Which cloud service is the best

IDrive is, in our opinion, the best cloud storage service available for premium users, offering great value for money as well as highly secure storage. Arguably the biggest advantage is that it applies to network drives too, meaning everything from servers to mobile devices is covered. Users can share files via email, Facebook and Twitter, and restore up to 30 previous versions of back-ups. When it comes to cloud storage for backups , IDrive Express provides a physical hard disk drive in case you lose all of your data, making a backup quick and painless disk image backup is also covered.

For personal and professional projects, Google Drive is the natural go-to for Google Workspace and Android users, due to seamless integration and versatility. You can use the office suite to create and store documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more; and store mobile-based high-quality photos via Google Photos.

While the web interface is somewhat poorly executed and not as user-friendly as elsewhere, native clients allow Windows and Mac users easier file storage through drag-and-drop. Each subscription can be shared for free with up to five others, but everyone will have to share the same amount of storage. Technically speaking, Nextcloud is not an online cloud storage provider on its own. Rather, it's a self-hosted file sync and content collaboration platform, which provides free software you can install on your own server, and administer cloud storage services yourself.

The benefit of a self-hosted product is that you get to keep your data on your servers, offering complete control and faster performance. While this might seem intimidating for beginners, or futile for serverless users, the service offers preconfigured hardware that runs Nextcloud out of the box.

As free open-source software, you can download and install it at no cost, but need to factor in the cost of setting up, running, and administering your own servers. However, if you already have infrastructure in place, using Nextcloud instead of a commercial cloud storage solution could save you money.

There are three pricing plans as an alternative, namely the Basic, Standard, and Premium plans, which are pre-configured and ready to go. Third-party providers can deploy, optimize, and maintain your Nextcloud installation for you, and if you have at least 50 users, you can choose Nextcloud Enterprise, a pre-configured, production-ready version. Read our detailed Nextcloud review. Hailing from Switzerland, pCloud offers no file size limit, making it ideal for storing large media files, although there are some bandwidth limits.

You can also send up to 5GB for free with pCloud Transfer, which covers all desktop and mobile platforms, and also has a web-based login. You can also spend more on a monthly, annual or lifetime basis for pCloud Crypto, which can encrypt individual files. However, it offers both individual and business plans, and Box's pricing structure is very simple for the former. Box apps for desktop cover Windows and Mac, while mobile users can use the official Android client.

With almost 15 years in the sector, Box is a mainstay in cloud content management and file sharing. Its strong points include broad management abilities and an emphasis on security, while its UI is easy to navigate, making you feel you at home immediately.

It's supported by a variety of commonly used app packages, including Google Workspace and Microsoft Read our Box review and our Box for Business review.

Ever since the switch to Windows 10, OneDrive has been the Microsoft cloud storage solution of choice. It's directly integrated into the file explorer, providing immediate access for users who want to jumpstart their online backup. There are also Android and iOS apps for mobile uploads, as well as an improved app for Mac users. As a Microsoft platform, OneDrive works closely with Microsoft , which is helpful if you're looking to boost productivity.

The Photos app can sync images across all your devices, and you can selectively sync files stored on your hard drive. The mobile app offers interesting features, such as multi-page scanning that allows you to save them as a single document, and access anywhere from any device. OneDrive has plans for home and business use, with four for home : two of these are OneDrive only, while the others incorporate Microsoft The most expensive plans also come with a one-month free trial.

Zero knowledge cloud storage pertains to encryption, which, according to SpiderOak , takes place before syncing, so it has no idea what you're storing. You're the only one who knows what's being encrypted and saved, which makes your data utterly private. There's a day free trial available, so you can see how the service works and test it before buying, and considering the focus is on security and privacy, it has a simple and straightforward interface, which utilizes a convenient drag-and-drop feature to help with quick and efficient file organization.

Read our SpiderOak review. For instance, you can store anything through the Mac Finder app, which integrates with iCloud Drive, and also sync iWork documents across all your devices, which are saved to iCloud. Read our full iCloud review. Add in an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface, and you have one of the best cloud storage solutions. A mobile app allows uploading of files and photos, while desktop users have sync clients at their disposal.

The invention of the infamous Kim Dotcom, MEGA allows you to upload files via an encrypted connection, and maintain control over your encryption key. That effectively prevents others, including MEGA, from scanning your content. In addition, its sync client is open-source and open to vulnerability checks.

For those seeking a paid option, there are four tiers ranging from Pro Lite to Pro III: the only main difference being storage and transfer amounts all four maintain the same additional features.

