Google Drive is a good product. It is fast, familiar, and for many teams it arrived bundled with Gmail rather than being chosen at all. The case for looking at Nextcloud instead is not that Drive does not work. It is two quieter things: what per-seat pricing does to your bill as you hire, and the fact that your files sit on a US corporation's infrastructure under terms you do not control. Here is the honest comparison.
Two pricing models
Google Workspace prices per user per month. At the time of writing, the UK plans are roughly £5.90 per user per month for Business Starter (30 GB of pooled storage per user), £11.80 for Business Standard (2 TB per user) and £18.40 for Business Plus (5 TB per user), on annual terms and excluding VAT; flexible monthly billing costs more. Those are fair prices for what is included, and the bundle matters: every seat also carries Gmail, Calendar and Meet.
Nextcloud on Node is a flat monthly fee for the deployment, not the people using it. At the time of writing the tiers are £25 (Small), £45 (Medium) and £75 a month (Large, which typically suits organisations of up to around 100 file and collaboration users), billed hourly with no minimum term. Current figures are always on the pricing page. Adding a user is an account in your own identity system, not a line on an invoice.
One honesty note before the arithmetic: Nextcloud does not replace Gmail. If your team needs Google's email, you keep paying for that. The comparison below is fairest for organisations whose Workspace seats exist mainly for Drive, or whose email lives elsewhere (Microsoft 365, or a hosted mail platform).
The per-seat maths
Take Business Standard, the plan most teams end up on because it is the cheapest with meaningful storage and data-region controls.
| Team size | Workspace Business Standard | Nextcloud Large on Node |
|---|---|---|
| 25 people | ~£295/month, ~£3,540/year | £75/month, £900/year |
| 50 people | ~£590/month, ~£7,080/year | £75/month, £900/year |
| 100 people | ~£1,180/month, ~£14,160/year | £75/month, £900/year |
| Each new hire | +~£142/year | £0 |
On Business Plus the same 50-person team is roughly £920 a month, about £11,040 a year. These are list prices, not a quote, and the columns do not buy identical things: the Google figure includes email and very large pooled storage, and the Node figure includes the operation of a private platform. But the shape of the two lines is the point. One rises with every hire; the other does not.
The counterweight is storage volume. Fifty people on Business Standard pool around 100 TB between them. Our flat tiers include a storage allowance sized for the profile, with more available as a metered add-on. A team whose real requirement is tens of terabytes of cheap pooled storage should do that sum carefully, because bundled per-seat storage is something Google genuinely does well.
When Google Drive is the right choice
Fair is fair. If your organisation runs on Gmail, Drive is effectively bundled with the email you are already buying, and adding a separate file platform only makes sense when data control is the driver rather than cost. Small teams can be cheaper per seat than any flat fee: four people on Business Starter is around £24 a month at the time of writing. External collaboration with other Google users is frictionless in a way no self-hosted platform fully matches. And Google's real-time editing in Docs and Sheets is excellent; Collabora Online is capable and genuinely collaborative, but a spreadsheet-heavy team should trial it rather than take our word. If any of those describe you, Drive is a reasonable choice and we will say so when you ask.
When a private Nextcloud wins
Headcount economics. From roughly 25 seats upward, the flat fee is a fraction of the per-seat bill, and the gap widens with every hire. Growth stops repricing your file platform.
A straight answer on data location. Your files sit on named infrastructure in the UK, under an Article 28 data processing agreement, with an audit trail of who accessed what. When a client, insurer or regulator asks where their data is, the answer is one sentence.
Control of access. Sharing, retention and file access rules are enforced on a server you control, with single sign-on from your own identity realm, so a leaver loses access to everything in one action.
Open formats and a clean exit. Files are files, documents are standard Office formats, and leaving is an export, not a negotiation. That is the general case for open source alternatives to SaaS, and it applies squarely here.
