Top Cloud Drive Comparison
Many internet giants have offered cloud storage service. From the most popular dropbox to skydrive and the new google drive, they all offered the similar service. In case you're looking for such service and need to compare a bit, let's check out the top 3 cloud storage providers and choose a suitable one.
Free storage size comparison
- Free size – Only 2GB free as default, but we can increase it by inviting friends, the total size can be up to 18GB (500 MB per referral)
- Google Drive – 5GB free as default.
- SkyDrive – The free size already upgraded to 7GB till present, the previous offer is 25GB.
Paid storage size comparison
If you think the free storage is not enough, they all provide upgrade plan with a fee. Let's take the 100GB size for instance. $60/yr is required for Google Drive, SkyDrive needs $50/yr and $199/yr from Dropbox!! So you see the Dropbox is the most expensive platform.
Note: If you're gmail user and applied the Google Drive paid service, your gmail account size will be upgraded to 25GB.
File Synchronization
We can synchronize our computer folders to their cloud drives. With Dropbox and Google Drive we have the option about what files we would like to synchronize. Although Microsoft announced they like to make things as simple as possible, we don't have the option to choose what folders we like to synchronize on Skydrive.
Platform support
Here's the interesting thing. While Microsoft and Google design their mobile device Apps, their apps are not compatible with each other. But they both are compatible with IOS. Dropbox is the only platform with both Linux and Blackberry compatible.
Internal file reader comparison
The Skydrive took advantages of many MS products like MS Office. Users can even edit documents inside a browser using Office 365 and even edit documents in groups or share links to files publicly or privately. Similar features are available with Dropbox. How about Google drive? the GDrive is probably the most brilliant one. It can open 30 different file types inside the web browser and can even open Photoshop files even if you don’t have Photoshop files on your machine. It even has an Evernote like OCR scanning feature, which scans text from an image.
Speed comparison
Probably because of the new of Google Drive, with 100MB shared bandwidth, the uploading of 300MB files completed in 10 minutes with GDrive while SkyDrive is around 50% completed and 30% for Dropbox.
However, being the most popular and biggest cloud drive provider, the dropbox has great tech advantages. In the testing, google drive will duplicate the uploading while dropbox not. The GDrive has more advantage in overall bandwidth. From overall comparison, Google Drive is a powerful competitor to Dropbox.
For quick view, here's a table about the main features among Google Drive, Skydrive and Dropbox
| Brands | Google Drive | SkyDrive | Dropbox |
| Free Size | 5GB | 7GB | 2GB(can increase by referal) |
| Paid Plan |
25GB: $2.49/mo 100GB: $4.99/mo 1TB: $49.99/mo |
20GB: $10/yr 50GB: $25/yr 100GB: $50/yr |
50GB: $9.99 /mo $99/yr 100GB: $19.99 /mo $199/yr |
| Max file size | Unknown | 2GB | 300MB through web, unlimited through desktop app |
| Desktop App | Windows and Mac | Windows and Mac | Windows, Mac and Linux |
| Mobile Device | Android, iOS | iOS and Windows Phone | Android, iOS and BlackBerry |
| Features | open SDK, Google search, Google+ & Google Docs integration, OCR Tech | Ms Office integration for online documents generating. | Able to increase free storage by referal |