Focus on Business Apps
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@SansGuidon said in Focus on Business Apps:
There are currently thousands of topics in the wishlist
1,600 to be precise --- with the top-voted Wireguard now being open for 5 years!
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@girish and @nebulon have created Cloudron to scratch an itch and make a living out of it.
Not everyone needs or wants to scale, even if you yourself want them to help you make bigger business.I also don't expect them to publicly talk about their business here, that's not how they have operated these past years. (See for example this 158 posts topic with exactly 0 post from them)
But I'm pretty sure they are reading, so hi!
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@ruihildt said in Focus on Business Apps:
See for example this 158 posts topic with exactly 0 post from them
Incorrect!
https://forum.cloudron.io/post/10861
https://forum.cloudron.io/post/11131 -
I’ve been less active in the Cloudron forums recently (sorry), but still use Cloudron daily for my freelance business. While I’m not a large business, I do like to act and think like one when it comes to hosting services, so I saw this post and wanted to add some thoughts.
With a business perspective, I would prefer the focus to be on infrastructure features rather than adding more apps for now. I think business-focused features such as 1️⃣ allowing multiple backup locations with custom retention rules, 2️⃣ better spam IP blocking with managed IP lists via URLs, 3️⃣ improved spam filtering in mail, and 4️⃣ syncing a secondary Cloudron instance with the primary Cloudron instance for either load balancing or failover… I consider these to all be very important features that most businesses would consider critical before investing big into Cloudron. And these are just off the top of my head as hopeful features to see added soon. For some of these I know users like me have been waiting for years. The good news is I believe there is some movement for the backup improvements soon.
These features are very important, especially for medium to large businesses that prioritize uptime. I’d absolutely love to see various apps added sooner than later too (such as some of the website analytics apps), don’t get me wrong, but I think for me at least they’re less important than adding resiliency and business feature sets. And heck, the improved spam filtering / blocking would be helpful not only for businesses but personal users too.
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Great points, well made @d19dotca.
It seems that this need not be a zero-sum game. We're talking about increasing the fan-base, quality, and benefits of something which is already great.
1. Minimal trade-offs: With a solid, values-led strategy, and well considered incentive structures to reward merit and quality, there need be no trade-offs;
2. Fewer competing priorities: by growing the active contributor base it should be feasible to deliver many things in parallel, thereby making the "but what to prioritise?" debate less of a priority
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Lots of good words & thoughts in this thread, but still a lack of specificity.
WHICH business app should be the focus of packaging effort ?
Or which top 3 ?
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@timconsidine said in Focus on Business Apps:
p should be the focus of packaging effort ?
Hi Tim,
I think we (Cloudron users) may have many different business types, so our needs may be different. You already have some good foundation apps and it's a great start!
An application that I think everyone will agree with me, that is part of any online business nowadays is a CRM. I think the most promising CRM right now are Twenty and ERPNext. I know you have already Dolibarr and Espo CRM but those are a bit outdated and lack modern features. For me, the most promising is Twenty CRM but I know ERPNext is a big favorite in the self-hosted community.
But IMHO where Cloudron is lacking the most right now is in innovative solutions that can have a BIG IMPACT on businesses. I'm making reference to AI-related platforms. AI is currently changing the world and as a business owner, we can't ignore it... We need to start integrating it into our processes ASAP. A few platforms are Langflow, Flowise, Autogen & Crew AI.
And to conclude, more no-code/low-code platforms such as Budibase or Appsmith.
Agentic, No-code/Low-code, and more CRMs. Those are the kind of apps that can truly helps a business to scale and that would be amazing to see Cloudron supporting these apps soon.
To conclude, I would like also to mention Plane as a new innovative self-hosted project management tool that has a lot of potential. For a business, project management tools are expensive and the options offered right now are a bit outdated.
This goes to MY OPINION. Some will agree with my priorities, some may have different ones. I think this is why this is very important to have a better voting system so we can figure out the real interests as the current way to vote is not convenient and hard to keep track of it.
Btw, thanks for taking the time to read our feedback... This thread wasn't meant to talk bad about Cloudron. We love Cloudron and support you 100% guys. I would just like to see Cloudron supporting more business users. As a business, it's hard to scale as subscriptions continue to go up (Currently paying ~2k/m in subscriptions) and I'm at a point in my business where I need to find a way to minimize my costs, and this is why I fall in love with Cloudron and don't bother paying more for a subscription if it can help me save hundreds of dollars in subscriptions monthly.
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@igaudette said in Focus on Business Apps:
With all the respect I have for the Cloudron team, I think you are not as good marketers as you are developers.
No, they are NOT marketers at all and, well this imho, not even much business oriented at all either I even wonder if they understand marketing. No offence intended I too respect the team and its work VERY much, but unfortunately in general this is the proper of the majority of developers even though they're among the bests. I wonder if only they have any idea of HOW to market Cloudron efficiently.
I can relate because I'm doing marketing and business online for almost 25 years, in the software and hosting industry and been part of the team that contributed to the marketing and rapid EXPANSION of cPanel when it got out.
At the time we literally revolutionised the web hosting business industry because this was the first GUI created that would allow a MUCH larger crowd of people out there the much simplified capacity of hosting one's website and hence install a presence online on the web without having the much deeper technical knowledge to do so before the advent of cPanel. That was circa 2005, I was already hosting website the old way through the use of CLI and FTP etc. But cPanel had totally changed the game not only by helping to provide hosting services much faster and in an much easier manner, but also expand more rapidly by providing training and allowing clients to host themselves while being able to accomplish simple maintenance tasks that they wouldn't have been able, or wouldn't dare to do before cPanel. And even so, many have become Web Hosting Providers thanks to cPanel and have made new careers and fed their family and even became very comfortable financially, the industry just EXPLODED.
