Best cloud storage - Dropbox vs Google Drive vs OneDrive: free and paid compared

Cloud storage is for everything from backing up your documents, collaborating on projects and sharing your precious favourite holiday snaps. But which is best? OneDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox all have their ups and downs and picking through each and every detail is hard, especially when trying out all three simultaneously can only be described as a huge faff. I've done the faff for you and here are my findings on the best free and paid cloud storage options.

OneDrive vs Google Drive vs Dropbox: Free products

First, let's take a look at each of the company's free offerings. Our table below describes each company's approach to free storage and any extras you get. We've also noted down the maximum file size for each provider, handy if you're planning on using each service to simply send large files to yourself or someone else on a temporary basis.

Google Drive gives you 15GB of storage for free, making it the best free proposition here.

Not only that, you also get access to its excellent Google Docs, Sheets and Slides software, which are perfect for quick documents, spreadsheets and presentations. What's more, any documents created by these web apps do not count to your overall storage limit.

Google Photos, the free photo backup service, lets you upload images at a slightly at up to 16 megapixels - and store them without contributing to your 15GB limit. If you choose to upload pictures at their original resolution, they will count towards your quota.

If you're using Google Drive in conjunction with Gmail, anything in your Gmail inbox, sent folder, spam folder, trash folder and any other folder will be counted against your storage quota.

OneDrive's 5GB of storage is down from the 15GB it offered last year, putting it behind Google Drive. You do however get access to its excellent browser-based Office Online suite, which gives you free versions of Word and Excel you can use wherever you have access to the internet. You can invite other people to work and collaborate on your Office Online documents simultaneously. Your Outlook webmail storage has no impact on your OneDrive storage.

While Dropbox lets you use up to 16GB of free storage, this has to be earned by inviting other people with referral links at 500MB a pop, which isn't really worth the hassle. Some smartphones offer free Dropbox storage for a year, but these offers expire, leaving you in the lurch and forcing you to pay to upgrade. In addition to storage, you will also get access to Dropbox's Paper web application when it's released to the public. This is a Google Docs-like application that lets multiple people work on a project, although it's much more freeform and less formal that Google Docs, for better or worse.

OneDrive vs Google Drive vs Dropbox: Subscription options

As you'll see from the sheer amount of extra features each cloud provider offers, simply calculating a cost-per-gigabyte figure isn't truly representative of each product if you're going to be using them for more than just file backup and file sharing purposes. If bulk is all you're after, though, the following tables will be handy.

If you're a light user, Google Drive is the clear winner here, offering more storage than OneDrive for less money. Dropbox doesn't compete here as it only offers one consumer-grade premium option.

1TB is where the money is and it's a key battleground for all three firms. Here, OneDrive is a clear winner, being at least £2 less a month than its competitors. Strictly speaking, the price here isn't for OneDrive at all, but is instead for a monthly subscription to Microsoft's Office365 service that also includes single-user licences for Word, Excel and OneNote. If you only want bulk file storage, you don't have to download the software and since it's cheaper than Google Drive anyway it's great value.

However, in this competitive space Dropbox actually comes off slightly better than OneDrive if you store massive files.

The table above shows that while OneDrive may have the best price-per-gigabyte, it can't match either Google Drive or Dropbox when it comes to the maximum-allowed file size, stopping users from uploading files more than 10GB in size. This comes from Microsoft's claim in November 2015 that "a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings. In some instances, this exceeded 75 TB per user or 14,000 times the average [amount stored by other users]."

That leaves Google Drive with its file size limit of 5TB (although, obviously with a 1TB plan the maximum size is 1TB) and Dropbox with its unlimited file size limit. Since Dropbox only offers one consumer plan, the 'unlimited' file size is moot since you'll only ever upload files that add up to less than 1TB. In the case of huge files, Dropbox wins thanks to its slightly lower price compared to Google Drive.

Beyond 1TB, Google Drive is your only legitimate option of the three. Dropbox doesn't offer a consumer account with more than 1TB and Microsoft's £7.99 Office365 subscription is for five people, each of whom get 1TB. Google's plans go all the way up to 30TB for £250 per month.

*Google charges customers in US Dollars, making direct comparisons particularly difficult as currency values fluctuate constantly. It also doesn't include VAT in its headline prices. We've taken the Dollar price on January 26th 2016 and included 20% VAT on Google's prices so you have a rough idea of how much you'll actually pay.

