Likelihood to Recommend Dropbox is well-suited for file sharing within our organization. We have employees who do not work out of a traditional office and need to access files from a variety of locations: at home, in client meetings, and while traveling. Dropbox allows us to continue to work from anywhere and collaborate with each other by sharing our files.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Dropbox's real-time collaboration features, including simultaneous editing and commenting, have revolutionized the way our teams work together. On multiple occasions, we've accidentally overwritten important documents or needed to retrieve deleted files. With Dropbox, we can easily revert to previous versions or recover deleted files, preventing data loss and minimizing disruptions. Dropbox excels in making file sharing a breeze. With just a few clicks, we can generate shareable links or invite colleagues to shared folders. Read full review 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! Read full review Cons Change the name of the root folder, the "()" can cause problems sometimes with some tools trying to find paths inside of the root folder. The upload queue becomes slow trying to upload files that have more than ~500mb of file size, even if I have 1 Gbit of speed, Dropbox gets stuck uploading single files with that rule. Sometimes we can't move a shared folder from root location. LAN sync seems not to be working in my experience. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Dropbox is a user-friendly, easy tool which requires little to no skill and they offer a free version with a good amount of storage available. There are other file sharing tools available however at a cost. Dropbox free version I have used for years and it serves every purpose I need.
Read full review Usability [Its] functionality and usability are very good, however[,] on every computer that I have ever installed the app on, Dropbox assumes I want it to update the files every time I start the system up. That's not always true, but the app assumes it is. I can switch that function off, but I would rather that function default to "Off" and then I can decide to turn it on as needed.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Performance Dropbox is really useful, you can access any file from anywhere and you can upload and even edit files online, but, sometimes it can be slow. Downloading, uploading, and syncing is a bit slow, it can take several minutes. Furthermore, the search engine for large amounts of data can be slow too and it is not powerful.
Read full review 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 .
Read full review Support Rating Our experience with support has been limited which is a good thing. We haven't experienced any major issues with the service and most of our service interactions have been useability questions which we were able to find answers for within their knowledge base. For the few times we have reached out to support, the responses were on point, quick, and our issue was resolved in one interaction. I appreciate not being routed to a chatbot or offshored support.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating I needed to stay current in improving my daily operations. Dropbox was suggested to me by a former colleague two-years ago and I've been using it just fine ever since.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Dropbox gives more visual control over the success of uploading.
WeTransfer uploads and then sends a link to the recipient. If something goes wrong during the upload, there doesn't appear to be a way to begin again from the dropping point. With Dropbox, I can watch as it uploads. If I lose a connection, it will continue uploading where it left off when I get a new connection. This is vital in transferring large files. If
WeTransfer offers that, I was never able to figure it out.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Return on Investment Helped us to streamline boxes of papers into electronic folders. Enables a more solid backup of necessary files, not dependent on one specific computer or one specific box of papers. Enabled a quicker search to locate specific files than the previously used operations. Read full review Software is free so if you are going for a hosted solution anyway, it's hard to beat One of the easiest way to make sure your data is secured without compromising on features You need to manage the infrastructure and software Read full review ScreenShots