Read our full MEGA review. In China, Tencent holds around a fifth of the market while Alibaba holds almost a half of it. Tencent Cloud offers 70 cloud products, including cloud VMs, Tencent Kubernetes engine container management service , batch computing, cloud computing on servers with high-density GPUs graphics processing units , auto-scaling, CVM cloud virtual machine dedicated hosts, and others.

Tencent CVM cloud virtual machine has better performance than Alibaba Cloud ECS elastic container orchestration service , however, the price is slightly higher. Overall, if choosing between Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud, Tencent showed better performance and pricing options, but of course, there are other factors that should be considered when evaluating vendors.

The Tencent Cloud network spans over 27 geographical regions with 61 availability zones, including partner locations. The company also has over 1, cache nodes deployed across Mainland China and over 1, nodes in other countries and regions.

Tencent Cloud is proliferating quickly. Tencent has a wealth of gaming resources and capabilities and offers a game ecosystem based on the cloud. The company is a video industry leader and provides a comprehensive set of services such as video on demand and interactive live video broadcasting. Tencent Cloud also offers customized products and services for WeChat ecosystem customers. Tencent Cloud has limited brand recognition outside China.

For now, the company has a small international sales and technical presence, with no managed service provider ecosystem outside of China, and no support for Oracle. Almost half of the overseas geographical locations are operated by a partner. Tencent is a fast follower of the leading cloud providers and shows fewer innovations while adopting the most successful offerings.

An increasing number of video broadcasting companies have deployed services by Tencent Cloud. For example, an e-commerce platform Shopee used Tencent cloud to live broadcast a sale to million viewers, while at the same time the number of in-app games reached 2. The Tencent platform proved its reliability and high performance at this peak time.

Once an enterprise has made a decision about their cloud vendor, the next step is to migrate their data to the chosen provider. Choosing the right cloud vendor is an important decision for businesses. Avenga cloud consulting services include an estimate of the effort required to select the optimal cloud provider as well as the migration of your infrastructure to a chosen platform.

Several Avenga Solution Architects will be assigned to your company for a predetermined period from 2 to 4 weeks , based on purchased consultancy hours, to assist with a cloud infrastructure assessment.

Avenga will assign a Senior Solution Architect as a resource to your company during the duration of the purchased services. In addition, Avenga provides a Project Manager that assists with planning and organization tasks. Avenga consultancy services will help explain the existing instances and define the effort required to migrate these instances to a new infrastructure, either in the cloud or on-premises. A 7-step guide with recommendations on how to create and implement an effective cloud strategy and what types of analysis and evaluations can help with assessing a future cloud architecture.

Our guide to the pros and cons of cloud agnostic vs cloud native approaches. Explore the different cloud migration types and their pros and cons to gain a solid head start with cloud migration.

An overview of application migration approaches. Andriy Stashko Solution Architect at Avenga. AWS Cost AWS fees are based on a pay-as-you-go model, depending on the hardware and software or networking options chosen.

AWS Weaknesses Despite proclaimed price reductions, the price for some services, like the AWS computer service, has not become cheaper since AWS Benefits AWS is the most mature and enterprise-ready provider with an influential track record of customer success, starting from small and medium businesses to large enterprises.

Google Cloud Offerings The Google Cloud platform offers products that can be grouped into six categories: storage, databases, computing and hosting servers, containers VMs , networking VPC, load balancing, cloud DNS , big data Big Query for data analysis, Dataflow for batch and streaming data processing , and machine learning AI platform.

Google Cloud Cost Google Cloud offers a pay-as-you-go model. Google Cloud Locations Google Cloud is available in countries. Google Cloud Weaknesses : Google has challenges with positioning itself as an enterprise-class IaaS solution. Alibaba Cloud Locations Alibaba spans over 23 regions and has 69 availability zones worldwide.

Alibaba Cloud Strength Alibaba Cloud offers a broad set of PaaS and IaaS that are comparable in availability, performance and security to the service portfolios of other service cloud providers. Alibaba Cloud Weaknesses Alibaba has a limited adoption in other parts of the world, except for South Asia. Oracle Cloud Cost When it comes to payment models, cloud pricing models are complex. Oracle Cloud Locations Oracle Cloud is available worldwide in 29 cloud regions. Oracle Cloud Strength Oracle Cloud has a strong partnership with Microsoft Azure so that their customers can run their workloads across the two clouds.

Oracle Cloud Benefits Oracle stands out among other cloud providers in its meticulous architecture and its cloud services that are pretty competitive with the ones provided by different cloud vendors. IBM Cloud Locations The IBM cloud network consists of 60 data centers and six multi-zone regions 3 more will be opened in that are located in high Internet traffic areas across six continents. Tencent Cloud Offerings Tencent Cloud offers 70 cloud products, including cloud VMs, Tencent Kubernetes engine container management service , batch computing, cloud computing on servers with high-density GPUs graphics processing units , auto-scaling, CVM cloud virtual machine dedicated hosts, and others.

