Nextcloud Talk

Last reviewed Sep 13, 2026 · 798 words

Nextcloud Talk is free with every Nextcloud install and works out of the box for chat, one-to-one calls and screen sharing. The number that matters is 4: that is roughly how many participants a call can hold before the browser-to-browser mesh Talk uses by default starts dropping video, because each participant uploads a separate stream to every other participant. Past that you need the High Performance Backend, a separate Go signalling server plus a media server, and at that point you are running a real-time infrastructure stack that happens to be attached to a file server. Whether Talk is right for you comes down to whether your calls live above or below that line.

Below 4 people, it just works

Enable Talk from the app store in Nextcloud and you have a chat sidebar, conversations tied to shared files, mentions, reactions, message editing, polls, and a call button. Calls are WebRTC peer-to-peer with the Nextcloud server acting only as the signalling channel. Nothing else to install, nothing else to secure. The iOS and Android apps get push notifications through Nextcloud's push proxy and ring for calls.

For a family or a five-person team that mostly chats and occasionally does a two-person call, this is the complete product, and it lands in an install you already back up and update. The 512 MB figure is Talk's share of a Nextcloud box, not a separate requirement.

The one thing to install even for small calls is TURN

Peer-to-peer WebRTC fails whenever both parties are behind NAT that will not hole-punch, which in practice means mobile networks, corporate WiFi and a surprising share of home routers. The fix is a TURN server that relays media when a direct connection fails. coturn is the standard choice, and Talk's admin settings take its address, port and shared secret directly:

listening-port=3478
tls-listening-port=5349
fingerprint
use-auth-secret
static-auth-secret=your-long-random-secret
realm=turn.example.com
no-multicast-peers

Open UDP and TCP on 3478 (and 5349 for TLS) on a machine with a public IP, and set the same secret in Talk. Without TURN, my estimate is that a quarter of calls fail to connect for at least one participant, and the failure is silent: the call rings, the tile stays black. Do this before blaming anything else.

Above 4 people, you need the High Performance Backend

The HPB is two pieces: the Nextcloud Talk signalling server, written in Go, which takes over from the PHP server the job of coordinating who is in which call, and Janus, an SFU that receives one stream from each participant and forwards it to the others, turning the N-squared mesh into N uploads. With that in place a call scales to dozens of participants, and the webinar features (lobbies, raised hands, breakout rooms, moderated broadcast) become usable.

Running the HPB means Janus with its WebRTC ports (a UDP range you control), the signalling server with NATS as its message bus, and the signalling proxy if you want to spread Janus across machines. Nextcloud GmbH sells this preconfigured for a reason; the community setup is documented and workable, but it is the part of Talk that generates the support threads. Budget a separate 2 GB VM for it and a full day the first time.

Honest comparison with a dedicated meeting server

If video calls are the main event and chat is secondary, Jitsi Meet does the SFU, TURN and signalling in one documented Docker stack, scales to more participants with less effort, and needs no Nextcloud. Talk's advantage is integration: the call about a document is next to the document, guest links work without an account, and identity comes from the Nextcloud user directory you already administer. Nothing leaves your server in either case.

For a team that lives in chat all day, Mattermost or Rocket.Chat remain deeper than Talk's chat, which is good and improving but built around the file-and-call use case rather than the channel-and-thread one.

What I'd do

Already running Nextcloud for a household or a small team: enable Talk today, install coturn on a public IP tonight, and stop there. Calls of 2 to 4 people will be fine. If you regularly need 6 or more on a call, either accept the day of HPB setup on its own VM, or run Jitsi Meet beside Nextcloud and keep Talk for chat. I would not install Nextcloud in order to get Talk; the file server is the product, and Talk is the very good reason to enable one more app on it.