Egnyte provides a unified content security and governance solution for collaboration, data security, compliance, and threat detection for multicloud businesses. More than 16,000 organizations trust Egnyte to reduce risks and IT complexity, prevent ransomware and IP theft, and boost employee productivity on any app, any cloud, anywhere.
$25
per month
ownCloud
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
ownCloud is a self-hosted open source file syncing and sharing option, from the Boston-based company of the same name.
$5
per month
Progress ShareFile
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
ShareFile is a cloud-based file sharing and storage service built for business. The product was acquired by Citrix Systems in 2011, and is now offered by Progress Software.
At the time when this was implemented (over 5 years ago and still in production), there were issues with syncing and reliability that Egnyte did not have, and have continued to impress with. Other providers have improved a lot and Egnyte is fairly costly, but switching costs …
Egynte is best suited for companies that SharePoint is not the best fit for. This includes managers unfamiliar with SharePoint specifically, and those really looking for a replacement for a file server in the more traditional Windows sense. SharePoint has more or less done away with any management that resembles Active Directory or File Explorer. Egnyte's web portal is incredibly straightforward. I would say Egnyte is less suited for companies that have licensing access to SharePoint already and do not have a ton of files or granular sharing and security needs
I'd easily recommend ownCloud to small businesses or teams within organizations. I've not used ownCloud in large deployments, so I'd hesitate before suggesting it in a situation where more than 10 users need support. That said, ownCloud is easy to set up and multiple instances could be used to service a large user base.
When we have a particularly large ad or job printing file that would "clog up" the email process, using ShareFile is very helpful. It's also useful for particular photographers we work with to upload a batch of photos all at once. Where it doesn't work as well for us is when trying to get clients to make use of a login to access folders. We find them reluctant to take on the learning curve. It works best for us when we just send them a clickable download link, and at most just require a tracking name and email address.
Sharing files externally with passwords, link expiration and granular control of permissions
File syncing across end-user devices using a client installed onto the computer for seamless integration for end-users as if they had mapped a drive directly to their machine
Attention and dedication to making the product a world class product with continual product updates.
Ease of use from an administration standpoint, and a very Clear UI.
The price -- you can't beat free!
Mobile applications are great.
Integration with public S3 cloud providers like AWS S3 and Wasabi S3.
2FA authentication is supported and works great!
Marketplace Add-Ons: I love this! For example, I can install an add-on that natively opens raw images. I am a photographer as well, and being able to quickly view the CR2 Raw Files direct from the camera is fantastic! This was made possible by a marketplace add-in.
Embedded Media Players: Photos, Music, and Video files can be viewed and played right in the browser window.
Sync application to keep local files on a computer updated with the files on the server.
Access control and permissions -- shareable links!
Workflows to get customer/affiliate responses to comments on documents.
I used to have the signature feature initially, but it was removed from the original plan, so I could only use it if I chose to select the higher plan price.
I love the upload notifications and reports on user activity.
The document storage versions are fantastic. I am the only user with Delete privileges, and I love that I can make those selections.
Integrations with Microsoft 365 - FANTASTIC - thank you.
The main drawback of the system that it is lacking in managing the uploading of large or huge files, even though the large files can be easily downloadable but the upload takes a lot of time.
While uploading the system sometimes starts lagging and the file after sometimes needs to upload again.
Egnyte is lacking in syncing multiple platforms at the same time. It gives access to one platform at a time which somehow hinders the work while migrating a large amount of data.
Inability to easily collaboratively edit the same document by several people. Some advances have been made with Collabora (Libreoffice online) but it is still very sub-par compared to Office365 and desktop/online Office editing Sharepoint or OneDrive documents.
Apps for Calendar and Contacts are not part of the basic core, and although now quite supported they cannot still be easily deployed in common email clients such as Outlook or Thunderbird, separate CalDAV and CardDAV plugins need to be installed. Embedding an email solution and plugins for major email clients so they can work just by entering username and password would be good.
Risk of moving important folders/files to another location just by random drag-and-drop on Windows. Sometimes this breaks public links that cannot be restored anymore. Reverting such mistake by any of the users is impossible automatically.
