Selecting a cloud storage for your valuable files for safety, better availability, and online collaboration may be challenging in terms of both cost and features. Let’s compare a few popular cloud storage services which may help you to choose or suggest someone the right option as per the need and budget.
Following table depicts the comparison on the key parameters both for minimum and maximum available storage offering from the most popular cloud storage solutions - i.e. Google Drive, SkyDrive, and Dropbox.
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| Cloud Storage Services |
| Minimum | ||||||||
| Cloud Storage | Size (GB) | Rate per Month ($) | Rate per Year ($) | Rate per GB ($) | Rental modes | File limitations | Sync speed | Remarks |
| Google Drive | 100.00 | 4.99 | 59.88 | 0.60 | Monthly | Max size 10GB each | Good | Yearly rate is calculated just for comparison |
| SkyDrive | 20.00 | N/A | 10.00 | 0.50 | Yearly | N/A | Average | |
| Dropbox | 100.00 | 9.99 | 99.00 | 0.99 | Montly, Yearly | N/A | Good | There is a discount in yearly rental |
| Maximum | ||||||||
| Google Drive | 16,384.00 | 799.99 | 9,599.88 | 0.59 | Same as Min | Same as Min | Same as Min | There is a little discount for higer size subscription |
| SkyDrive | 200.00 | N/A | 100.00 | 0.50 | Same as Mn | N/A | Same as Min | |
| Dropbox | 1,024.00 | N/A | 795.00 | 0.78 | Yearly | N/A | Same as Min | Unlimited storage for 5 users, but just for comparison - max size of Google drive has been considered. |
From the comparison table above, it’s clear that the selection of any of the available cloud storage solution should be driven by the individual need of storage volume not by the cost or any other parameter.
Google Drive or Dropbox will be costlier than SkyDrive to you if your need is less than 100GB. Up to 200GB you may continue with SkyDrive but after that you have to choose either Google Drive or Dropbox.
Next by pricing Dropbox seems costlier than Google Drive up to 1TB storage, so up that requirement you can use Google Drive. But beyond that you should go for Dropbox, because for 5 users Dropbox’s business plan provides you unlimited storage option which is really beneficial for larger storage requirement for businesses.
Now a days there is another important aspect of consideration for choosing a cloud storage - that is inbuilt document editing features within the storage location itself. This feature helps better online collaboration and availability of office document files. So if you work on a good amount of office files, like Word (document), Excel (spreadsheet), and PowerPoint (presentation) with a team then you may think for either Google Drive or SkyDrive as Dropbox does not offer this feature.
Dropbox just sync files across your devices, and for editing those files you have to be dependent on the particular device’s capability to edit those files. But for at least office documents in Google Drive and SkyDrive you are free from this restriction as these services provide inbuilt office applications to work on the stored office documents directly. In this context Google Drive has one added advantage over SkyDrive – that is you need not to spend for the office application licensing separately. In SkyDrive editing of office document on the web is free, but to edit or create the document with all features of MS Office on desktop you’ll need separate licensing. And to compete with Google Drive’s web-office, SkyDrive has to have desktop capabilities to match with. Nevertheless, connectivity of cloud storage with MS Office 2013 desktop applications is awesome these days.
If we think both on storage volume beyond 1TB and online collaboration or editing of office documents together then things might be a little more complex to choose any of the storage services. Because 1TB or beyond storage is not offered by SkyDrive, and beyond 1TB Google Drive will be costlier than Dropbox too. So what can be the best option on this situation?
Generally office documents does not require a huge amount of storage space like other files e.g. high-resolution images, videos, database backups, etc. So the problem of online editing or collaboration of office documents and a large storage space requirement together can have a hybrid solution. Ideally a small and mid-sized organization can accommodate their important and current office document’s storage need within 20GB easily. So they can implement SkyDrive and Dropbox together to solve their both of the said requirements cost-effectively. They have to just segregate the files in two categorized locations for the first time – even these two locations can also be in sync as well if implemented properly.
But, beyond 20GB office document’s cloud storage with inbuilt collaboration and editing requirement may create several complexities. Because not only cost but also strategic issues may arise - like the organizations those who are using MS Exchange IDs or Live IDs and working tightly with Microsoft technologies will face issues to go for Google Drive.
So it’s completely organization to organization’s need which plays the major role in choosing cloud storage options.
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