OpenCloud is the 2025 fork of ownCloud Infinite Scale by the former oCIS team - Go microservices, the Spaces model, aimed at sovereign enterprise. Cotton is a focused personal and small-team file cloud. This is not a scoreboard with fake certainty; it is a product-fit comparison for self-hosted file cloud decisions.
OpenCloud's flagship concept is Spaces: content is assigned to a Space, not to user accounts. That fits org-owned team drives and feels wrong when you just want your files to be yours. Cotton is account-owned and personal-first.
OpenCloud's embedded identity provider is officially a small or dev-only stopgap - no MFA, up to a few hundred users, no migration path - and for production it tells you to run Keycloak with LDAP. Cotton ships passkeys and TOTP as the whole login system, no extra identity stack required.
Cotton is one Docker image plus Postgres. OpenCloud can spin up as a single test container, but its production shape is a cloud-native microservice fleet plus Collabora, a WOPI server, a reverse proxy, and - for real auth - Keycloak, each on its own subdomain.
Cotton ships streaming AES-GCM by default plus client-side E2E folders the server cannot read. OpenCloud guarantees encryption in transit, while native end-to-end encryption is an open GitHub idea stuck on a hard problem - OIDC tokens versus password-derived keys - and its server-key model, by its own admin docs, does not keep the admin out.
Pick OpenCloud if you are an institution buying sovereign, federated, Spaces-based collaboration with a sysadmin team. Pick Cotton if you want your own files to feel finished on hardware you control, without standing up an enterprise platform.
Cotton does not need to beat every long-established ecosystem on every surface. The useful comparison is narrower: storage behavior, privacy posture, recovery model, deployment shape, and product focus.
Cotton stores file content as chunks and manifests, so deduplication, verification, versions, snapshots, and cleanup share one mental model.
Compression and AES-GCM encryption sit in the normal storage path; the site does not sell isolated crypto speed as user-visible ingest speed.
Snapshots, versions, trash, and reclaim are positioned as ordinary file-cloud workflows, not emergency-only backend chores.
Cotton deliberately stays narrower than broad collaboration suites: files, previews, sharing, WebDAV, recovery, and operator visibility.
Cotton is the cleaner story when files, previews, shares, snapshots, versions, WebDAV, passkeys, admin diagnostics, and a compact Docker/Postgres deployment are the main problem.
Institutions buying sovereign, federated, Spaces-based collaboration with a sysadmin team.
You want a focused self-hosted file cloud with content-addressed storage, streaming crypto, snapshots, previews, WebDAV, sharing, passkeys, and a compact Docker deployment.
You need sovereign enterprise collaboration: Spaces, federation, Office co-editing, and scale on Ceph/GPFS more than the Cotton storage-engine and recovery-model strengths.
Cotton is not trying to be a bigger suite than OpenCloud. It is trying to be the sharper file cloud when the file engine itself is the product decision.
If you want a personal, account-owned file cloud with built-in auth and one-image deployment, Cotton is the cleaner fit.
Last reviewed June 2026. Every line below links to its receipt - the actual issue, doc, or commit it came from. Competitors move fast; if a link goes stale, open an issue and we fix it.
Receipts
Not always. Cotton is a focused file cloud, not a clone of every app and integration in the older ecosystems. It fits best when file storage, previews, sharing, snapshots, WebDAV, security, and deployment simplicity are the main problem.
Because people searching for a self-hosted file cloud often start with the familiar names. The comparison makes the tradeoff explicit instead of pretending every product has the same goal.
If you are an organization that needs sovereign, Spaces-based collaboration, external-IdP identity, federation, and enterprise scale, OpenCloud's lineage and roadmap target exactly that. Cotton is built for personal and small-team file work, not enterprise platform rollouts.