Seafile: OwnCloud, Only Better

Anyone who has read my post about OwnCloud will know that I strive to store my data, if possible, not with Dropbox & Co. In the past, OwnCloud was the best and simplest solution, but for some time now, there has been an alternative that is worth seeing: Seafile.

Seafile offers free sync clients for every common platform (Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, iOS).

In the background, the application, written in Python, works in two parts. The seafile application controls the saving and syncing of data. It uses a filesystem based on git, which means that by default, all files are versioned. The other part is seahub, which provides the web interface to Seafile.

From my perspective, Seafile has the major advantage that it is not written in PHP. One has to torture PHP very much to extract functionality like OwnCloud from it. This is noticeable in performance. Likewise, the separation of the web interface and the sync server is advantageous. Sync clients speak directly to the sync server, and the website is just another sync client.