Compare SkyDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox

SkyDrive vs Google Drive vs Dropbox

Supported Platforms

Dropbox is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, BlackBerry and Android devices. Windows Live SkyDrive is available for Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad and Windows Phone devices while Google Drive is currently available for PC, Mac and Android phones /tablets. All services do offer a web mobile version that can help you access our files from the web browser of any mobile phone.

The other important difference is that Dropbox is also available for Windows XP and Linux while SkyDrive is not.

Storage Limits

Dropbox offers 2-3 GB of free online storage storage, Google Drive offers 5 GB while SkyDrive, if we are new, offers 7 GB of storage space.

We can upload files of any size to Dropbox through the desktop client while that limit is 2 GB in the case of SkyDrive. Both SkyDrive and Dropbox let we upload files up to 300 MB from the web browser while that limit is 10 GB in the case of Google Drive.

Storage Plans

If we are running out of storage space on SkyDrive, we can buy an additional 20 GB for about $10 per year or 50 GB for $25 per year. Dropbox Pro offers 50 GB of storage space for $99 per year while Google Drive offers an extra 20 GB for $2.49 per month.

Have a look on detailed comparison of pricing plans.

Price Comparison of Online Storage Services

Built-in File Viewers

Both SkyDrive and Dropbox web apps have built-in file viewers for most common file formats including Office documents, PDFs, videos and images. Google Docs supports even more formats – including Photoshop mockups and AutoCAD drawings – and no wonder that we can also view these files in Google Drive without additional software.

Unfortunately, maybe because of licensing issues, none of these drives will stream MP3 songs in the browser – we will to have download the MP3 file locally to play the audio.

Account Security

Since our Google Drive is connected to our Google Account, we can apply 2-step protection and non-authorized user won’t be able to access our online file even if they are aware of our Google username and password. This extra layer of protection is not available to Dropbox and SkyDrive users.

Google Drive and Dropbox also maintain a detailed log of every single change that was made to our files (or account) but this seems to be missing in SkyDrive.

Selective Sync

If we have multiple computers, all these “online drives” will copy our files across all our machines. Sometimes, we don’t want this to happen and both Dropbox and Google Drive offer we an option to selectively synchronize folders per computer. For instance, we can tell Dropbox not to download our family photographs folder on the work computer.  This saves bandwidth and our hard disk stays light too.

Selective Sync is however missing in SkyDrive.

File Search

This is one area where Google Drive has a definite upper hand.

When we search for a file on Dropbox.com, it returns results where the file names matche our search keywords. SkyDrive lets we search the content of documents that are in common Microsoft Office formats. Google Drive goes a step further as it can even read the text content of scanned documents and photographs using OCR. That is, if we have saved a photograph of the whiteboard to our Google Drive account, we should be able find that image by text without having to remember the filename.

File History

Our free Dropbox account will save any file’s history for 30 days meaning if we accidentally delete or change a file, we can easily restore the previous working version for the next 30 days. SkyDrive and Google Drive also store the previous versions of all files though they have not exactly specified how many reversions are preserved.

If we delete a file or folder inside SkyDrive web app, it’s gone forever whereas in the case of Dropbox and Google Drive, the files are moved to the Trash from where they can be easily restored.

Offline Access

The mobile apps of Dropbox and Google Drive let we save any document or file on our mobile for offline use.  Such a facility is not available in the iOS apps of Windows SkyDrive though we can always export the document to another app (like iBooks or Good Reader) from SkyDrive and access it offline.

What I like about Windows SkyDrive

SkyDrive offers plenty of storage space but the best part is that the SkyDrive web app lets we access files and folders of all our other computer right from within our browser. We just need to have SkyDrive on these machines and we can then easily access any of their files from any other computer, anywhere simply using our Windows Live ID.

SkyDrive is an absolute must-have service for Microsoft Office users because it gives we the ability to edit documents in the web browser while preserving all the formatting.

What I like about Google Drive

Google Drive offers the most pleasing interface, the search feature is brilliant and the new grid view lets we quickly browse our stored files visually. We can email any file from our Google Drive account to another user as an email attachment, a useful feature that’s missing in all the other online drives.

If we live in the Google ecosystem and do not have Microsoft Office on our computer, skip SkyDrive and go with Google Drive.

What I like about Dropbox

The basic Dropbox account offers a mere 2 GB of storage space but we can easily increase our account space to 16 GB by referring a couple of friends to Dropbox. Also, we can find tons of apps that make the Dropbox service even more powerful and useful.

Google Drive and Windows Live SkyDrive are extremely promising services but none of them support as many platforms as Dropbox does. The best part about Dropbox is that it just works and it won’t be easy even for Google and Microsoft to build the kind of developer ecosystem that currently exists around Dropbox.exists around Dropbox.