When I discovered Cloudron in 2019 I started to use it immediately, I fell off my chair I thought really that could be the new cPanel alike REVOLUTION but "in the cloud" and with a higher level of easiness to manage and privacy and security, to not just hosting websites but also an amazing array of apps that a LOT of people and businesses need, all of a single click. I'd already explored many other panels out there and solutions with Docker, Kuberneties, and Portainer etc. but man, there was nothing like Cloudron, yet, and still.
You can imagine I contacted the guys here. I've made MANY proposals, suggested several ideas and even privately revealed some of my secret plans for marketing and getting clients at scale to no end, unless the world explodes. All along with several technical suggestion for the platform to make it marketable at scale like crazy etc. I'll keep it brief, but now we're almost 2025 and here we are... They never give any kind of feedback, nor intention it's like talking to ghosts loll okay not that much but when they're seem to maybe have an open mind on something then that is all there is though, an intention until now, and never went any further... It's pretty hard to know what they think and what they really want to achieve at any level. I respect that, it's their way of doing things and they'll get the results that goes along.
Now, sadly I can't wait forever and now I'm like many of the power users here and I start to look elsewhere too, not because there's not enough apps on Cloudron, no it's been a long time there's enough, it's only that nothing goes nowhere, and in the actual state of how Cloudron is implemented for deployment there's NO WAY to create the momentum we created for cPanel in the past. And, at the moment to access and use the very popular apps emerging that are getting dust on before to get onto Cloudron, I use EasyPanel which IS, a very interesting choice as an 'alternative' to host what's not yet supported by Cloudron.
Cheers!
Ignorance is not an excuse anymore!
https://AutomateKit.com -
@igaudette said in Focus on Business Apps:
But IMHO where Cloudron is lacking the most right now is in innovative solutions that can have a BIG IMPACT on businesses. I'm making reference to AI-related platforms. AI is currently changing the world and as a business owner, we can't ignore it... We need to start integrating it into our processes ASAP. A few platforms are Langflow, Flowise, Autogen & Crew AI.
OpenWeb UI and N8N are absolutely great and POWERFUL apps that CAN be definitely be used by an Agency or freelancer to use and develop complete Automation with AI solutions with Agents, Chatbots even with RAG and Pipeline and MUCH more... And I've yet to talking about Chatwoot and Typebot so there are plenty of very good powerful amazing apps in those field, I mean enough at least to feed your hunger they may be not your preferred ones that you'd want to have right now, but on Cloudron the offer in that sector is very well filled imho.
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@igaudette said in Focus on Business Apps:
And to conclude, more no-code/low-code platforms such as Budibase or Appsmith.
I'd suggest that you take a closer and deeper at Cloudron's app rep.
There's Directus, do you know Directus, and what about NocoDB. -
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Just in case there's any misunderstanding, those who have [APPDEV] after the username are not part of Cloudron, and don't have a formal role in selecting apps to package for the AppStore. It just means they packaged an app for use on Cloudron, usually to scratch an itch, which then may or may not be added to the AppStore if Cloudron think it's useful for others and are happy to take on the updates.
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I loved Budibase when it was earlier in its development phase, but they have taken it down a more focussed "intranet" model, which doesn't suit my needs. My own feeling is that Budibase and ERPNext/Odoo are better deployed on their own VPS, rather than a VPS running Cloudron, but that's just my opinion.
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@micmc Yeah, I am already using n8n and have tons of stuff automated with it and I love it! You're right it's very powerful and can do mostly all I recommended. I mentioned a few big names upvoted a lot in the forum. Personally for my business, the two things I want the most are Twenty CRM and Plane.
I tried Directus but it's not like budibase or appsmith.. It's more a database management tool with an interface. You can't build apps. A good use case for Budibase or Appsmith was to create a frontend for n8n and start workflows via webhooks.
In n8n self-hosted edition, you can't share your workflows with other users so that's how a frontend UI is handy and why I believe Budibase would be very helpful.
And yeah I agree with you about the potential for Cloudron to revolutionize the self-hosting industry... The technology is so amazing... I just have doubts about their motivation to scale it. I feel they are good in their current state and don't want to become a bigger company. Cloudron has definitely the potential to become a 9-figure company.
They never produced any form of content marketing... Look at Semrush or Ahrefs, NADA. They also have zero paid ads running.
This means they built their user base ONLY on word of mouth (Which is amazing btw! This proves how good the product is). Imagine if they would start investing in marketing... This would FLY! They should hire a marketer to help them... there are so much potential.
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@igaudette said in Focus on Business Apps:
Twenty CRM and Plane
Seeing how new these are it is difficult to accept that your business needs them. You've just been using pen and paper? I wouldn't be surprised if this is one rationale behind which apps get worked on. I mean, at the start they had Confluence - an established app with a proven user base.
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@scooke They are new (~1yr old) but have you seen how fast they are growing? Twenty is now the most-starred CRM project on Github with 24k stars. They have almost 400 contributors and release new features and fixes at a crazy speed. I tested it on a VPS and it's surprisingly stable considering its maturity. I would use it for my business without worrying.
I haven't tested Plane but the reviews on Reddit are good.
It's not because the product is new that it's not a good product. Old mentality.
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But …
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We're currently in the development phase of Twenty's alpha version.
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Typically Cloudron prefers apps to have made it to a v1.0 release. I didn’t see a releases page. (But looking on small screen).No judgement applied, it may be great and growing, but when something is in alpha (not even beta) a lot of breaking changes can happen. That’s a big potential maintenance burden.
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And Plane is on V0.24
This may explain why they’re not available on Cloudron as official apps yet.
