Once upon a time, Dropbox was a surprisingly simple cloud storage and file-sharing service. You'd drag files into a magic Dropbox folder, and the files would sync to the cloud and to all your other devices. Dropbox can still work this way if you want, but the company offers a whole lot more, including a backup service, tools for taking screenshots and recording video of your screen, e-signature services, and an online document editor. While having more features is a boon, Dropbox has become increasingly complex. It's still a capable online cloud storage service, but you can pay less and get more space from competitors such as Microsoft OneDrive and IDrive, both of which are Editors' Choice winners.
Note that this review focuses on Dropbox for personal use. For the corporate audience, PCMag has a separate review of Dropbox for Business.
How Much Does Dropbox Cost?
Dropbox offers a free version called Dropbox Basic, which offers 2GB of storage space. You can earn up to 16GB of free storage space by referring people to Dropbox, but this takes work, as you only get 500MB per person you refer.
Either way, the amount you get for free is less generous than what you get from much of the competition. Microsoft OneDrive, Apple iCloud, IDrive, and Sync all offer 5GB, while Google Drive comes with 15GB of storage, although it's shared with Gmail. Another limitation of Dropbox's free tier, compared to similar applications, is that you can only install the app on three devices. None of the other apps mentioned is limited in this way.
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Dropbox's paid plans start at $11.99 per month or $119.88 per year for Plus, which offers 2TB of storage space and removes the device limitation. It's still pricier than the competition. Google One, which adds storage space to individual Google Drive accounts, charges $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year for 2TB of storage. Apple's iCloud also charges $9.99 per month for 2TB of storage. Microsoft charges $99.99 per year for Microsoft 365 Family, which, in addition to offering 1TB of storage each to 6 users—for a total of 6TB—also includes office apps like Word, Excel, and Outlook. And it's not just the big companies. Sync costs less than Dropbox with a Solo Basic account for $96 per year for 2TB. IDrive has one of the best deals available at $79.50 per year for 5TB.
Another option is Dropbox Family, which gives you the same 2TB of storage you get for Dropbox Plus but lets you have as many as six people on the account, all with their own logins. You also get some special sharing features for everyone on the account; otherwise, the benefits are the same as what you get from Plus. The Family plan costs $19.99 per month or $203.88 per year. Dropbox has a few other account options, but they are all business-grade, and this review focuses on Dropbox for personal use.
Terabyte for terabyte, then, Dropbox charges more than most of its competitors.
What Operating Systems Does Dropbox Work On?
Dropbox's desktop client is available for Windows (8, 8.1, 10, or 11), macOS (13 High Sierra or later), and Linux (Ubuntu 14.04 and later, Fedora 21 and later).
The web version is officially supported in the two most recent versions of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Safari.
Dropbox's mobile application is supported on Android (6 and later) as well as iOS and iPadOS (13.1 and later).
Getting Started Can Be Tricky
Before you can use Dropbox, you need to head to Dropbox.com and sign up for an account. Note that for individual users, the only option after signing up is the Plus plan—the free Dropbox Basic plan isn't visible, nor is the free trial of Dropbox Plus. To get the free version, you need to go to Dropbox.com/basic and sign up there. Dropbox Basic is not linked to from the homepage or mentioned on the Sign Up page. Even if you figure it out, the only way to get the free version is to click this tiny link at the bottom of the page. Likewise, you can get a free trial of the Plus plan, but you don't see that offer anywhere until you begin to sign up for Dropbox Basic.
I understand the economic incentives at play—free users don't earn Dropbox any revenue—but making the free and trial versions so hard to find shows a willingness to make users jump through hoops. It doesn't build trust.
After signing up, the site prompts you to download the Dropbox app for your computer, which is a straightforward affair. The app then creates a Dropbox folder for you. If you used Dropbox in its early years, this part of the process will be familiar. Any files you put in this folder are uploaded to the cloud, becoming available on the other devices where you've installed Dropbox and from the Dropbox web app. Depending on your settings, your files may also be available offline (more on that part in a moment). It's a simple enough setup, one since copied by many other services. When Dropbox first launched, however, the concept was brand new.
Classic Syncing With Cloud Compromises
Dropbox's main feature is, as mentioned above, the Dropbox, a folder on your computer you can drop anything into for it to sync to the cloud and your other devices. Open this folder, and you see icons added to every file. A green circle with a checkmark means the file or folder is fully synced and available offline. A blue icon means the file is syncing or the folder contains files that are syncing. A gray cloud icon means the file is only available online. It's simple enough, and it works.
Outside this folder, Dropbox's desktop app primarily lives as an icon in the Windows system tray or Mac menu bar. Click it to see a summary of files that have recently been uploaded, or select your profile icon in the top-right corner to find the settings. From here, you can enable or disable the backup feature, set a cap on the application's bandwidth usage, decide what notifications you want to see, and choose which files will be synced to your device.
Pay attention to the syncing settings. Dropbox, by necessity, works differently than it did in the first few years after it launched. Back then, the model was to sync files directly from your computer to the cloud and to other computers from there. The problem today is that at 2TB, Dropbox's cheapest paid plan offers more space than most people have room for on their computers. If you sync files from multiple computers and Dropbox puts a copy of all those files on every device you sync, you won't have room for them all locally.
The result is a compromise. When I set up Dropbox on a Windows machine that previously didn't have the application, all new files were only available online by default. It changed if I opened a file, which caused the cloud icon to disappear and the file to download and become available for offline usage. To summarize, the default setting doesn't sync all your files but rather makes them available and visible but only downloads them when you open them.
