Seafile
Headquarters
Beijing, ChinaFounded
2009CEO / Founder
Jonathan XuEmployees
11-50Funding
BootstrappedProducts
1 product listedAvg. AI Score
7.5/10Website
www.seafile.com
Profile updated
About Seafile
Seafile is an open-source file sync and share platform founded in 2009 by Jonathan Xu and Daniel Pan. Operated by Seafile Ltd. in China and a dedicated German company Seafile GmbH, the product offers a self-hostable Dropbox alternative for teams, universities, and enterprises that require data residency or privacy.
Seafile is widely used in research institutions, universities, and European enterprises. Both open-source Community Edition and commercial Pro Edition are offered.
Seafile is bootstrapped and operates independently from both its Beijing and Mainz, Germany locations.
Specialties
Products by Seafile
All products by Seafile reviewed by our AI panel of experts.
How Our Review Panel Scores Seafile
Six independent reviewer personalities assessed Seafile's product on their own terms. They landed within 0.8 points of each other, an unusually strong consensus.
Averaged across 1 reviewed product in our catalog. Scores are out of 10.
Competitive Landscape
Who Seafile competes with, and how they differ.
Dropbox is a proprietary, cloud-only consumer/SMB sync service with no self-hosting option; Seafile is open-source and self-hostable for teams that must keep data on their own infrastructure.
Nextcloud is a broader open-source self-hosted collaboration suite (calendar, contacts, office docs) forked from ownCloud in 2016, competing directly with Seafile's narrower, performance-focused file-sync-and-share core.
ownCloud is the original open-source self-hosted sync-and-share project that Nextcloud later forked from, and still sells its own on-premises Enterprise edition as a direct alternative to Seafile Professional.
Box targets enterprise content management and compliance-heavy workflows on a proprietary cloud-only SaaS model, a heavier, pricier alternative to Seafile's lightweight self-hosted approach.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedCompany Timeline
Key milestones in Seafile's history, with sources.
- Launch
SeafilePlus Cloud SaaS launched
Seafile Ltd. launched SeafilePlus Cloud, a SaaS platform built on Seafile, and established SeaCloud Labs Pte. Ltd. to operate the service globally, per the company's own About page.
seafile.com - Launch
Seafile Server 7.0 released
Seafile Ltd. released version 7.0 of the Seafile server, per the project's GitHub release history.
github.com - Milestone
Seafile Ltd. and Seafile GmbH end licensing dispute
Seafile Ltd. and its former European distribution partner Seafile GmbH reached an amicable resolution to their 2016 cooperation dispute; Seafile GmbH rebranded as Syncwerk GmbH and all Seafile trademarks and the seafile.de domain reverted to Seafile Ltd.
forum.seafile.com - Launch
Seafile Server 6.0 released
Seafile Ltd. released version 6.0 of the Seafile server, per the project's GitHub release history.
github.com - Milestone
PayPal suspends then restores Seafile GmbH payment account
PayPal suspended European distributor Seafile GmbH's merchant account after demanding the company monitor customer files for illegal content; PayPal restored the account within a day and issued a public apology after backlash.
fortune.com - Milestone
Seafile Ltd. established, founders go full-time
Daniel Pan (CEO) and Jonathan Xu (CTO) began working on Seafile full-time and formally established Seafile Ltd. in Beijing to develop and distribute the software; the company's own About page states it was established in 2012.
seafile.com - Founded
Seafile project started at Tsinghua University
Daniel Pan and Jonathan Xu, students at Tsinghua University in Beijing, began building the file-sync software that became Seafile, initially envisioned as peer-to-peer sharing before the team moved to a client-server model.
linux.com
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