A self-hosted team workspace for Nextcloud, and an open-source alternative to Microsoft Teams. Every Nextcloud Team gets one page to work on: messages, decisions, presence, projects and internal services.
TeamHub is a self-hosted team workspace for Nextcloud, an open-source alternative to Microsoft Teams that runs inside the Nextcloud you already have. A Nextcloud Team on its own is a membership list: a group you can share a folder or a calendar with. TeamHub turns that list into somewhere to work. Every team gets one page carrying a message stream, decisions, presence, an activity timeline, projects and internal services, beside the Talk conversation, team space, Calendar, Collective and Deck board that team already uses.
Nothing is copied and nothing has to be migrated. Deck stays the source of truth for cards, Talk for conversations, Files for documents. TeamHub reads across them and writes your actions back to them. It works entirely within your own Nextcloud instance: no external services, no hosted version, no data leaving your server.
Nextcloud's built-in Dashboard is personal. It's about you. TeamHub is the team-scoped equivalent. It started as a visual mock-up to discuss what team-based working could look like inside Nextcloud, and grew into a full workspace layer built on top of Nextcloud Teams.
Organisations replacing Microsoft 365 with Nextcloud find that mail, files, documents, chat and boards are all covered. The row Nextcloud does not cover on its own is Teams itself: the place a team works. That is the row TeamHub fills, without replacing anything already running.
| Microsoft Teams | TeamHub for Nextcloud | |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | Microsoft's cloud | Your own server, self-hosted only |
| Licence | Proprietary, per user per month | AGPL-3.0. Free to develop with, licensed by seat count to run in production |
| Data residency | Microsoft's regions and sub-processors | Your instance, no sub-processor to add to your register |
| Chat | Built in | Nextcloud Talk, which you already run |
| Files | SharePoint | Nextcloud Files and team spaces |
| Boards | Planner | Nextcloud Deck, which stays the source of truth for cards |
| Decisions | Chat threads and meeting notes | A decision log with categories, approvers, the reasoning given, an append-only trail, and decisions that are reviewed, superseded and archived rather than left to go stale |
| Presence | A status dot, about this second | A working location per half day, for the week ahead, synced to each member's calendar |
| Audit | Purview, depending on the plan | Append-only audit log — per team and for the installation itself — and an ISO/IEC 27001:2022 control report |
Moving an existing estate across is covered by bulk team import: one CSV, one row per team, with a dry run before anything is created.
TeamHub is not affiliated with or endorsed by Nextcloud GmbH. It is a third-party app published on the Nextcloud App Store.
- Which Jari Feet? (4.10.7): every place you pick a person (inviting, the wizard, bulk create, the admin pickers,
@mentions) shows the same row: avatar, name and a line that says which colleague this is, built from the profile rather than the email: Controller · Finance. The Nextcloud administrator chooses the fields under Admin → TeamHub → Telling people apart (job title, organisation, headline, manager, groups, email address, account name); fields a person set to private stay private. - TeamHub teams are TeamHub's (4.10.6): a team is created in TeamHub, where the template decides its apps and modules and the policy profile its settings. A team made elsewhere (Contacts' Teams page, Collectives,
occ) is not shown in TeamHub. And a team created in TeamHub can only be deleted from TeamHub: Nextcloud's own Teams page refuses, the way it refuses for a Collectives team. Teams that existed before the upgrade to 4.10.6 stay where they are. - My Work: one personal queue of what every team needs from you, across sources. Deck cards assigned to you, file approvals waiting on you, and decisions awaiting your approval land in the same list, grouped into Action required, Today, Upcoming, Waiting for others and Completed. Every row says why it is there, which team it belongs to, and who is waiting on whom, and you can approve, complete, snooze or open it without leaving TeamHub. New sources plug in behind one provider contract.
- What's new: one feed of everything happening across the teams you're in, plus public posts from teams you're not. Comments and Talk replies show on each item and you can answer, or vote in a Talk poll, without leaving the page. Filter by source, period, team, message type, or just what mentions you, and save that as your default.
