If you are looking for a new Cloud Drive service for storing data online, or for synchronizing data such as photos or documents, then you are in for some research on the topic as offers vary largely from provider to provider.
Price can be an important factor when selecting the right cloud hosting service especially if you might exceed the free storage provided at one point in time in the future.
With that many services in the field, it is important to compare pricing, as much as it is important to look at the feature sets individual services offer. Like pricing, features differ a lot between services.
Compatibility
It starts with the supported operating systems.Amazon Cloud Drive’s software is available for PC and Mac, and Android and iOS. Microsoft OneDrive on the other hand is available for those, and also for Windows Phone and Xbox.
If you need to access your files on specific devices, you need to make sure that they are supported by the cloud hosting service of your choosing.
Back to pricing. All services offer Gigabytes of free storage. If you need more, you need to pay either a monthly subscription fee, or a yearly fee. Free storage ranges from 2 Gigabyte that Dropbox offers to the 15 Gigabyte that Google Drive offers. And if that is not confusing enough, some services give you extra Gigabytes if you refer other users, or take part in promotions.
Cloud Drive Price Comparison
Online storage pricing differs immensely between services. If you take the 1000 Gigabyte tier alone, the price difference between the cheapest provider, Microsoft, and the most expensive one is more than $550 per year.
The price information you find listed below are as of June 2016. Please note that pricing may change at any time in the future. If it does, please let us know in the comments so that we can update the table.
The following screenshot displays the free space and extra space pricing of the following cloud hosting services: Amazon Cloud Drive, Apple iCloud, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive and SugarSync.
The prices highlighted in gree indicate the cheapest storage pricing up to this point. Some services may offer more online space for a cheaper price than other services offer less storage space. Click on the image to view it in full screen.
| Storage (GB) | Amazon Drive | Apple iCloud | Box | Dropbox | Google Drive | Microsoft OneDrive | SugarSync |
| 2 | free | ||||||
| 5 | $11.99 | free | free | ||||
| 7 | |||||||
| 10 | free | ||||||
| 15 | free | ||||||
| 25 | |||||||
| 30 | |||||||
| 50 | $11.88 | $23.88 | |||||
| 60 | |||||||
| 100 | $96 | $23.88 | $89.88 | ||||
| 200 | $35.88 | ||||||
| 250 | $119.88 | ||||||
| 500 | $299.88 | ||||||
| 1000 | $119.88 | $119.88 | $119.88 | $83.88 | $660 | ||
| unlimited | $59.99 |
Notes:
- Amazon is the only provider that offers unlimited storage, and that at a very good price of $59.99 per year. The company’s other plan gives you 5GB of storage but supports unlimited photo storage.
- Apple provides Apple Music customers with access to their entire music library in the cloud, and does not count it against the storage quota.
- Google offers storage beyond the 1TB mark. You can sign up for 10TB, 20TB or 30TB of storage for $99.99, $199.99 or $299.99 per month respectively.
- Microsoft’s 1TB offer includes a subscription to Office 365.
The best free service storage-wise is Google Drive which nets you 15 Gigabyte of free storage. When it comes to paid accounts, price may not be the sole decider when it comes to selecting a provider.
If price is the only factor, Amazon Drive takes the crown as it gets you unlimited storage for $59.99 which is half as expensive as most 1TB plans offered by other providers.
Most services offer a trial option or a free option, so that you can try before you subscribe. This is highly suggested as you can test the programs and functionality that these services provide you with before signing up for a paid plan.
Now You: are you using a cloud synchronization service? If so which, and why?