Google and Dropbox have took very different directions when launching their service. Even if today they tend more and more to get closer, the orientations taken at the time are still well marked. For Dropbox, the emphasis was and remains today on the synchronization of files with different users. The software provided for this purpose considerably facilitates collaboration in the selected files.
In the case of Google, Drive was first offered as a storage space for Gmail accounts and for cloud computing services related to Google Docs. It is only since 2012 that users can manage their cloud storage space uniformly. To achieve this, however, the service provides its users with a free huge storage space. This strategy was successful with the introduction of Gmail and helped Google gain a large following of Google’s email service.
The evolutions show that the two cloud storage providers adapt more and more to each other. Google also offers software to sync folders on a personal PC with cloud storage. With Paper, Dropbox, on the other hand, relies on features that were previously found in Google Docs.
For many users, only thestorage space still plays a role today. In this area, Google is clearly ahead in both its free and paid version. On this point, Google presents a better quality/price ratio. Dropbox, on the other hand, stands out with a unique idea allowing greater speed: rather than replacing the entire file after a modification, Dropbox only copies the modified bits. The transfer is enormously accelerated.
In terms of data security, the two companies have nothing to envy to each other: Google and Dropbox both use standards now recognized as safe, which has not always been the case. Both services have been at the center of data theft scandals in the past: in 2013, it was admitted that US authorities (NSA) were monitoring Google’s servers and in 2016, unknown people published on the Internet access data for several million Dropbox accounts.