- Message stream: post announcements, questions, and polls to the team. Pin important messages; reply in threads.
- Activity feed: one view of recent file, calendar, task, and member changes across everything the team has access to.
- App tabs: quick links to the team's shared Talk chat, Files folder, Calendar, and Deck board, opened inline.
- Collaboration-first file opening: open a file from TeamHub and the sidebar opens with it on the team's conversation about that file, one Join conversation click away. No hunting through Details → Chat first, and nothing lands in your Talk conversation list until you join.
- Timeline: a visual, zoomable timeline aggregating Deck cards, Calendar events, Decisions, and Messages on one canvas, with admin-defined milestones and connector lines showing how items relate to each other.
- Decisions: propose, discuss, and formally approve team decisions, with categories, approvers, linked tasks, and a full audit trail. An approved decision keeps a life: any member can ask its approvers to review it when circumstances change — saying in the same breath what they think it should say instead, and attaching the document that says it, so the approvers can read the thing they are being asked to agree with. The approvers approve that wording in one step, edit the words first, or deny with a reason; the attachment stays the requester's either way. A category can require a review every so many months, a decision filed under the wrong category can be moved to the right one by its approvers, and a decision a newer one overrules is superseded into the team's archive — read-only, with a link to whatever replaced it. A proposal can also start from the document it is about: Propose a decision in a file's ⋯ menu in Files (4.11.42) opens the team's proposal composer with that file linked in the Context field.
- Sidebar widgets: upcoming calendar events, open Deck tasks, pages, presence/schedule, and an activity snapshot. Layout is per-user and drag-to-rearrange.
- Team management: invite by user, group, email, or federated account; manage roles and pending requests.
- OpenProject: an OpenProject project team template. Create the team, pick an OpenProject project you administer (or a public one), and every member gets a concise cockpit on the team home: status, open / overdue / due-soon counts, the next milestone, recently completed work, and their own work packages (assigned to them, overdue, due this week, recently updated), each a click from OpenProject itself. Everything is read as you, through the official OpenProject Integration app, so you only ever see what OpenProject would show you. The project stays managed in OpenProject; TeamHub is the workspace around it.
- OpenProject workspaces (4.9.6): the same template can also build the whole workspace: create a new OpenProject project from one of your OpenProject templates (or connect an existing one), and TeamHub sets up the team, its files, Talk conversation, calendar, knowledge space and modules, adds the members on both sides with roles your administrator mapped, and lays out the dashboard, as one recorded operation you can watch, retry step by step, or roll back safely. The OpenProject project stays OpenProject's; TeamHub never deletes it.
- OpenProject across your teams (4.9.7): your OpenProject work follows you into My Work: overdue, due today, due this week, recently assigned, changed since your last visit, created by you and still unassigned, completed, and the projects' upcoming milestones: one row per work package, with OpenProject's own type, status and priority, filterable by project and work type, grouped by project if you like, with one-click views. What's new shows your projects' news, and each news item is posted once into the team's stream with a Source: OpenProject pill that opens it there, so members without an OpenProject account read it too. Upcoming events shows the project's meetings, and (4.9.10) copies them one way into the team calendar: created, updated and removed as OpenProject changes them, so they are in every member's calendar client. The team home's Project info widget says what needs your attention. Everything is read live as you, and a slow or unreachable OpenProject never takes the rest of TeamHub with it.
- Create work packages from the team home (4.9.15): the Upcoming tasks widget's menu offers Create OpenProject work package to everyone OpenProject lets add work packages to the project: subject, type, assignee, due date and description, with the type and assignee lists OpenProject offers you. It is created as you, OpenProject validates it, and it appears in the widget and the counts right away. When OpenProject cannot be reached, the Project info widget shows one connection lost notice and the other widgets stay quiet (4.9.13).
