I’m a happy Dropbox user but that doesn’t mean I’m not watching similar products, either for myself or my clients. I even made some comparison. Criteria are the following:
- Features: even though the primary goal of those solutions are backup, some also permit to synchronize data between different computers, share documents with other users or even keep an history of multiple versions in order to restore if an error is made
- Free treshold: every product has a free version where you get almost all features. However, a big discriminator is the number of Gb you can backup. If you do not intend to pay, it can make a difference.
- Pricing: if you intend to pay, on the contrary, what product gives you the most bang for your bucks?
- Storage location: if you’re a enterprise, data location is of utmost importance since it’s a big hint to what law will be applied in case of lawsuit.
- Security: if you value your privacy, you should take care of how data is sent to the server and how it is stored. If data is stored as is, you will either have to trust the provider or store only unsensitive data.
- Supported platforms
- Third-party integration
| Dropbox | Microsoft Live Mesh | Spider Oak | Syncplicity | SugarSync | ZumoDrive | Dmailer Backup | Wuala | Tonido | Box.net | Carbonite | Elephant Drive | ||
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Features |
Backup |
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Synch |
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Share |
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Versioning / Restore |
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Others |
Streaming on iPhone |
Multimedia stream |
Multimedia stream |
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Free treshold in Gb |
2 |
5 |
5 |
2 |
2 |
2 |
2 |
1 |
N/A |
5 |
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2 |
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Pricing (cost for 100 Gb/month) in $ |
20 |
10 |
30 |
20 |
20 |
129CHF |
15 for 500 Gb |
49€ unlimited |
100 |
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Saves location |
Amazon S3 |
Switzerland Germany France |
N/A |
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Security |
Transfer |
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Storage |
AES 256 |
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AES 128 |
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Supported platforms |
Web |
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Windows |
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Mac |
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Linux |
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iPhone |
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iPad |
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Android |
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BlackBerry |
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Other |
Windows Mobile Symbian |
Palm Pre |
U3 |
Windows USB Portabl |
LinkedIn Google Apps Salesforce |
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Third-party integration |
Google Docs |
iTunes |
Firefox |
App store available |
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Legend:
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Obviously, not every product fits every needs. Moreover, I feel that some criteria may be missing such as installation and configuration easyness: Dropbox is a breeze even for non-computer software professionals whether SpiderOak has a very IT feel. However, since I did not install every product, I prefer not including such criterion.
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Information found on this summary comes from the web sites of the different providers: there may be some mistakes. I’m all ears to correct information on one’s favorite product, provided one can point me to the page that holds the missing information. |
Finally, credit where credit is due: icons on this page come from famfamfam Silk icons set.