OneDrive vs Google drive vs Dropbox: features

Cloud storage has become such an integral part of the way we live and work that it's the extra features - sometimes the tiny nuances - that make all the difference in whether a storage provider is perfect for you or an extra, frustrating step in your workflow. Here, we'll take a look at some key differences in the way each service handles a few important features including version history, documents, photos and software.

Software

OneDrive is unique in that it's baked into Windows 10 and, in all likelihood, you're using it already. To actually configure OneDrive you have to find its Taskbar icon, often hidden in the menu on the bottom-right of the screen on Windows 10. It's denoted by two little clouds. Right-click on it and click Settings to find some of its fairly basic features.

Perhaps OneDrive's best desktop feature is the ability to remotely access your files, even if they're not inside your OneDrive folder. This only works in Windows 7 and 10 and you can only access files via the OneDrive website, but this can be incredibly handy if your PC is on and you forgot to move an important file into OneDrive. Irritatingly, you can't pause or throttle OneDrive uploads in Windows 10, meaning you have to close OneDrive entirely to stop it from syncing and eating your bandwidth.

Google Drive's Windows application is about as basic as OneDrive, although it's not completely over-simplified and you can actually throttle Drive's download and upload speeds, which could be crucial for people working with large files and photos on a slower internet connection.

Dropbox is fairly similar to Google Drive in terms of its functionality, with selective syncing, throttling and built-in sharing options (OneDrive makes you visit its website to set up sharing). It also has a handy feature called LAN Sync that means Dropbox will sync directly from other PCs on your home network instead of from the internet. This can save a huge amount of time, especially if you're working a joint project with someone in the same room.

File history

File history, otherwise known as versioning or version history, is a tricky topic with all three services offering wildly different ways of storing file version histories. Google Drive is the most complicated. For files not created in Google Docs, etc, Drive will store up to 100 previous versions if the versions are less than 30 days old. If you label the file 'keep forever' you'll get 200 versions. For items created within Google, such as a Doc, versioning is indefinite although Google says it occasionally 'prunes' edits, combining some versions to save space.

Dropbox is simpler. All versions of a file are kept for 30 days unless you purchase the £29/year Extended File History add-on that keeps versions for a full year.

OneDrive is as clear as mud; the number of versions of a document that are stored does not appear to be time limited, but official documentation and even Microsoft Support agents were unable to give us an answer on this one. However, we do know that OneDrive only provides file history on files created in Office programs or Office Online. Other files, such as images, do not have version histories.

Web-based Photos

Google Drive handles photos brilliantly, if you're happy with the firm hoovering up all your pictures and turning them into slightly weird collages and video montages. Occasionally it'll treat you to a genuinely good collage and video, but most of the time it's fairly inane.

As we discussed above, images uploaded in Google's 'High quality' mode do not factor into your Drive storage quota. Drive also lets you make small tweaks to your pictures, including colour, vignettes and cropping. You can search for photos by keyword, such as location or even objects within the photo. This can be useful when you're looking for all your food pictures, for example.

You can't make edits with OneDrive, meaning its handling of photos is very basic indeed. You can view photos by date and, like Google, OneDrive will categorise your photos by what it thinks is in them. It's not as intuitive nor as easy to search as Google Drive, though.

Dropbox's web-based photo tools are similar to OneDrive's, but faster and nicer to look at. All your photos are displayed in a timeline and you can navigate to a specific date with a single click. You can also view by album if you prefer.

Web-based Documents

Both Google Drive and OneDrive have fantastic web-based document editing, with Google Docs and Microsoft Office Online both forming robust tools for individuals and teams working on documents. Dropbox, having yet to release its Paper web app, is a long way behind on this one.

Conclusion

Neither OneDrive nor Google Drive or Dropbox can be all things to all people, meaning picking a winner is hard. If we were to choose a service purely based on consistency, it'd probably be Google Drive purely because it manages excellent web-based management, photo editing and reasonably robust desktop software. However, if your needs are fairly basic, OneDrive's £5.99 Office365 deal is by far the best value product. Dropbox has gradually moved out of the mainstream consumer space and is looking more and more like a small business option. This isn't a bad thing, but it means its appeal for the everyday consumer is limited.