About

Who We Are

Seafile is an open-source file syncing, sharing, and document collaboration platform, emphasizing unparalleled reliability and performance. Beyond its core functionalities of file synchronization and sharing, Seafile boasts a sophisticated built-in collaborative document editor, SeaDoc, facilitating seamless document collaboration and workflow management.

Distinguished by its two editions - the Community Edition under an open-source license and the Professional Edition under a proprietary license - Seafile has garnered international acclaim since its inception in 2012. Trusted by millions worldwide, the Community Edition is utilized across diverse user bases, while the Professional Edition finds adoption among esteemed organizations such as Alibaba Group, Humboldt University in Berlin, Max Planck Society, and Kaspersky Labs.

Our Mission

Seafile's mission is to deliver the best document management and collaboration solution to our users, with reliability, user experience, security, and performance as its cornerstones.

As a document management solution, ensuring data safety and reliability is our paramount concern. Seafile places a strong emphasis on the reliability of file synchronization, with its synchronization algorithm refined over more than a decade of continuous improvement and trusted by hundreds of thousands of users. Seafile's file history and snapshot mechanisms guarantee seamless restoration of files to any historical state at any given time.

We consistently enhance our technology and features to provide our users with the best possible experience. In 2016, we introduced virtual drive clients to seamlessly integrate file management for users across multiple devices. In 2023, we unveiled a lightweight collaborative document editor, empowering users to compose, manage, and publish high-quality documents directly within Seafile.

Security is a fundamental element of our product design. Seafile stands as one of the earliest adopters of encrypted library features within file sync and share solutions. With the encrypted library feature, user data is encrypted end-to-end on the client, ensuring complete confidentiality even from system administrators.

Renowned for its exceptional performance, Seafile boasts superlative file syncing capabilities that enable efficient collaboration on extensive file repositories. Additionally, Seafile's highly efficient server architecture demands minimal hardware resources, further enhancing operational efficiency.

Development History

Since its initial release in 2012, Seafile has rapidly emerged as one of the most popular solutions for file synchronization and sharing, thanks to its outstanding file syncing speed and reliability.

In 2016, we realized that, given the ever faster network and still limited disk space on desktop computers, it will be very useful to allow users to access files on the cloud without syncing them to local disk. With this insight, we developed and released the Drive client for Seafile. It maps Seafile cloud storage as a virtual drive on Windows, Mac and Linux computers. Similar features were then released by leading cloud storage services including Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive, in 2017. Up to the year of 2019, Seafile is the only on-premises file sync&share solution that provides this capability.

In June 2019, Seafile 7.0 version added knowledge management capability. Users can save Wiki documents in Markdown format directly inside a library. Other types of files can be saved alongside Wiki documents in a library. Such organic combination of Wiki and Cloud Storage removes the limitation on attachment size in traditional Wiki systems. Wiki documents can be conveniently edited in web browser with a WYSIWYG Markdown editor. Full-text search, file tagging, related documents, document review features are included to make knowledge management very efficient.

Up to 2019, Seafile has over 2 million users worldwide. It is also used by large organizations and commercial companies like Alibaba Group, Homboldt University in Berlin and Kaspersky Lab.

In 2023, we released a light-weight collaborative document editor -- SeaDoc, which is seamlessly integrated into Seafile. SeaDoc is an evolution of the Markdown editor released back in 2019. Compared to Markdown, SeaDoc offers richer formatting options, more collaboration features and a refined document publish workflow. The release of SeaDoc is a key step for Seafile's evolution from file sync&share solution to a document management and collaboration solution.

Our Team

Seafile is developed by a team of seasoned professionals specializing in storage, distributed systems, and web technology from Seafile Ltd. Seafile Ltd. is a provider of collaboration software, headquartered in Beijing, China, strategically situated within the city's technology innovation hub. Its flagship products include Seafile and SeaTable, the latter being a no-code database featuring a spreadsheet interface and flexible app-building capabilities.

Seafile was established in 2012 by CEO Daniel Pan and CTO Jonathan Xu. The founders began their collaborative journey while studying at Tsinghua University, one of China's top academic institutions, and have since continued to work together on software products.

Daniel Pan (Founder & CEO)

Daniel Pan assumes the role of Chief Executive Officer at Seafile Ltd. Just two years after attaining his master's degree, he, alongside Jonathan Xu, co-established Seafile Ltd. Their entrepreneurial venture commenced during their university tenure, where they commenced the development of Seafile. Before founding Seafile Ltd., he served as senior software engineer at NetEase Co. Ltd.

Daniel Pan is an alumnus of Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, where he completed his MSC in Computer Science.

Jonathan Xu (Founder & CTO)

Jonathan Xu assumes the role of Chief Technology Officer at Seafile Ltd. He co-founded Seafile Ltd. together with Daniel Pan in 2012. Before founding Seafile Ltd., he served as senior software engineer at EMC.

Jonathan Xu is an alumnus of Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, where he completed his MSC in Computer Science.