- OpenProject is a licensed module (4.9.16): switched on by a Nextcloud administrator under Admin → TeamHub → Integrations → Modules when the instance has an OpenProject to talk to, off by default. Off, every OpenProject surface is hidden and nothing is deleted; existing teams keep their link.
- My Work sources, clustered (4.9.17): the source tabs read All · Deck · Files · Decisions · Meetings · Tasks · Teams · Administration · OpenProject: everything about files under Files, a team admin's own housekeeping under Teams, and the Nextcloud administrator's queue under Administration, shown only to administrators.
- Team spaces on Nextcloud 35 (4.10.1): on Nextcloud 35 every team's folder is its team space: exclusive to the team, managed by it, listed on Nextcloud's own Teams page beside Talk, Deck and Calendar. New teams get one; the existing estate converts itself in a daily pass without moving a file: a team folder is for its team only, a legacy shared folder gets an empty space next to it, and the Nextcloud administrators get the steps in My Work → Administration → Team spaces and a notification. TeamHub itself appears on Nextcloud's Teams page as the team's home. Nextcloud 33 and 34 behave exactly as before.
- Workflows in My Work (4.10.2): anything one person asks, hands to or approves for another runs through My Work: the administrator hands a folder move to the team owner (Hand to team owner), the owner's task appears with the steps and Complete, the administrator Closes. Since 4.10.29 a team admin asks for a bigger team space as a Nextcloud service (from the ⋯ menu on Manage team → Files or the Request a quota increase card on the Services page), and the service team that holds the Nextcloud services Grants (the quota is set at once) or Declines with a reason; the team admin Closes. Every such row folds out to the whole workflow (Step 2 of 3, what is done and by whom, where it is now, what is to come), and both sides see the same tracker.
- Service teams (4.10.23, licensed): a team template for the desk that answers the rest of the organisation. Create a team from the Service template, and its admins switch on the Nextcloud services in the wizard or on the team's Services tab: requests for a new team, a change to a team, external access, a shared folder, archiving a team, and anything else all arrive in that team's queue. One team on the server answers them, so nobody has to know where to ask. There is no separate roster to keep. The team works its requests on its own home (4.10.27): a Service requests widget where any member claims and answers a request (also from My Work) and team admins reassign it, a Request statistics widget, the desk's changes in the team's activity stream, and the number of unclaimed requests behind the team's name in the navigation, and a whole department joins by adding its Nextcloud group to the team. While no team answers them, the buttons that start these requests are not shown at all.
- The service catalogue (4.10.25, licensed): a Services page listing everything the service teams on the server offer, one card per service, with what it is for and how long it usually takes. Read it A-Z or grouped under the team that answers it, and filter it with the category tiles above. Asking is one click on a card: the service is already chosen, so the form only asks which team the request is about and what you need. From there it is an ordinary workflow: it appears in My Work under Waiting for others, says who is responsible, and the last step is yours to confirm.
- Service teams are switched on by an administrator (4.10.46): licensed, and off until a Nextcloud administrator turns them on under Admin → TeamHub → Integrations → Modules, so a client adopts them when its people are ready rather than the moment it upgrades. Off, every service surface is hidden: the Service template in the wizard, the Services page, the queue and statistics widgets, the unclaimed badge and the request cards, and nothing is deleted; on again, the desks, their services and their open requests come back as they were.
- Tasks that know whose they are (4.11.15): when you add a task on a team's home, you say who it is for: yourself, a colleague, or the whole team. Yours appear in My Work → Tasks, where you tick them off; a colleague's appear on their page and they are notified, while you follow them under Waiting for others; a task for the team appears for every member. Undated tasks are listed too, after everything with a date, because a task with no board is only ever seen here. Tasks created before this are the team's, and keep working.