Tencent Cloud Locations The Tencent Cloud network spans over 27 geographical regions with 61 availability zones, including partner locations. Tencent Cloud Strength Tencent Cloud is proliferating quickly. Tencent Cloud Benefits An increasing number of video broadcasting companies have deployed services by Tencent Cloud. Tabular summary of migration solutions offered by the top 7 cloud providers Once an enterprise has made a decision about their cloud vendor, the next step is to migrate their data to the chosen provider.

Service benefits: Recommendations and best practices on the right technology choice and configuration Estimate of possible cost reductions when consolidating the infrastructure during the migration A to-do list of tasks and activities to sort out your technology and process gaps Be a professional addition to your in-house IT department, providing expertise and knowledge Delivery risks assessment Migration roadmap Service spotlights: Kick-off meeting to define the scope and the tasks that Avenga Solution Architects will work on Discovery and analysis of the current infrastructure Categorizing the instances as per CPU usage; i.

Get skilled and professional help on choosing the best cloud service provider. Back to overview. Data Migration Methodology. Database Migration. Simple Application Server. Application Migration. Migration to Google Cloud.

Database Migration Service. Migrate for Compute Engine. Cloud adoption and transformation assessment. This type of encryption means that Sync. If there was a security breach or the authorities demanded access to your account, they could view the files but not what they contain, keeping you in control.

Strong encryption does put it at a disadvantage, though, as it means that Sync. Not only does it regularly beat out other providers in terms of features, but it also does so at a truly competitive price for consumers.

The Pro Solo Basic account offers the most value, though. All in all, Sync. It also has a good number of features, as well as support for Windows 10 and Mac users it even makes the top of our best cloud storage for Mac shortlist. If you want to learn more, take a look at our Sync. It has a number of unique features that make it an excellent choice for users, competing well in a market dominated by the bigger players, like Google and Microsoft.

However, you can save even more money by signing up for a pCloud Lifetime account , giving you online storage that remains yours — forever. Its features are good, too, allowing you to create playlists, shuffle songs and loop albums. Syncing and sharing files is also easy with pCloud, which it does even faster than Sync. It uses a slightly different system than most other providers, creating a virtual drive that allows you to sync your files without using up any space.

Your data is stored either in the U. With pCloud Crypto, you get a specific area to store your files that you want to be protected with zero-knowledge encryption. This prioritizes your sensitive data, keeping it safe and away from other files. Although pCloud could be forced to give up access to your unencrypted data, these could be non-sensitive media items or photos, keeping your other files safe in your pCloud Crypto online backup storage.

You can read more about pCloud Crypto in our pCloud review. Instead, it uses an algorithm called Twofish. Twofish was one of the final contenders for the Advanced Encryption Standard contest at the turn of the century. Some consider Twofish to be more secure if sometimes slower than the eventual winner, Rijndael now known simply as AES. Paid accounts include zero-knowledge encryption as standard, so files should be safe from prying eyes.

Unlike most other zero-knowledge providers, Icedrive lets you preview certain files by streaming them in encrypted form to your computer, where they are then decrypted on the fly. That said, it has a no-nonsense privacy policy that rules out most problematic behaviors, and as a UK-based company, Icedrive is governed by stringent GDPR regulations.

One of the biggest selling points of Icedrive is the price, though. That may or may not be a risk, though, especially given how new of a provider Icedrive is. Learn more in our Icedrive review. You can read more about this in our MEGA review. MEGA is a good option for users who want to try cloud storage for free. In , it increased its free storage space from 15GB to 20GB.

Plus, you can extend your free space by completing various tasks — like installing the desktop app or mobile apps — but that extra space expires after a year. You can designate any folder on your device as a sync folder, and you can move them wherever you want. In comparison, the file-sharing is a bit bare-bones, though you can set access privileges on the share-links that you create. Although IDrive works great as traditional cloud storage, online backup is its bread and butter check out our cloud storage vs online backup guide to understand the difference.

One of the best aspects of IDrive is just how much storage you get for such a cheap price. The IDrive free plan only comes with 5GB, but the two paid personal plans are incredibly generous.

Office integration is the biggest selling point for OneDrive users — or rather, the collaboration benefits that come from a combined Office and OneDrive service. These Office apps make collaborating on documents simple. You can share any of your documents stored in the cloud, and multiple users can work on them together in real time.

Any changes are instantly visible to all other co-authors and automatically saved to the cloud. You never have to worry about losing that page thesis to a hard drive failure ever again. With a Microsoft Personal subscription, you can install Office on up to five different devices, allowing you to share the service across an entire family or household.

