All About Dropbox

Launched in 2008, Dropbox is one of the most popular cloud storage services currently with more than 500 million registered users. Dropbox offers free and paid file storage services and beats most of the competition in ease of use and responsiveness. Meanwhile, it provides many collaboration features, capable sharing options, and fast sync. On top of that, Dropbox has strong user support.

Why You Need Dropbox Alternative?

Though Dropbox has gained massive users for abounds of advantages, it also has many loopholes and drawbacks:

☛Dropbox now caps the number of devices you can sync to three for free users.

☛Dropbox does not offer full-text search, shared link controls, or viewer history.

☛Dropbox’s pricing plans aren’t competitive or anywhere near the best deals in cloud storage.

☛Dropbox Basic offers a measly 2GB of free storage while many other cloud providers offer more free storage.

☛Some people don’t like Dropbox’s “all or nothing” approach to some of its permissions (though they’ve improved on this by introducing “read-only” access).

☛Dropbox lacks the absence of end-to-end encryption and has a confusing privacy policy. Meaning Dropbox does not encrypt your files when you are uploading them to their cloud, thereby, creating a major security risk.

The disadvantages above including increasing prices, syncing restrictions, and multiple data breaches have caused its users to look for its alternatives. There are good Dropbox competitors out there that provide better security, features, and at a more affordable price.

What is the Best Free Dropbox Alternative?

The best secure and free Dropbox alternatives have been listed in the following content.  I’ll start with some mainstream alternatives like Google Drive, OneDrive, etc., and then get into some smaller, more niche-specific cloud storage services. Please read on to learn more information so that you can choose the best alternative to Dropbox for Mac or Windows.

• Google Drive

• OneDrive

• Box

• CBackup

• Mega

• Amazon Drive

Google Drive

If you are looking for cloud storage for your personal use, Google Drive may be the best Dropbox alternative. Google Drive is a part of the Google suite of apps, which allows people to store files in the cloud, synchronize it across various devices, and share files.

What’s more, it provides each user with 15 GB of cloud storage for free and the paid plans of Google Drive are more flexible than that of Dropbox. The first couple of plans get you 100GB and 200GB for $2 and $3 per month respectively, which are good options if you don’t need a lot of storage, however, Dropbox doesn’t offer similar ones.

In addition, Google Drive has desktop clients for both Mac and Windows, as well as mobile apps that make it easy to access your files in the cloud and can sync to an unlimited number of devices. Another advantage is that integration with Docs, Sheets, and Slides, makes the process of collaboration easy and effective.

Free Storage Space: 15 GB.

Plans & Pricing: 100 GB for $1.99, 2 TB for $9.99, goes up to 30 TB for $299.99 (monthly prices).

Security: SSL/TLS, 256-bit AES, 2-factor authentication.

OneDrive

Microsoft OneDrive is one of the best alternatives to Dropbox, which is ideal for cloud data storage, especially when sensitive documents and images are in question. It integrates well with other online services and office utilities for easy management of files, documents, and archives.

OneDrive comes with a 5 GB storage space for free. The plan can be upgraded to a 1 Tb space for an additional $69.9 charged annually. That’s a hell of a lot more space as compared to Dropbox’s default paid storage space. The Business plans also include Office 365 applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

OneDrive have good web and mobile apps for all operating system, which makes it easy to sync files from all platforms. And allows you to create, edit, and share your documents regardless of the device that is being worked on.

Free Storage Space: 5 GB.

Plans & Pricing: 50 GB for $1.99/month, Office 365 Home with Premium OneDrive Features for $99.99/year, and Office 365 Personal with Premium OneDrive Features for $69.99/year.

Security: SSL/TLS, 256-bit AES.

Box

Box is specifically designed for business purposes, so, it can be regarded as the best alternative to Dropbox for business. The ease of use, integration with your favorite apps, and ease of IT management make it an excellent choice for small teams.

Box is a freemium solution with multiple free and paid product tiers. The free plan comes with 10 GB of storage. Individual users can increase this to 100 GB by paying $10 per month. Meanwhile, its basic Business plan costs $15 per month, per user and puts no limits on storage capacity.

Dropbox also offers securely sharing files and allows you to create, edit and review documents with others from any device in real-time. And the Box Business plan also features two-factor authentication, SSL and at-rest encryption, mobile access, and very granular permission controls. As far as security and data privacy go in comparison to Dropbox, Box is much better.

Free Storage Space: 10 GB.

Plans & Pricing: 100 GB for $5/month/user and unlimited storage for $15/month/user.

Security: SSL/TLS, 256-bit AES, 2-factor authentication.

