Pydio Cells

What Pydio Cells does

Pydio Cells is a file sharing and collaboration platform aimed at organizations. It is a full rewrite of the older PHP-based Pydio in Go, built as a set of micro-services that ship as one binary. Users work in workspaces and “Cells”, shared areas that can include internal and external people, and they can send public links. Files are previewed online, and desktop and mobile sync clients keep copies on users’ devices. WebDAV, a REST API and SDKs let other tools reach the data.

Storage can live on the local filesystem or in S3-compatible object storage. Cells Flows, the built-in automation engine, runs jobs such as file processing, maintenance and reporting when events happen.

Editions

The open source edition is called Cells Home and is free. According to Pydio’s pricing page it covers filesystem and S3 storage, sharing, an embedded user directory, document preview, the REST API, SDKs, WebDAV and mobile and desktop sync. Two commercial editions use a separate binary unlocked with a license key:

• Cells Connect adds LDAP/Active Directory, single sign-on through OpenID Connect and SAML, Cells as an OAuth2 identity provider and white labeling.
• Cells Enterprise adds role- and rule-based access control, multi-factor authentication, terms of service validation, exportable audit logs and real-time auditing of shares.

Google Cloud Storage and Azure Blob backends, custom versioning policies, data sharding and OnlyOffice support are also listed in the paid column. The pricing page adds that using Pydio inside your own software without contributing your code back requires an OEM license. The Pydio website is published by Wire France SAS.

Security and encryption

Each datasource can be encrypted at rest. Pydio generates a random 256-bit AES key for every file and wraps it with a datasource key created by the admin; data is encrypted with AES-GCM in fixed-size blocks so large files can still be streamed. The documentation warns that keys are stored in the default database and that lost keys mean unrecoverable data. Existing data is not encrypted after the fact, so encryption has to be switched on for an empty datasource. This is server-side encryption, meant mainly for storage run by a third party, not end-to-end encryption.

Self-hosting Pydio Cells

Cells ships as precompiled binaries for Linux, macOS and Windows. The only required dependency is MySQL 5.7 or later or MariaDB 10.3 or later; MongoDB is optional for larger deployments. The documentation recommends at least 2 cores and 4 GB of RAM for Cells Home, an SSD, a dedicated non-root user and a high open-files limit. Supported systems include Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL and Rocky Linux, plus macOS; Windows is supported only for Cells Home. Upgrading to a paid edition means swapping the binary and adding a license key.

The main branch currently holds Cells v5, which its README marks as work in progress; stable documentation covers v4.

Hosted version

Pydio does not list a hosted SaaS. For Connect, the pricing page mentions ready-made cloud images (OVF, VMware, Amazon AMI) to run on your own infrastructure.

Limitations

Many features organizations look for, including LDAP, SSO, MFA, audit exports and OnlyOffice, are in the paid editions. Encryption at rest keeps keys on the server. The ongoing move to v5 means the default branch is not the stable release.

Who it suits

Pydio Cells fits organizations that want a self-hosted file sharing portal with automation and are prepared to buy a commercial edition for directory and SSO integration. For a fully open source feature set, compare Nextcloud and OpenCloud.