You can learn more about these collaboration options in our OneDrive review. The collaboration features come at a cost, though. This can save you a small fortune on storage and productivity apps for the family, making it a good value option.

OneDrive also has some excellent business options that make it our favorite value product in our list of the top enterprise file sync and share providers where a business online storage provider like Egnyte reigns. With Office and Windows integration, as well as pretty good pricing, OneDrive is certainly a provider we can recommend with confidence. If you want a similar experience to OneDrive, you may want to try Google Drive. These kinds of integrations make Google Drive our top choice as the best online cloud provider for integrated apps, but it shines in other areas, too.

Powerful collaboration options in a free product help Google Drive to come out near the top of our list of the best no-cost cloud storage.

There are some downsides, though. The price you pay for accessing the collaboration tools and app integrations is that Google will scan the contents of anything you upload to Google Drive; it has full access to read, catalogue and use that data. One of the most useful is the ability to link it to other cloud storage services.

Currently, you can connect accounts from Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive, allowing you to mix and match your services in one place. Up until the end of , you could also connect your Amazon cloud storage to Koofr, but Amazon decided to stop third-party applications accessing its services, as our Amazon Drive review explains in greater depth.

Still, with other big platforms available, this is only a minor blip in a pretty unique offering from Koofr. Another highly useful feature is the ability to set up a virtual network drive for all of your files from Windows File Manager as if they were stored on your computer.

Unfortunately, this level of access between services does mean that Koofr lacks the kind of zero-knowledge encryption that privacy-focused providers offer. Koofr does offer 2FA to help keep your data safe in the event that your password is hacked, though.

Koofr integrates with Microsoft Office , though this feature has a few limitations. Free accounts can create an Office document but only paid accounts can edit it. It has some very cheap plans that offer GB of storage or less, as well as a free 2GB plan. Of course, you can still integrate with other services, allowing you to mix and match your storage pots together.

This is costly, compared to Sync. Dropbox may not have been the first cloud storage service, but it was the first to really bring the idea into the mainstream. Dropbox also has the name recognition that providers like Sync.

One of the reasons why Dropbox is still so popular is the excellent collaboration it offers, which is why Dropbox Business is one of our top recommendations in our cloud storage for collaboration shortlist. Both formats work seamlessly, allowing you to co-author documents in real time, which are then automatically saved to the cloud.

The excellent collaboration tools come at a cost in two ways. Dropbox has had security breaches in the past, which we discuss in our Dropbox review. This could be a reg flag for some users, and for good reason. When Dropbox first launched, it used the now-commonplace system of a sync folder.

You drop your files into this folder on your desktop and everything in it syncs to the cloud, and vice versa — all very straightforward. One of the issues with this system, though, is that if you have a lot of data, you can quickly fill up your hard drive. There are other providers that offer similar systems, but these use different methods to help you save space, such as the virtual drive system used by pCloud. For many users, Dropbox continues to be a good choice.

Although Box is a cloud storage provider that focuses on businesses, it still offers two plans for personal users — one free and one paid. Due to its nature as a business-focused storage option, Box comes packed to the brim with advanced features.

Everything from strong collaboration options to two-factor authentication, note-taking and project management is present, which makes for a solid list of features.

The clear standout feature of Box is the long list of collaboration options it offers to users. The two most important integrations for this are obviously there, namely Google Workspace and Microsoft Office, but Box goes far beyond these two popular options. Instead of forcing you into the apps themselves, Box lets you edit and collaborate on documents directly from its own software, and this even extends to the mobile version.

If you ever find yourself needing to edit a text or spreadsheet while on the move, Box is one of the few cloud storage options that let you do this directly from your mobile device. By far the biggest drawback to Box is its frankly absurd price. As mentioned, there are only two plans available for personal users.

However, the paid plan is a terrible value for money if all you want is storage. Cloud storage is a way of storing your files and folders on online servers, allowing you to access them from any location and on any device with an internet connection. Your data is stored on servers that belong to your cloud storage provider, which usually offers a web interface, desktop app or mobile app to access your information.

These servers might be located in your own country or on the other side of the world. Most services use a sync folder on your desktop, allowing you to store files easily.

Any files you put into this folder are also uploaded to the cloud servers, which will automatically update if you make any changes.

People use cloud storage for many different reasons, starting with storage. While services like Dropbox and Sync.

He decided he wanted a means of storing and accessing files online in a way that required little effort on his part. Any file you drag and drop into a sync folder gets automatically sent to the cloud, then sent to any other devices with a sync client installed. That way, you never have to worry about messing with removable storage.