Dropbox was an early adopter of the cloud storage model and has spent many years perfecting its platform. Today it is a leader in enterprise-oriented cloud storage plans. If you’re looking for a premium cloud storage and backup solution for your organization, we think Dropbox is one of the best cloud storage platforms, and should be one of your top choices.
In our Dropbox Business review, we examine the platform’s strengths and weaknesses and consider which businesses would benefit most from Dropbox’s services, as well as whether it ranks among the best cloud storage for business.
Dropbox Business: Plans and pricing
There are three tiers of Dropbox Business plans: Essentials, Business, and Business Plus. There's also a bespoke enterprise plan for larger businesses. If you pay annually instead of monthly, you get a discount of around 20%.
The Essentials plan, priced at $22 a month, is tailored for individual professionals, providing a substantial 3TB of storage and the capability to deliver large files up to 100GB. This plan also offers a security net with a 180-day window to restore deleted files, alongside features like track file engagement, unlimited signature requests, PDF editing, and video recording, reviewing, and editing functionalities.
Stepping up, the Business plan at $24 per user per month is crafted for teams comprising three or more members, with a starting storage capacity of 9TB for the team. Additional features tailored for team collaboration include setup for admins and tracking content sharing, alongside the core features of PDF editing, video management, and unlimited signature requests carried over from the Essentials plan.
For larger teams or smaller companies, the Business Plus plan at $32 per user a month elevates the offerings further, starting with a generous 15TB of team storage and boosting the large file delivery capacity to 250 GB. This plan extends the restoration window for deleted files to a full year, while also introducing tiered admin roles, suspicious activity alerts, and compliance tracking, augmenting the collaborative and security framework for managing and sharing files within a team.
Dropbox Business: Features
Dropbox is one of the most feature-rich cloud storage platforms, making it incredibly powerful, intuitive, and engaging to use. This section explores some of the most essential Dropbox features from a business point of view.
Dropbox Business customers can use several file sharing features to collaborate more effectively with both colleagues and clients. Link sharing enables users to easily share files up to 2GB in size, while shared folders and groups enable teams within the company to share and collaborate on documents from a single location.
Another component of the platform’s file-sharing framework we like is the ability to control permissions at all levels, from entire drives to folders to individual files. File owners can choose whether the recipient has view-only access or full editing privileges.
These features combined make it straightforward for businesses to work effectively online and share data and documents quickly and stress-free.
Dropbox Paper is one of the more innovative business-specific cloud storage features we’ve seen. It enables employees to collaborate in a relatively unstructured way, adding thoughts, comments, agendas, or anything else that comes to mind. Think of it as an office whiteboard, but online.
If you’re the type of company that likes to brainstorm ideas and bounce ideas around the office regularly, then this might be the perfect feature for you.
Dropbox doesn’t just enable users to upload individual files and folders to its servers, but also allows them to back up an entire device. For businesses, this means you won’t have to subscribe to a backup service in addition to your cloud storage solution, saving time and money.
This also means you can back up all your business computers to a centralized location, ensuring that all employee and work data is safe in the case of an office accident, hack, or hardware malfunction.
Dropbox Business: Interface and in use
Dropbox clients are available on almost all platforms across desktop and mobile devices, including iOS, macOS, Windows, and Android. All apps share a similar interface that is easy to navigate and bug-free.
Users can also access the platform from their web browser, which we found to be not quite as polished as the app experience, but impressive nonetheless.
In short, there’s very little to complain about when it comes to Dropbox’s interface. It’s clean, comfortable to use, and bug-free. You can rely on Dropbox to work for your employees time after time after time.
Dropbox Business: Support
Like most cloud storage platforms, Dropbox maintains an extensive online help center, containing everything from tutorials to how-to guides to technical explainers. If you’re looking to learn more about Dropbox and how to make the most of its features, this is the place to head.
If you need more personalized support, customers can also contact Dropbox support via email. Unfortunately, Dropbox makes it difficult to get in contact, and we had to spend a considerable amount of time (around 15 minutes) searching the website before managing to speak to a Dropbox representative.
Dropbox Business: Security
Dropbox is a highly secure cloud storage platform and one we’re confident you can trust to protect your organization’s most important files.
Secure cloud storage starts with encryption because you need to know your files won’t be compromised in a data breach. Fortunately, Dropbox employs a raft of encryption frameworks, including AES 256-bit encryption at rest and 128-bit TLS/SSL encryption for in-transit files.
Beyond encryption, Dropbox also provides business customers with a suite of enterprise-specific team controls that ensure that data can only be accessed by the appropriate persons. This is important for medium and large companies that don’t want all users to have universal access privileges.
Audit logs are another feature that protect enterprise customers by enabling IT administrators to assess how the platform is being used. They can also help identify weak points early, before they become major security issues.
Alternatives to Dropbox Business
Dropbox’s main competition are providers like Microsoft OneDrive and IDrive. All three are established players in the cloud storage market with impressive feature lists and security frameworks.
Businesses that already use Microsoft 365 applications such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint might prefer to go with OneDrive for Business, which is deeply integrated into these apps.
Similarly, organizations needing maximum storage space at more affordable prices than those offered by Dropbox might want to consider IDrive Business, one of the most affordable storage platforms available.
Dropbox Business: Final verdict
Dropbox is one of the best cloud storage platforms and is unlikely to disappoint any business that chooses to invest. It comes packed with enterprise-specific features as well as a top-quality security framework, and an impressive range of mobile and desktop applications. Integrations with third-party platforms such as Slack and Zoom are another big plus.
Although Dropbox is one of the most expensive cloud storage providers, we think it may be the best choice for companies that won’t compromise on quality.