- Sub-teams (4.12.2, licensed): a smaller group inside a team, with its own files, its own Talk conversation and its own members. A team admin creates one from Manage team → Sub-teams, picks who is in it from the team's own people, and can invite someone from outside the team as well — a client, an auditor, a contractor — without giving them anything else the team has. The sub-team appears under its team in the navigation, where it folds away when you do not need it, and it carries the same actions a team does. Everything about it is managed from the main team: who is in it, what it is called, whether the rest of the team can even see it exists, and whether it stays. A sub-team cannot have sub-teams of its own, and deleting the main team takes its sub-teams with it.
- A sub-team shows what it was built from, and it can be changed (4.12.6): the Sub-teams list names the template and the policy each sub-team carries, beside its member count, and the manage dialog can change either. A sub-team has no settings page of its own — its modules come from its template — so until now a template picked in a hurry could only be undone by deleting the sub-team and starting again. Switching template brings the sub-team in line with the new one: what it asks for is switched on, what it no longer asks for is switched off, and the dialog says which of those will happen before you confirm it. The files folder and everything in it is never removed this way.
- Sub-teams are switched on by an administrator (4.12.3): licensed, and on by default once a licence is active — a sub-team needs nothing but a team, unlike service teams or the OpenProject module, each of which needs something else in place first. A Nextcloud administrator can switch them off under Admin → TeamHub → Integrations → Modules. Off, sub-teams disappear from the navigation and the Sub-teams tab is hidden, and nothing is deleted — a sub-team keeps its members, files and messages, and everything comes back when it is switched on again. One thing to know before switching it off: somebody who was invited into a private sub-team from outside the main team, and is in no other team, then sees an empty navigation until it comes back.
- Open integration layer: other Nextcloud apps can register their own sidebar widgets or sandboxed iframe tabs into a team's home. See
developers.md. - Bulk team import: admins can roll out many teams at once from a CSV, one row per team. Each row names its template, its policy, its members and its owner; the apps, modules and privacy settings follow from the template and the policy, exactly as they would in the wizard, so imported teams come out identical to wizard-created ones, and each one lands with the right owner rather than the admin who ran the import. Upload gives you a dry run first: every row is checked, conflicts and errors are shown with reasons, and nothing is created until you confirm.
- Admin controls: org-wide rollout settings, creation permissions, optional modules (Presence, IntraVox), audit and archive tooling. The Compliance tab reports the instance's state against the ISO/IEC 27001:2022 controls TeamHub can evidence, and exports it as a printable report, including the controls it cannot evidence.
- Nextcloud 33-35
- PHP 8.1-8.5
- MySQL/MariaDB or PostgreSQL
- The Teams (Circles) app, enabled
Grab the latest release zip from the Releases page, extract it into your Nextcloud apps/ directory, and enable it:
unzip teamhub-x.y.z.zip -d /path/to/nextcloud/apps/
chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/nextcloud/apps/teamhub
sudo -u www-data php occ app:enable teamhubDatabase tables are created automatically on first enable. For building from source, admin settings, optional integrations, and background jobs, see INSTALL.md.
| Doc | What's in it |
|---|---|
| INSTALL.md | Installation, upgrading, admin settings, background jobs |
| developers.md | Building widgets and tab integrations that plug into a team's home |
| DESIGN.md | Architecture decisions and the reasoning behind them |
| ROADMAP.md | Forward-looking feature proposals |
| CHANGELOG.md | What shipped, by version |
Other Nextcloud apps can add a sidebar widget or a tab-bar menu item to every team's home, resolved and called in-process via Nextcloud's DI container, no HTTP round-trip required:
$teamHub->registerIntegration(
appId: 'myapp',
integrationType: 'widget',
title: 'My Widget',
description: 'Shows recent items from My App',
icon: 'ChartBar',
phpClass: \OCA\MyApp\Integration\TeamHubWidget::class,
calledInProcess: true,
);Full guide, including the menu-item (iframe tab) integration type: developers.md.
Issues and feature ideas are welcome on the issue tracker. Check ROADMAP.md for what's already being considered.
TeamHub is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0.