CBackup

If you are looking for a safe cloud server for your computer data, CBackup is a good Dropbox Alternative free for Windows PC. CBackup is a professional cloud backup service that offers a secure and reliable cloud server called CBackup Cloud. Compared with Dropbox, it is more professional in the data backup aspect.

In addition, the storage plans of CBackup are really reasonable. It provides 5GB of free storage space, and offer 1TB and 5TB storage plan at pretty low prices. If you need to upgrade, it offers storage plans for months or years.

What's more, CBackup offers many useful features for free. For example, it allows you to backup/sync files from your PC to OneDrive, Dropbox, and Google Drive via its client. Therefore, you can also use CBackup as a free alternative to Dropbox. What's more, it also offers cloud-to-cloud sync and cloud storage combination, which allows you to combine the free or idle space of multiple cloud storage accounts into one to store more data.

Free Storage Space: 5 GB of free backup space.

Plans & Pricing: 1024 GB (1TB) for $4.99 per month, 5120 GB(1TB) for $14.99 per month.

Security: OAuth, 256-bit AES Encryption, GDPR Compliance.

Mega

Mega is one of the most recognizable names in the cloud storage space, which offers zero-knowledge encryption. Like others, it also has cross-platform app support allowing you to access your data from any device.

The free plan of Mega provides 15GB of storage and another 35GB that eventually expires. Still, 15GB is much more than what Dropbox offers. You can upgrade the plan to €4.99 per month for 200 GB of storage, and go up to €29.99 per month for 8 TB of storage. Their Pro plan costs $11.38 a month with 1 TB of storage space, which is perfect for people with large files.

Its service is provided primarily through web-based apps, but it also offers mobile apps for Windows Phone, Android, and iOS. And you can share folders and collaborate with other people if you want to. It also has browser extensions that give you quick access to your files.

Free Storage Space: Up to 50 GB free storage.

Plans & Pricing: 2 TB for $11.06, 8 TB for $22.13, and 16 TB for $33.20.

Security: SSL/TLS, 256-bit AES.

Amazon Drive

Amazon Drive is a cloud storage application managed by e-commerce behemoth Amazon. It allows you to back up your files, share them by generating a link, emailing it, or sharing them directly to Facebook or Twitter, and even use on-demand photo prints using Amazon Prints service.

If you are an Amazon customer, you already have free cloud storage. With an Amazon Prime account, you get unlimited photo storage space (depends on your location) plus 5 GB for videos and other files. If you want to test the service, you can sign up for the free plan, which gives you 5GB of storage. That’s not much, but it’s still more than Dropbox provides.

Amazon Drive offers sync clients for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android and it utilizes the same server network that Amazon uses for Amazon S3 and its own internal data.

Free Storage Space: 5 GB.

Plans & Pricing: 100 GB for $19.99/year, 1 TB for $59.99/year, 30 TB for $1,800/year.

Security: SSL/TLS, 256-bit AES, 2-factor authentication.

Bonus Tip: How to Switch Dropbox to Other Cloud Storage with Ease?

After long-term use, there must be some important files in Dropbox that you don’t want to abandon. When you decide to switch to another cloud storage, you must want to move the files from Dropbox to another cloud storage directly to save local storage and keep data safe in the cloud server.

If you need to move Dropbox data to another cloud storage, the easiest way is to use a third-party tool like CBackup. With CBackup, you can move files from Dropbox to Google Drive, OneDrive, FTP/SFTP, and other cloud with ease.

If you happen to need this, please refer to the steps below to learn how to achieve that with CBackup:

1. Create an account for CBackup. Install CBackup on your PC and sign in.

2. Under the Storage tab, select Dropbox and click Authorize Now. Then sign in to your account and authorize CBackup to access your files on the cloud. Then, repeat the steps to add another cloud drive to CBackup.

3. To move files from Dropbox to another cloud storage, click on the Sync tab at the top of the page, then, click Sync Public Cloud to Public Cloud button.

4. Click on New Task on the Sync Tasks screen.

5. Name your sync task, click Add Source to add Dropbox or certain Dropbox files as the backup source, and click Add Destination to select another cloud storage as the backup destination.

6. Then, click Start Backup in the lower right corner to perform the task.

Note: CBackup also offers a Cloud to Cloud Backup feature that can help you backup Dropbox files to OneDrive and other clouds. It also allows you to backup files to Dropbox and any other added cloud.

Conclusion

The 6 best Dropbox alternatives have been listed above with detailed plans, features, and advantages. You can make your choice after careful comparison. If you decide to use a Dropbox alternative and give up Dropbox, don’t forget to use CBackup to move your important files from Dropbox to the new cloud storage easily and quickly.