It's worth noting that this selective syncing feature is only available to paid customers, and it's currently not fully working on macOS. Dropbox advises Mac users to make files available offline before attempting to open them using third-party software. If you don't want to use this feature, you can instead exclude certain folders from showing up on any of your synced devices entirely.
Dropbox also offers backup in the desktop version. You can choose to back up the Documents, Desktop, and Downloads folders on your computer. A drop-down menu also allows you to back up Music, Pictures, and Movies. There's no ability to back up any other folders, which might annoy users with multiple hard drives. But it makes sense. Dropbox isn't aiming to become a full-fledged backup service, only to keep a copy of your data safe and synced. It's nice to have the basics covered, though. Backed-up files can be recovered from the web interface, which allows you to revert to any version of a file created in the last 30 days.
The desktop application adds a few other nice-to-have features. For example, you can enable Dropbox as a save location in Microsoft Office, and an overlay in the Office application lets you track versions of a document.
Sharing Files and Folders With Dropbox
You can share a file from the desktop application by right-clicking on any file or folder, or you can do it from your browser. You can share files specifically with another Dropbox user, or you can generate a link that allows anyone to access the file. The options for sharing are strong, but only if you have a business-class Dropbox account. Even with a paid Dropbox Plus account for home users, the options are limited. You can't set expiration dates on shared links, password-protect shared links, or make files view-only so people can't download them. We'd expect to see such features for the price Dropbox charges for a Plus account.
A File Request feature lets you set up a web page where people can upload files to you, whether they have a Dropbox account or not.
Accessing Files on the Go With Dropbox
Dropbox's mobile application is available for Android devices, iPhones, and iPads. I tested it primarily on an iPad mini and a Pixel phone.
The application lets you browse all files in your Dropbox, as well as any computer folders you may have backed up. You can decide to make any file or folder available offline if you like, and you get the ability to edit certain files using the appropriate applications, such as editing a spreadsheet stored in Dropbox using the Excel app on your phone.
The Dropbox mobile app also has the option to automatically store in Dropbox all the photos and videos you take using your device. It's a standard feature of the best file-syncing services. If your phone is lost, stolen, or broken, your images and videos need not be gone forever. And an added benefit is you have access to all your photos on all your devices.
For free users, installing the Dropbox app on your phone counts as using up one of your three devices, though you can get around this by using the web app in a mobile browser instead. It works pretty well, though you lose out on being able to automatically sync any photos and videos you take with your phone to Dropbox.
The Dropbox Web Experience
The nice thing about the web version of Dropbox is that you don't really need to use it very often, and that's a compliment to the product. You can do almost everything in Dropbox using the apps, which is relatively rare in today's software ecosystem.
The web interface is a competent alternative to the desktop or mobile experience. You can browse and manage all your files, preview hundreds of file types, and easily restore any file you deleted in the past 30 days. That applies if you have Dropbox Basic (free), Plus, or Family. You also have 30 days of version history for all your files.
Dropbox Extras and Integrations
Perhaps one of the best arguments for using Dropbox is the sheer scale of extras you get in the form of included extras and supported integrations. Granted, Dropbox doesn't offer a full suite of its own office apps the way Microsoft or Google do, but you can connect Dropbox to practically any major app to integrate it seamlessly.
Among its own special tools and features is Dropbox Capture. Capture is a simple tool for recording videos or taking screenshots on a Windows or macOS computer. It's included even at the free level and is a great alternative to Loom, an application that costs $8 per month. The only real limitation is the amount of space you have left in your account.
Dropbox Sign, formerly known as Hello Sign, allows for legally binding document signatures—Dropbox Plus subscribers can request three signatures per month. Dropbox Passwords is a password manager that's free to all Dropbox users. Dropbox Paper is a bare-bones alternative to Google Docs that works well for quick notes. None of these applications is going to make the cost of a Dropbox subscription worthwhile on its own, but any of them could be compelling when combined with the cloud storage and syncing that is Dropbox's main feature.
Back to integrations, the sheer number that Dropbox offers is another reason to consider this file-syncing service over others. The Dropbox App Center offers hundreds of tools you can connect to Dropbox, allowing you to do things like share Dropbox files in Gmail conversations or automatically send content to any folder using IFTTT or Zapier. If an application can connect to any storage service, it can connect to Dropbox, and that's a powerful advantage.
How Fast Does Dropbox Upload Files?
Make no mistake: Dropbox is fast. I uploaded 505GB of files to Dropbox, which took 1 day and 38 minutes. That's an average rate of 2 minutes and 56 seconds per gigabyte, making it one of the fastest services I've tested. IDrive comes close. It uploaded a gigabyte at an average rate of 3 minutes and 24 seconds. Sync, on the other hand, takes 5 minutes and 31 seconds per gigabyte. For context, I ran my tests on a Windows 10 desktop with a mechanical hard drive attached to my local network via ethernet. My home internet upload speed is 50mbps.
Capable, But Complicated
Dropbox deserves credit for being a pioneer in the cloud storage and file-sharing space, and it's still a decent service. It's fast, offers thousands of app integrations, and has many bonus features. On the other hand, it's complicated and expensive, even considering its many features. That's not to say Dropbox is bad, just that there are better choices. OneDrive, for example, which comes with Microsoft 365 accounts, costs less and offers better syncing. Online backup service IDrive is an even more affordable option with an optional syncing service. Both of these services are Editors' Choice winners.
Dropbox, once a pioneer in the cloud storage and file-sharing space, is as reliable as ever, but it's not the best value.
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