Where your data actually lives
Google Workspace offers data-region controls on Business Standard and above, and the available regions are the United States or Europe, meaning the EU: the United Kingdom is not an offered region at the time of writing. More fundamentally, Google is a US corporation, and the US CLOUD Act can compel US providers to disclose data they hold regardless of which country the servers are in. Google operates lawfully under UK GDPR through its processor terms and transfer mechanisms; the point is not that Drive is non-compliant, it is that your compliance position depends on a chain of another company's paperwork.
Nextcloud on Node, in its default form, removes that chain: your instance runs on hardware we own in a UK datacentre, operated by a UK company with two named engineers, under a UK GDPR Article 28 DPA. There is no US parent company, so the CLOUD Act does not reach our infrastructure. That claim is scoped to our default UK hosting: if you choose instead to have us deploy Nextcloud into your own AWS, Azure or GCP tenancy, that infrastructure carries its provider's jurisdiction, and you are trading some of the sovereignty argument for cloud convenience. The choice is explicit either way, which is rather the point.
Migration, done by us
Moving a company off Drive is mostly careful plumbing, and it is included in the service. We map your shared drives and My Drive structures onto Nextcloud folders and group permissions, transfer the content, and export Google-native Docs, Sheets and Slides to standard Office formats. Then we verify: file counts and sizes against the source, spot-check opens of converted documents, and a pilot group using the new platform for real work. Only when you confirm do we switch sync clients and retire the old structure, and your Drive data stays intact until you choose to remove it. Anything that will not convert cleanly, typically Apps Script automation, gets flagged early with options, not discovered afterwards.
The short version
If you are small, Gmail-centred, or dependent on Google's editors, stay on Drive; it is good and it is probably already paid for. If you are 25 people or more, hiring, and answering questions about where client data lives, a flat-fee private Nextcloud is cheaper at scale and gives you an answer you can point at. See what the managed Nextcloud service includes, current figures on the pricing page, and if your incumbent is Dropbox rather than Google, the same comparison is here: Nextcloud vs Dropbox.
Frequently asked questions
Can Nextcloud replace Google Drive for a business?
For file storage, sync, sharing and collaborative document editing, yes: desktop and mobile sync clients, share links with passwords and expiry dates, and real-time editing through Collabora Online. It does not replace Gmail. If your team is on Google Workspace mainly for email, Nextcloud sits alongside it rather than replacing the whole subscription, and the cost comparison changes accordingly.
How does migration from Google Drive to Nextcloud work?
We run it. We map your My Drives and shared drives onto Nextcloud folders and group permissions, transfer the data, and verify it: file counts, sizes and spot checks against the source. You review with a pilot group before anything is switched over, and Drive stays untouched until you confirm. Google-native Docs, Sheets and Slides are exported to standard Office formats as part of the transfer.
What does the managed service include?
Deployment, configuration, upgrades, security patching, nightly encrypted backups, monitoring and support from named engineers. Single sign-on against your own identity realm is included, and we provide a UK GDPR Article 28 data processing agreement as standard. You use the platform; we operate it.
Is Nextcloud on Node actually cheaper than Google Workspace?
Not always, and we would rather say so than pretend. A team of four on Business Starter pays around £24 a month at the time of writing, less than our £25 Small tier, and if you need Gmail you are paying Google for seats anyway. The flat fee wins as headcount grows: at 25 people on Business Standard the per-seat bill is roughly £295 a month against a flat £75, and it keeps climbing with every hire while the flat tier does not.
Where is our data stored with each option?
Google Workspace lets eligible plans pin data to the United States or to Europe, meaning the EU; the United Kingdom is not an offered region at the time of writing, and Google remains a US corporation subject to US law. Nextcloud on Node runs by default on hardware we own in a UK datacentre, operated by a UK company, or we can deploy it into your own cloud tenancy or on-premise environment if you prefer.
What happens to our Google Docs and Sheets?
They are exported to standard Office formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) during migration and remain editable in Nextcloud through Collabora Online, including real-time collaboration. Most documents convert cleanly. Complex spreadsheets that depend on Apps Script or Google-only functions will need rework, and we flag those during the migration rather than leaving you to find out later.