Cloud is back in news. It has been a buzzword in tech community with apple announcing iCloud few days back. Besides iCloud, there is another cloud product that created lot of noise in tech community - Dropbox. Dropbox has been darling of tech community and gathered some very good PR in the past. SugarSync, on the other hand, did not get much PR but has been making progress slowly and steadily. The battle is on and time will tell who emerges as winner. Here is a direct comparison of two products to see how they fare against each other.
Ease of Use
When you install Dropbox, it creates a folder named “dropbox” on your device. You have to keep all files that you want to sync in this folder. This means you have to either move all your files to dropbox folder or you have to keep copying files manually to dropbox folder. SugarSync is much simpler. During setup, you have to tag the folders that you want to backup to SugarSync. That’s it. Your folders will keep syncing with SugarSync from then on.
Pricing
SugarSync beats Dropbox hands down in pricing. SugarSync not only has more flexible pricing options but also is significantly cheaper.
Features
The biggest difference between Dropbox and SugarSync is that SugarSync provides an option to backup files while Dropbox doesn’t. Dropbox automatically syncs files to all devices and you don’t have an option to just backup files on cloud without having it to sync on other devices. What if you don’t want those large data files from work on your iPhone? SugarSync supports both syncing and backing up data. Folders that you add to SugarSync gets backed-up on cloud and you can access them from any device online. And if you want certain files to be available on all devices offline, you just need to drag-and-drop those files to a folder called “Magic Briefcase”. Lack of ability to backup data is a major drawback in Dropbox for me.
Apart from this, I found both SugarSync and Dropbox to be similar feature wise. Well, atleast for commonly used features. Both support syncing multiple devices. Both have very useful iPhone apps. Both supports accessing files via browser and both have ability to share files to friends / other users. And both support multiple platforms.
There could be other features where one could be better than other but I have just focused on those features that I use.
Conclusion
SugarSync is the winner for me. Simpler to use, more value for money, work flawlessly and supports all required features. Dropbox is famous for its simplicity but for me SugarSync is as simpler and works better.
