.12

The subscription wins on price by $188.04 a year. What hosting it buys you here is the data, not the money.

Not counted: your own time, a domain, and a backup kept anywhere other than that same server. A machine you already run costs nothing extra — set the server to zero.

Microsoft 365 · Personal, 1 TB, billed annually, price checked 2026-09-21 Server prices: DigitalOcean Basic, checked 2026-09-10

Migration

What changes when you host it yourself

The data stops leaving your network, and so does the responsibility for it: backups, the restore you have actually tested, and the disk it all sits on.

Feature parity is never exact. Read what each recipe states about limitations and the smoke test before planning a migration.

The bill turns into work: updates, certificates and an eye on the release notes. The catalog shows how much of that each recipe asks for.

Guides with these applications

A family cloud without the subscriptionFiles, photos and device sync for a household. Decide who holds each copy, how access is granted and where the off-server backup lives.