ProjectSend

ProjectSend solves a narrower, specific problem than Dropbox or Nextcloud: sending and receiving files with clients who are outside your organization, not syncing folders across your own devices. It originated in 2007 and has been iterated on since as a dedicated client-portal tool — clients get their own login into a group with access only to their assigned folder, they can upload files back to you (not just download what you send), and every action is captured in detailed per-file, per-user activity logs and statistics.

That client-first framing shows up throughout the feature set: system user roles distinguish staff from clients, the interface supports multiple languages for international client bases, and the whole thing installs on a plain LAMP stack — no Redis, no message queue, no external services — so a small agency can run it comfortably on cheap shared hosting.

The honest limitation is that ProjectSend is not a sync tool at all: there's no desktop client, no continuous folder watching, and no offline-first conflict resolution — it's a web portal for uploading and downloading, full stop. The interface is also visibly dated compared to Dropbox's or Nextcloud's, and the project is maintained by a small core team with a correspondingly slower release cadence than the larger open-source storage platforms. For a freelancer or small agency that specifically needs a free, simple, self-hosted way to exchange deliverables with clients — and doesn't need real-time sync — ProjectSend does exactly that one job well, at zero cost, under a permanent GPL-2.0 license.