Syncthing vs Nextcloud for Two Laptops: When File Sync Shouldn’t Be a Suite

I wanted two laptops to share a Documents folder and a photo inbox. I stood up Nextcloud because that is what you stand up when you leave Dropbox. A week later I had a Postgres container, a Redis container, a Collabora container I never opened, a desktop client that invented conflict copies of a spreadsheet I had open on both machines, and a phone app that wanted to upload camera photos into a folder the laptops were already fighting over. The suite was doing suite things. I had asked for rsync with a nicer handshake.

Syncthing is the handshake. Nextcloud is a product company you run yourself. For two machines you both own, that difference is the whole review.

What two laptops actually need

The job is: a folder on the ThinkPad and the same folder on the Framework, both writable, both allowed to be offline, both allowed to meet on a coffee-shop NAT without me opening 443 on the house. Occasional versioning when I do something dumb. No “share link for a client” until there is a client.

Nextcloud Files can do that if you treat the server as a third replica and you never touch Talk, Deck, Calendar, or Office. Most people do not treat it that way. The admin UI offers those apps the first time you log in. The desktop client offers virtual files. The Android app offers auto-upload. You now have a photos product, a collaboration product, and a sync product sharing one database. The failures mix.

Syncthing does not have a photos product. It has devices, folders, and a web UI on localhost:8384 that looks like 2015 and works like a contract. Device A and device B exchange blocks. A NAS can be device C as send-and-receive or receive-only. There is no user account named “Denis” unless you invent one in your head. There is a device ID you screenshot and put in a password manager.

The Nextcloud client is not Syncthing in a branded coat

Nextcloud’s desktop client syncs against a server. The server is the truth. Two laptops that both edit budget.xlsx while the Mini PC is asleep do not merge like two Syncthing nodes that later meet. They upload. The second upload becomes a conflict file, or it overwrites, depending on timing and whether Office locked the file. I have a folder of budget (conflicted copy 2026-03-11) that exists because I used the suite as a pair of USB drives.

Syncthing’s conflicts are real too. It will write a conflict copy when both sides changed a file. The difference is there is no third interpreter. No PHP app, no oc_filecache, no “pending” state in a web UI that still shows the old mtime. When both laptops are on the tailnet, they find each other with local discovery or global announce and they copy blocks. When one is offline, the other just waits. That wait is a feature. Nextcloud’s wait is a red badge and a retry loop that I have watched chew a laptop fan on a flaky hotel Wi-Fi while Collabora sat idle in RAM on the server.

Windows path limits and OneDrive leftovers make both tools ugly. Nextcloud is uglier because the server also has to store the path in a database. I have had a filename that synced in Syncthing and 507’d in Nextcloud because the app’s max upload and the PHP limit disagreed. Syncthing’s limit is disk.

Where Nextcloud still wins for two people

If the second laptop is not yours — a partner who will not install Syncthing, a contractor who wants a link, a phone that should see a folder in iOS Files without a third-party client fight — Nextcloud is the product. Public links, passwords, expiry, a browser preview for a PDF. Syncthing can share a folder with another device ID. It cannot send a URL to someone in a café. I have tried to make it do that with a relay and a lecture. It is a lecture.

Mobile is the other honest win. Nextcloud’s official apps are ordinary. Syncthing on Android is Syncthing-Fork and a battery exemption and a notification you will never swipe away. On iOS, Syncthing is not a first-class citizen the way Files + Nextcloud can be, with all the iOS Files caveats that already have their own scars. If the laptop pair is really a laptop plus a phone that must upload the camera roll, I use Immich or the Nextcloud auto-upload, not Syncthing. That is a photos job.

Office-in-the-browser is a win I do not want. Collabora and OnlyOffice are why people keep a Nextcloud they only needed for sync. They also are why the box needs 8 GB and a weekend after every major release. For two laptops I already have LibreOffice and a local disk.

How I run Syncthing so it stays boring

Three devices: ThinkPad, Framework, and a receive-only folder on a Synology that is not the boss, just a copy. The NAS folder is versioning at ten last versions. The laptops use Syncthing’s default versioning on the folders I am stupid with, and none on node_modules trees I should not have been syncing in the first place.

