Competition in the online storage sphere is hotting up. The recent launch of Google Drive and changes to Microsoft’s Skydrive have put Dropbox onto the back foot for now. But how do the various offerings stack up against each other?
Blogger Tim Anderson has compiled information showing the differences between the major cloud storage competitors: Google Drive, Microsoft Skydrive, Apple’s iCloud service, Dropbox and Box. The most obvious of these figures is free storage, which has Dropbox coming in with the lowest amount of space (2GB), Skydrive offering the largest (7GB) and the remainder of the contenders (iCloud, Box and Google Drive) all offering a solid 5GB of storage for no money down. Skydrive’s 7Gb of free cloud storage, on the surface, seems to be the best of the lot but Microsoft have made users sacrifice 25GB of non-synced space to get it.
Apple’s iCloud is a mostly Mac-centric service, lacking support on the Android, Blackberry, Linux and Windows Phone platforms and only limited Windows support. The only service that does support Windows Phone is, unsurprisingly, Microsoft Skydrive. Skydrive however leaves Android, Blackberry and Linux by the wayside. Google Drive has yet to support Blackberry and Linux, Box has left Linux off the list and both do not support Windows Phone. Dropbox, which may be a bit worried at the recent involvement of the bigger players, has the widest range of support, encompassing the web, Android, Blackberry, Mac, iOS, and Windows platforms in their cloud storage solution.
In terms of paid-for space, Box is the most expensive on the list, with Skydrive and Google Drive working out to be the cheapest. Apple’s lack of external platform support makes the mid-range Dropbox price-per-GB of $9.99 (for 50GB) seem like the most affordable for now, given the service’s ability to sync your digital content across every platform besides Windows Phone.
Source: The Guardian