Plus a real mail server underneath, and events, a store, a public site, an AI assistant on your own hardware and multi-server management in the same install, on one upgrade path.
Nextcloud is a big, capable platform with a decade of work and a huge community behind it. If it is doing what you need, keep it; nothing on this page is trying to talk you out of a setup that works.
Most people who run Nextcloud at home do not run only Nextcloud. There is a mail server beside it, or a paid mailbox somewhere else because the mail server was too much. There is a website on a third thing. There are backup scripts someone wrote one weekend. Each piece has its own login, its own upgrade day and its own way of failing.
Joinery is shaped to be the whole of that, on one server: mail, calendar, drive and contacts at the centre, with the website, the events, the store, the backups and the AI assistant already in the box. One set of accounts, one upgrade, one backup. That is the reason to look, and everything below follows from it.
The six things they mention, in the order they mention them.
Joinery is a real mail server, with the hard part handled: outbound goes through a delivery provider such as Mailgun or Amazon SES, with SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured during setup. Your archive lives on your machine and your mail gets delivered. The thing most self-hosters gave up on is the thing that works on day one.
Schema changes apply themselves. No maintenance mode, no compatibility list to check, no version you have to pass through on the way. Because the website, the store and the events run on the same release as mail and files, nothing waits for a third-party app to catch up. Server Manager turns the command into a button.
Every install backs itself up on a schedule: encrypted, to an S3-compatible bucket you own, old copies pruned. Files, database and settings together, so a restore onto a fresh box is one command and not a reconstruction. No script to write, no cron line to remember.
The desktop client is developed against a soak rig that kills the process mid-write, over and over, while a no-loss oracle checks that every byte either arrived or is still queued. It never reports complete when it is not. The client is pre-release, so keep a backup and tell us what breaks.
Server-rendered pages with no front-end framework, PostgreSQL underneath, no cache layer to add before it feels quick. The stated minimum is a 1 GB VPS, and that VPS runs mail, calendar, files, the website and the backups together. Cheap hardware is not a compromise here.
Files at the Private level are end-to-end encrypted with keys you hold and stay encrypted through sync; the server stores ciphertext it cannot read. Everything else is plain files and Postgres on your own disk. Two states, both stated exactly, so you always know which one a file is in.
What a self-hosted household or small organisation typically runs, and where each piece lives with Joinery.
| Around Nextcloud today | With Joinery | |
|---|---|---|
| Files, calendar, contacts | Nextcloud | Built in |
| Email at your own domain | A separate mail server to run, or a paid mailbox elsewhere | Built in, with delivery through Mailgun or SES |
| Phone photo backup | Nextcloud app | Built in, to your own storage |
| Public website or blog | A separate CMS on a separate host | Built in, same server, same login |
| Event sign-ups, waiting lists, surveys | A separate service | Built in |
| Selling something: products, memberships, subscriptions | A separate store, plus its fees | Built in, 0% platform fees |
| Off-site backups | Scripts you maintain | Scheduled, encrypted, to your own bucket, from the admin |
| An AI assistant over your own mail and files | A cloud API key | Runs on your hardware; cannot leak encrypted content |
| More than one server | Each one by hand | Server Manager: status, upgrades and backups from one dashboard |
| Accounts and sign-in | One per service, unless you also run single sign-on | One account for everything, with passkeys and two-factor built in |
Real differences, stated plainly, so you can choose with your eyes open.
Yes, and it is a sensible way to try Joinery. Put it on a spare VPS, move your mail and calendar across, and keep Nextcloud for whatever it is doing well for you. Nothing about Joinery requires it to be the only thing on your domain.
Files: copy them in, they are files on both sides. Contacts and calendars: export as vCard and .ics and import. There is no one-click Nextcloud importer, and building one is not currently on the list.
The stack matters less than what it produces. Joinery pages are server-rendered with no front-end framework, the database is PostgreSQL only, and the whole thing is one codebase written to be read top to bottom. Whether it is fast and readable is something you can check yourself.
Every install backs itself up on a schedule to an S3-compatible bucket you own, encrypted, with old copies pruned. If you would rather do it by hand, it is rsync of the data directory and a pg_dump. Server Manager adds write-only keys, so a compromised server cannot delete its own history.
No. No telemetry, no licence check, no usage reporting. It runs air-gapped. The only outbound connections are ones you configure: your mail provider, your backup bucket, updates when you ask for them.
Precisely, and only where we can say so precisely. Files at the Private protection level are end-to-end encrypted with keys you hold, and stay encrypted through sync; the server stores ciphertext it cannot read. Everything else is stored unencrypted on your own disk, readable by anyone with access to that machine, which on your own server is you. Losing your keys and your recovery key means the Private files are gone; nobody can recover them, including us.
One command, a stock Ubuntu server with 1 GB of RAM, and about an hour. Free, permanently, for personal use.