Ignore patterns matter more than people admit. I ignore .git/objects in one repo I mistakenly shared, *.tmp, and the Office lock files. If I do not, two laptops and Word will sync the lock and then argue. Receive-only on the NAS means a laptop cannot be “fixed” by a bad delete that already hit the server. A delete still hits the other laptop. Receive-only is not a backup. restic is a backup. The NAS copy is how I get a file back at 1 a.m. without mounting a snapshot.

Discovery: local when we are in the house, global announce when we are not, Tailscale so the two laptops have a stable 100.x address and I can turn off relaying for the folders that matter. Syncthing relays work. They are also someone else’s bandwidth and a slower path. I leave them on as a fallback and I notice when a folder has been “out of sync” for six hours because both machines thought they were waiting on a relay. The UI will tell you. I still forget to look.

I do not expose 8384 to the internet. I do not put Syncthing behind Nextcloud like a treat. The GUI stays on localhost or on the tailnet. Introducer mode on the NAS is useful when I add a third laptop. It is also how you accidentally share a folder you meant to keep on two devices. I read the share list when I add a device, every time, because I have not earned the right to skip that.

How Nextcloud fails at the same job

Updates. I have lost a Friday to a Nextcloud upgrade that wanted a new PHP and a migrated oc_jobs table while the desktop clients sat in a retry loop and one laptop wrote conflict copies of everything it could still see. Syncthing updates are a binary. I have never had Syncthing ask me to run occ upgrade.

Memory and the noisy neighbor. Nextcloud + Talk + a preview generator on a 4 GB VM will OOM the preview generator and then the client will say the server is gone. Syncthing on that same VM as a third node is a few dozen megabytes. If I already run Nextcloud for links, I still do not point the two laptops at it for the working set. I point them at Syncthing and I drop finished PDFs into a Nextcloud folder by hand, or with a small script, when a human needs a URL.

The desktop client’s “virtual files” on Windows look like OneDrive. They also mean a file is not on disk until you open it, which is the opposite of “I took the laptop to a plane.” I turn that off. Then I am syncing the full tree through a PHP app. At that point I am paying Nextcloud’s complexity for Syncthing’s behavior, poorly.

Sharing with myself via a public link is a smell. I have done it to get a file from the house to a machine that was not yet a trusted device. That link is now a thing I have to expire. Syncthing would have been a device ID and a folder. The barrier was that I did not want to install a client on a locked-down work laptop. Nextcloud wins on that work laptop. It should not win on the two machines with my name on the lid.

Encryption and the story people tell

Nextcloud Server-Side Encryption is not a substitute for trusting the server. If you run the server, you already have the files. End-to-end encryption in Nextcloud exists and I have broken enough workflows with it — apps that cannot see the files, clients that do not support the folder — to stop recommending it for a two-laptop pair. Syncthing encrypts on the wire. At rest, the disks are BitLocker and LUKS, or they are not, and Nextcloud would not have changed that.

Untrusted peer is Syncthing’s interesting option: a node that holds encrypted blobs and cannot read them. I have used a VPS that way when both laptops were away and I wanted a meeting point that I did not want to read my tax folder. That is the one “server” Syncthing deserves. It is still not a suite. It cannot preview a PDF. It can hold blocks until the Framework is back online.

A split I will defend

Working set — Markdown, the current project, the photos I have not imported yet — Syncthing between the two laptops, NAS as receive-only, versioning on, Tailscale, relays as fallback.

Published set — PDFs a human will download, a family folder a relative will open in a browser — Nextcloud, as few apps as I can disable, backups via the database dump plus the data directory, not via “the desktop client is the backup.”

I do not run both clients on the same folder. That is how you get a conflict copy of a conflict copy. If a folder must exist in both worlds, one side is the writer and the other is a copy job, not two sync engines.

If you already have Nextcloud for reasons that are not this article, you can keep using it for two laptops. You are choosing a server, a database, and a client protocol so you do not have to learn device IDs. That is a valid trade if the server is already healthy and you never edit on both sides offline. The moment the job is “two disks I own should converge,” Syncthing is the smaller program. The suite can stay for the people who will not run the smaller program.

File sync should be a suite when the file has to become a URL or a calendar or a chat. For two laptops, the file has to become the same bytes. I stopped asking Nextcloud to be those bytes. It is happier, and so are the laptops.