Best storage and sharing options for creatives

While many of the best-known options that exist today started off with different approaches and purposes, they have grown closer towards offering a similar blend of storage and collaborative tools, making it harder to identify the advantages of each.

Here, we compare 5 of the most popular options for creatives to store files online and share with colleagues and clients and examine the strengths and weaknesses of each.

1. Google Drive

Google Drive is an obvious choice for anyone who uses Google’s other products, and particularly for Android users since it comes built into the architecture. It integrates seamlessly with other Google apps and has one of the most generous free storage allowances around, offering 15GB, although this includes Gmail if you use that as your email.

The platform is easy and intuitive to use and one of the best options for instant collaboration owing to the ability to work simultaneously with others using Google’s own GSuite tools like Google Docs and Sheets, and you can boost productivity with a wide range of third-party add ons.

2. pCloud

Google Drive offers practicality and flexibility for collaborative work, but it isn’t the prettiest option for presenting work to clients. The interface is busy and crops image previews to a square. pCloud can be a better option in terms of looks. Interface elements are discreet and kept to a minimum, giving priority to offering large scale previews of each file that save clicking to open each file.

pCloud doesn’t have the collaborative tools of Google Drive, OneDrive or Dropbox, but there with features such as the option to customise sharing links to include your own message or branding, it's easy to see why pCloud is one of the most popular options for photographers to deliver work. The free option offers a fairly generous 10GB, and there are lifetime subscriptions available at $175 for 500GB, or $350 for 2TB, which mean you can pay once then get on with it.

3. Dropbox

Dropbox remains one of the biggest names in cloud storage. It’s among the fastest because it uses block-level synching, which means it only syncs changes made to a document rather than the whole file. The professional version also offers a 'smart sync' capability that allows you to save space on your hard drive by sending files to the cloud but still allowing you to see them on your computer.

A new transfer tool just out of beta means you can also send files weighing up to 300GB to anyone, even if they don’t have Dropbox, effectively turning Dropbox into a file transfer service as well as a storage service. The service isn't as integrated with other tools as GoogleDrive or OneDrive and doesn't offer its own full office suite, but it does have collaborative tools, and integrates with Office Online for editing Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, and can share files directly to Slack.

Dropbox is one of the most expensive options and offers only a stingy 2GB in its basic free plan. You need to fork out at least £7.99 a month for a more generous 2TB, and £16.58 to get the professional version with the added features that really make Dropbox stand out, such as smart sync, watermarks, viewer history and a 180-day backup of deleted files that beats the 30 days offered by most other services.

4. OneDrive

Just as Google Drive is a convenient option for Android users, if you’re a PC user running Windows 10 or use Microsoft’s Office 365, OneDrive offers comparable levels of integration. It’s much less popular than Google’s option among general users but has a big uptake among companies that use Office 365.

The interface looks good, a chat icon at the top launches Skype so you can talk to colleagues, and OneNote integration beats Google Docs and Dropbox Paper. Free allocation is a rather mean 5GB, which is a lot less generous than Google’s and makes this option mainly useful for storing files that you want to email via Outlook, but storage can be upped to 50GB for a reasonable £1.99 a month, and there’s a business plan that offers unlimited storage along with desktop versions of Microsoft products including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote for £7.99.

5. iCloud

This is storage option that only makes sense for Apple devotees but is convenient for storing and backing up images and files from a Mac or iPhone. Like Microsoft’s OneDrive, free storage is limited to 5GB and higher allocations are reasonably priced, but it’s strictly a storage option.

There's no option to share files outside Apple’s Family Sharing and there are none of the collaborative tools that you get with other services. Documents from the iWork suite are saved to iCloud so that you can access them from all your devices. There’s also a Windows client so access is not restricted to Apple devices.

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