But making users essentially do your marketing for you to get what’s free elsewhere isn’t a great value proposition.ĭropbox also has a feature that makes it faster to send files around your local network: LAN sync. Dropbox users can boost their free storage by getting friends to sign up with referral codes, up to 16GB. $75 per month/3 user minimum, $25 for each extra userĪs you can see, Google Drive (also known as Google One) offers both more initial, free storage, and more and cheaper options at different levels of storage. $45 per month/3 user minimum, $15 for each extra user $12 a month (one user only), $20 a month for 6 users Here’s a quick breakdown of the various plans and prices: Storage tier PricingĪt the consumer level, both companies offer at least one approximately comparable plan for cloud storage. With such similar pricing, the main differentiator seems to be a dedicated OneDrive application for accessing files on iOS as well as the Office apps, which some Apple users still prefer over iWork.Note: You might also be interested in our comparison of Google Drive vs. Unlike Apple, Microsoft is pushing its OneDrive cloud service on competing hardware platforms, and with similar pricing structures to Apple, it will be up to each user to decide if they truly need OneDrive in addition to iCloud on their devices. Microsoft hardware users will benefit considerably from using OneDrive, while Apple customers will have the most seamless experience with using iCloud.
Likewise, OneDrive is well integrated into Xbox, Windows Phone, and Windows 8. iCloud is heavily integrated into the Apple ecosystem, so it is simple to setup and use with iPads, iPhones, iPod touches, Macs, and Apple TVs. Pricing aside, each cloud service has its own benefits. Those iCloud prices combine the photo library feature, iCloud Drive, and all other existing iCloud services… iCloud goes to 20GB of storage for only $0.99 per month.
For comparison, iCloud Drive will cost the same as OneDrive going forward for 200GB of storage per month, while iCloud’s free tier is 5GB versus Microsoft’s 15GB. This also comes at a time in which Apple is opening up iCloud to become a cloud-based photo library service. These changes are significant in light of Apple’s upcoming iCloud Drive storage service, which brings Apple into the existing world of OneDrive and Dropbox- storage services. These price changes will be rolling out sometime in the next month for users.
The change here is price decreases: 100GB used to cost $7.49 per month and 200GB previously was $11.49 each month.
This move from 20GB to 1TB is a significant boost, but it’s unlikely that most people even have ~1000GB worth of Office files to store. This 1TB tier costs the same $6.99 per month for an individual user or $9.99 for a 5 person family plan (which still provides 1TB per family member). That service is moving from 20GB of storage to 1TB of storage per user.