If you’ve ever scrolled through the self-hosting community online, you’re bound to hear the same complaints about Next Cloud. It’s bloated, resource-hungry, and always trying to do too much at once. I’d rather turn my router into a backup hub than spin around consuming NextCloud’s resources.
So if you’re looking for a simple file server and not a full productivity suite, I’ve got good news. There’s a new alternative in the self-hosted market, and NextCloud didn’t see the competition coming.
When really low
Why Co-Party Idealism Just Works
meet up COPPARTY. A lightweight file server that’s quietly been making waves in the self-hosting world, and for good reason. What immediately stands out about Copy Party is how easy it is. The entire file server and all its features are compressed into a single Python file. Drop the file into the root directory of the drive you want to use, and run it to start the server. That’s it.
You can run it almost anywhere, including Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, and even Raspberry Pi. You can choose to run it with or without Docker, and the whole setup is incredibly portable. Yes, you can build your own Raspberry Pi cloud server with NextCloud, but it won’t give you the performance you would with CoParty.
Simplicity also extends to what the copy party actually does. It is a web based file server where you can upload, download, share and store files as per your requirement. No additional email clients, calendar apps, or fancy collaborative editing features. Just a simple file server that lets you easily manage your files.
- OS
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Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS
- The developer
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9001
- Pricing model
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Free, open source
CoParty can turn almost any device into a file server with upload/download functionality using any web browser.
CoParty is fast, secure and surprisingly capable
A lightweight server that punches above its weight
In addition to being incredibly easy to get started, CopyParty is fast. Not just reasonably fast for a free, self-hosted tool, but legitimately faster than many alternatives, including NexCloud.
While most file servers upload files, like CoParty splits large files into chunks and sends them to the file server in parallel using separate TCP connections. This means that if you’re uploading over long distances or on a slow connection, you’ll usually get the same speed regardless. Here, the bottleneck is your internet connection, not the server.
Another advantage of this approach is that interrupted downloads can be resumed. If your Internet goes out in the middle of a large file transfer, when you get the Internet working again, pick up where the upload was left off.
The tool also packs a few features that make file management a breeze. You get file deduplication, which saves disk space by using file hashes to avoid storing duplicate copies. On-the-fly compression means files are automatically zipped without you having to manually create archives. Batch renaming and tagging let you organize large collections of files or media, saving you a ton of manual work and time.
CoParty also supports some file transfer protocols. HTTP, HTTPS, WebDAV, FTP, FTPS, TFTP, it speaks them all. This gives the tool considerable flexibility. You can mount it as a network drive on Windows, access it with your FTP client of choice, or just use the web interface as you would with any other cloud storage alternative. There’s even built-in media and thumbnail support with a music player that reads metadata and an image gallery to browse images.
If the GUI interface seems limited, you can use a terminal to sync folders to the server, like RSYNC, but it uses HTTPS with deduplication. You can even use regular curl or echo commands to download or upload files directly from the terminal.
Next comes security, a major concern with more lightweight file management tools. CoParty handles this through a single configuration file where you control everything. You can set fine-tuned file permissions using multiple user accounts, a flags system, and even control access to individual folders. The permissions system is a bit old school, more like Linux’s chmod than a modern cloud storage solution, but it’s incredibly fast, efficient and easy to understand.
Additionally, you can also create temporary share links with passwords and expiration dates, check on active connections, active uploads and more. There’s a fully functional control center with advanced search options and filters to find whatever you’re looking for.
NextCloud should be worried
This little project does what NextCloud can’t
NextCloud is a significantly more powerful and capable tool than CopyParty, and some of its fewer features will make you question paying for Google Workspace. But it’s also overkill for most people. Unless you want to host your own and build an entire productivity suite, NextCloud gives you features you’ll never use, complexity you don’t ask for, and resource consumption you can’t afford without Google Drive or Dropbox.
Copy Party does one thing, and it does it well. It’s not trying to be your entire digital life. It’s a simple, fast file server that you can spin up with storage on any device and have your cloud in minutes. It’s light on your system and doesn’t force you to run background database services or dive into configuration options.
CoParty may be the only file server you’ll ever need
Set it up once, forget about it forever
Copy Party isn’t for everyone, and it doesn’t pretend to be. If you need a fully integrated ecosystem with calendars, contacts, and collaborative documents, NextCloud still makes sense. But if you just want a dead simple, fast way to share and manage files over the Internet on your hardware, CoParty might actually be a better choice.
Sometimes, the best tool is the one that does one job exceptionally well, rather than doing everything else perfectly. In the file sharing space, that device is the copy party, and it’s worth a shot.