Item: Dropbox
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Dropbox to collaborate within teams and externally with our customers and partners. The advanced sharing features and the ability to lock down and restrict access with ease was one of the selling features for us. The editor version history has proven itself quite useful when changes are made to a document by accident or something is deleted. Dropbox is truly cross-platform and there are apps for every device and ecosystem we use. Being a household name, there are no security reviews needed when onboarding a new customer, Dropbox's security speaks for itself and we utilize all the safeguards available from strong passwords to 2FA.

Pros and Cons

Super fast syncing across devices and very reliable and consistent speeds.
"Good enough" security with the supported 2FA and 256-bit AES encryption.
Solid sharing and collaborations tools are built-in to the app, UI shell on Windows/Mac and on web browsers.
Version/history feature allows you to never lose work or files.

Built-in editor for office documents (Word, Excel, PPT) isn't as powerful as its rival Google Drive/Docs.
Minimalist app and interface on PC/Mac leave you wanting more advanced controls.
Sync doesn't always work as expected using "Automatic Camera Uploads", I sometimes have to manually trigger it.

Return on Investment

Dropbox has allowed us to move more quickly given our ability to share files on the go and without the other party needing to sign-up for the service.
The versioning feature has saved us a lot of time and headaches by not losing important work and documents.

Usability

Dropbox is dead simple to us since right out of the box, it creates a folder on your PC and anything added to it gets synced to the cloud and any other device signed into that account. You can then dive deeper into permissions, version history, etc. Overall though, the minimalist approach is welcome since not everyone we work with is highly technical and that itself saves us time and money. Many of our colleagues already use Dropbox for their personal cloud so no training is required when using it at work other than going over our own company guidelines and best practices.

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.

Alternatives Considered

Google Drive

If you're already using GSuite, Google Drive is probably the natural choice but only because it has a solid built-in document editor which is more powerful than Dropbox's offering in my opinion. However, when it comes to syncing to devices like Mac's and PC's, Dropbox has Google Drive beat hands down for reliability and consistency.

Other Software Used

Mavenlink, Slack, Small Improvements

Likelihood to Recommend

Dropbox is very well suited for SOHO professionals and small to medium-sized teams who need solid performing, reliable collaboration tools on a trusted cloud platform provider with very robust security. Where it falls short compared to Google Drive & Google Docs is in the document editing and collaboration tools within the office suite. If you're already using GSuite then you'd likely better suited with Google Drive, but as a long-time user of Dropbox, I still rely on it as both my professional and personal cloud of choice and part of my redundancy for cloud storage. I find the integration with Mac better than any competitors offering and the PC experience is better than most other cloud providers too.

Best all around cloud storage solution!

Overall Satisfaction with Dropbox