Nextcloud vs Seafile

I' m using Seafile for years but Nextcloud is still the leader in the Self Hosted world when peoples ask for a Self hosted replacement for DropBox, OneDrive , Google Drive etc..

So I' m going to compare both of them and see if for me Seafile is still the best.

Test environment

The test will be performed using a fresh installed Debian 12 with 4 cores and 4 GB of RAM. This VM is running on Proxmox.

Seafile and Nextcloud will run as docker containers running with docker compose, both will use MariaDB as database. You can see the docker-compose.yaml files used here and here.

Test protocol

I' m going to sync between my computer and Seafile/Nextcloud two folders:

• Folder 1: Size of 11.2 GB containing 869 Files and 13 folders. It's a mix of Pictures and videos I took with my phones
• Folder 2: Size of 7.6 GB containing 4 files with size between 1 GB and 2.5 GB

The sync will be performed using the Desktop application for Seafile and Nextcloud over Wifi. The server is plugged with 1 GB port to my router.

Results

Sync speed

Performances

Seafile

Folder 1

Folder 2

Nextcloud

Folder 1

Folder 2

Conclusion

For me Seafile stay the winner regarding speed and hardware usage. You can see on the graph Seafile stay under 60% of CPU and the Load stay under 2. Seafile stay the best if you want a simple Dropbox/OneDrive/Google Drive alternative running on low end hardware.

Regarding Nextcloud, I guess it will run better with higher end hardware, with a peak at 80% of CPU and a LOAD of 4 my virtual machine was running on it's knees.

I want also add,  to be able to run the test with Nextcloud, I had to shutdown others VMs because OOM Killer was killing the VM  due to Out Of Memory issues.