What are the Cheapest, Most Efficient File Sharing Services?

Gone are the days when we had to use USB flash drives to exchange and/or share files with our peers. Especially in today’s working environment, current corporate standards lean toward remote operations, which in turn underlines the importance of syncing and file sharing services.

While some of these tend to focus on bigger, more complex industries, others provide easily accessible—often free—options for small businesses or those that require complicated tasks. In this article, we’re going to put a spotlight on the latter, or the cheap yet efficient file sharing services out there.

We asked the help of our digital entrepreneur peers to know what file sharing services they use. Here are their responses:

Ethan Taub, CEO, Goalry

Adobe Cloud

We have Adobe subscriptions here at Goalry, meaning that we are able to access design files remotely. Another great advantage of it is that we can easily manipulate PDFs as required. Whether it’s for digital signatures or online workbooks, it helps us to keep on top of everything within one cloud-based system.

Google Drive

Probably the most famous, but for all the right reasons. It’s easy to access, whether it’s on your laptop, phone, or desktop PC, you can view the files with ease. See who has made changes and when, and if your workforce is working simultaneously, they can chat to ensure that the work they undertake is not removed or edited by accident.

Dropbox

Quick and easy to transfer files whenever you require. Again, easy to access from a number of devices, on Android, iOS, Apple OS or Windows.

WeTransfer

If the files you want to send are too big, there’s always the help of WeTransfer. A free service which allows you to transfer up to 2GB of data at one time. However, if you wish to transfer bigger data, you can sign up for the pro version, this way you have unlimited transfer size and faster upload speeds.

Milosz Krasinski, Managing Director, Chillifruit

Dropbox

File sharing has been massively important for my business this year and, as a result, I’ve made it my business to try out some of the top file sharing services. Dropbox is, of course, one of the original file sharing services and, while it doesn’t have tons of fancy features, it gets the job done and is pretty inexpensive.

Google Drive

Google Drive is also very much worth having as it’s free to an extent, and really simple and straightforward to use. 

Amazon Web Services

Because I’ve had an increased need to keep data secure this year, I’ve been using Amazon Web Services. This is a really good service to get your hands on, as it provides a whole suite of cloud-based products to help you compute, store, and share information. It also has some networking, mobile and developer, and management tools. AWS has a secured pay-as-you-go pricing option, which can really help you manage your budgeting as you go along—and is also good for scaling.

Jack Zmudzinski, Senior Associate, Future Processing

Dropbox

Like many companies, we started out using Dropbox, as this is a really cheap and easy-to-use system. However, the more clients we took on, the more important it became vital to focus on security, as well as efficiency.

Slack

For sharing within our business, we tend to use Slack for the most part, as this is a system that we use to communicate and to keep ourselves organized.

Droplr Pro

For sharing outside of the company, Droplr’s Pro version is an affordable and fairly secure service to use, similar to the more common WeTransfer.

Johan Hajji, CEO and Founder, UpperKey

Dropbox and Slack

As I’m dealing with a lot of properties and a lot of client details, being able to share files fast and securely is incredibly important. While things like Dropbox and Slack are fine for sharing files between colleagues which don’t contain important or sensitive information, you really need something a bit more secure for more important documents.

Cerberus FTP 11 and Microsoft OneDrive

I tend to use Cerberus FTP 11 when transferring files to and from clients as this allows me to share unique time-sensitive links to help keep data secure. Microsoft OneDrive is also a viable option for sharing files with medium security requirements.

Dima Suponau, CEO and Founder, Number For Live Person

Hightail

My business revolves around the collation, storage and use of data and, as such, I’m often having to share documents and files which are highly confidential. Because of this, I wouldn’t risk using the usual suspects such as DropBox or WeTransfer as I’m not convinced that these have the type of security clout that I need. Hightail costs between $12 and $36 per month and, as well as being really reasonable, offers project management and collaboration features which mean you get a bit more bang for your buck. 

Netfiles

Netfiles is a file sharing ‘data room’ which is ideal for those who are regularly sharing large files as its pretty fast and has some great security features to boot.

Terashare

Finally, Terashare is also a good option for businesses as it has good security and is really easy to use—both for sender and recipient.

Katie Fellenz, Head of Marketing, Trust & Will

Google Drive and Dropbox

There are more and more companies coming out with variations on what has made popular file-sharing services so ubiquitous, but services like Google Drive and Dropbox are head and shoulders above the rest for good reasons.

Their accessibility from other useful programs anyone working on a computer is probably using. People want affordable solutions to file sharing and they also want programs that are intuitive and easy to use and Google Drive checks both of those boxes. So much work is done through Google’s other programs like Docs and Sheets so being able to move files and share them with team members is a breeze and is why almost every company uses the programs in some way.

We hope you have a bit of an idea with regard to the cheapest, most efficient file sharing services available for your personal and professional use. Be sure to leave a comment down below and share your experience with these programs.