When some user deletes some data in a shared folder it is put into recycle bin of the owner of the folder. The user who deleted cannot himself/herself revert such action as he/she does not see the recycle bin (trash) of the owner. Also, there is no log in the recycle bin who deleted that file or folder.
The web console is not the most user friendly site to use to get to, and send my files.
We have had users that have not liked the change in workflow to get files from Progress ShareFile when they were used to just clicking on files on an email.
That management of the tools are not the most user friendly. There have been some improvements but keeping up with certs and setting up new users can be more work than expected.
We found that usage of Egnyte in our supported clients, with sufficient bandwidth, provided all the features and stability we required. The billing setup was fair and the support provided was ample for end users and well as our in house admins. There was a concern about high usage clients but this was taken into account during the vetting process.
It's a highly effective and secure storage system, has robust workarounds for serving the various equipment limits of our users, meets high security requirements of HIPAA standards, significantly reduces our needs for producing paper trails.
Really easy to use the interface. The web browser is very intuitive and I have not had any notable issues with this. It's easy to work on documents as a team, and the only issues we have to tend to come with Apple apps and downloading large files to WebEdit. It's very similar to the filing systems that come on Apple and Windows devices so not a steep learning curve.
OwnCloud is easy for me to use, and I believe it would be for others too. The barrier for most people will be the set up. For a technology professional like myself, ownCloud's setup is pretty straightforward, but it's not the sort of thing most casual users will be able to handle. Also, it's on the user to maintain the service. These can be taken care of by paying someone to do it for you.
ShareFile is so easy to use I was able to download all of my projects files and have them set up to sync before my supervisor could even come over to explain the process to me. It is a neatly organized and intuitive software that allows even the less tech-savvy to become power users.
Egnyte works very well across all platforms and as an add-on to other programs. Load time is close to nothing. Reports can be made in no time as well. All in all no performance issues. We can see that it depends on the local network connection. If you're running with fiber there won't be any issues.
Compared with other cloud services, ownCloud has been the most efficient. It doesn't create a noticeable drain on resources and very quickly syncs across all my devices. I'm usually able to save a file on my laptop and by the time I walk over and sit down at my desktop machine, it's already there. I don't need to wait as often as I have with services like OneDrive.
Easy to use, easy to integrate with Outlook. I only gave it a 9 because I have found that sometimes it does not play nicely with Outlook and can slow it down. But, when that happens (not frequent), I restart Outlook and all is well again
I never had to reach out to customer support for Egnyte. I don't know any coworkers who have had to reach out to Egnyte for support either. As far as I am concerned, the support team is doing a good job since I have not had to reach out to them.
Regarding the community edition, there is a reasonably good support on the IRC, forums and in the issue section on Github. Perhaps a much more individual approach would be available if the premium support was chosen and the instance of the server was provided by the Owncloud company that also offers some premium extensions, not available generally. However, we did not need this level of support yet.
Citrix was generally responsive and helpful in solving technical issues. Like any cloud based SaaS product there is a danger that it may go down. This was a rare occurrence over my three years of using the product. The more common issue we encountered was clients forgetting their login which was easily managed through a forgot password functionality.
Good documentation for the API. With a little help from RS tech staff, any competent programmer should be able to integrate RightSignature with an existing system in a week or three. That help is easy to get as well
At the time when this was implemented (over 5 years ago and still in production), there were issues with syncing and reliability that Egnyte did not have, and have continued to impress with. Other providers have improved a lot and Egnyte is fairly costly, but switching costs would be high to move away from it to similar solutions.
The paid cloud services are expensive if you need a lot of data. You're giving your personal and business information to a data-hungry organization. Local NAS solutions are too slow. We run ownCloud on an older business PC and the performance is outstanding, even for remote access, due to local syncing.
ShareFile is easier and does what you need. I have moved a few organizations from SharePoint to ShareFile. Just easier. You can setup different areas for different departments, setup their permissions and it is easy enough for them to do what they want in their zones. The mobile app works great as well. So you can all the features you really use from SP, but just easier to setup and use.
All of our clients and consulting engineers find ShareFile easy to use, thus complementing our business.
Our staff also find ShareFile intuitive, accessible, and easy to use, making it an ideal, everyday indispensable desktop tool for everyone in our company.
ShareFile can be linked to our firm's primary website as a placed for private use. We haven't found need for this yet, but might in the future.
