Cloudreve

What is Cloudreve?

Cloudreve is a self-hosted file management and sharing platform that puts a web-based cloud drive in front of storage you already control. Instead of storing files itself, it connects to a backend — local disk, S3, OneDrive, and more — and gives you upload, preview, sharing, and multi-user access over it, like a private Dropbox or Google Drive.

What is Cloudreve best for?

Cloudreve fits individuals, teams, and small organizations that want a polished cloud-drive experience over storage they own or already pay for. It’s especially useful if your files live in an S3-compatible bucket or on OneDrive and you want a clean web UI, share links, and user accounts on top — without migrating data into a monolithic app.

What can Cloudreve do?

• Front ten-plus storage backends: local disk, remote slave nodes, AWS S3, MinIO, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, Google Cloud Storage, OneDrive/SharePoint, Aliyun OSS, and Tencent COS.
• Stream uploads and downloads directly between the browser and the storage provider, with drag-and-drop and resumable transfers.
• Serve every backend over WebDAV so you can mount your drive as a network disk.
• Create expiring share links for files and folders, with per-user, per-group, and anonymous permission settings.
• Preview video, images, audio, ePub, and Office documents in the browser, with WOPI editing via OnlyOffice or Collabora.
• Queue remote/offline downloads through Aria2 and qBittorrent (grab torrents and HTTP files straight into storage).
• Index files for full-text search via Apache Tika and Meilisearch, and manage multiple users and groups.

Where does Cloudreve fall short?

• It’s a drive, not a full sync-and-collaborate suite. Cloudreve focuses on web-based file management and sharing; it has no first-party desktop sync client like Dropbox or Nextcloud, so keeping a local folder mirrored means relying on WebDAV mounts rather than a native background sync agent.
• The best-known features are split across a paid Pro edition. AI semantic search and some advanced capabilities are gated behind Cloudreve Pro, a commercial license (roughly $375 for a 5-domain V4 bundle) rather than part of the free GPL build.
• Project and docs are heavily China-oriented. Many backends (Qiniu, Upyun, Huawei OBS) and much community discussion target Chinese cloud providers, so some English-language documentation and support lags the primary Chinese material.

Is Cloudreve free?

Yes — the core Cloudreve application is free and open source under the GPL v3 license, and you can self-host it at no cost for personal or organizational use. It follows an open-core model: a separate Cloudreve Pro edition adds features like AI semantic search and is sold as a paid commercial license (around $375 for a 5-root-domain V4 bundle). Everything most self-hosters need is in the free community build.

What does Cloudreve replace?

Cloudreve stands in for consumer and business cloud-drive services — it’s an open source Dropbox alternative, a Google Drive alternative, and a Box alternative. Instead of paying per-seat for hosted storage, you run the drive yourself and point it at storage you already own or rent.

FAQ

Is Cloudreve open source? Yes. Cloudreve is released under the GPL v3 license, with full source on GitHub. The backend is written in Go and the frontend in React. A separate paid Pro edition exists, but the core platform is genuinely open source.

Can I self-host Cloudreve for free? Yes. The community edition is free to self-host with no user or storage caps imposed by the software. It ships as an all-in-one binary (plus a supported Docker image), so a small VPS or home server is enough to get started.

Is Cloudreve a good Dropbox alternative? For web-based access and sharing, yes — it gives you a clean drive UI, share links, and user management over your own storage. The main gap is native desktop sync: Dropbox mirrors a local folder automatically, while Cloudreve leans on WebDAV for drive-like mounting.

What do I need to run Cloudreve? A server that runs the Go binary or Docker, a database (SQLite for small setups, or MySQL/PostgreSQL), and at least one storage backend — local disk works out of the box, or connect S3, OneDrive, or another supported provider.