Why pCloud is Better than Dropbox, Google Drive and One Drive
I’ll come out up front and say that pCloud is my favorite online “cloud” storage company. It was one of the first of now several cloud services that offered 2 TB of online storage [or more, but more on this later] for a fair price. Dropbox has raised their monthly plan to $12.99/month and $9.99/month annually. They also offer no lifetime plans (and don’t appear to ever plan on offering one).
Pricing
Prices being $4.99/month for 500 GB and $9.99/month for 2 TB (or $3.99/month or $7.99/month, respectively, if you pay annually). What’s even better is they offer lifetime plans where you just pay a fair amount once, and that’s it. The 500 GB plan being $175 and the 2 TB plan being $350, then you never pay again for the life of your plan. They also offer discounts during holidays also, I purchased my 2 TB lifetime plan on Black Friday for $250. Oh, I should bring up that they also offer a free plan where you receive 10 GB for free. If you sign up for that, they’ll periodically offer you the lifetime deals (which is nice if that’s something you’re looking for), which I’d recommend doing.
- 10 GB of storage for free
- $4.99/month for 500 GB and $9.99/month for 2 TB
- $3.99/month for 500 GB and $7.99/month for 2 TB if paid annually
- $175/one time payment for 500 GB and $350/one time payment for their 2 TB plan
- You can stack the 2 TB “lifetime” plan to get even more storage. I currently have 4 TB of storage.
Need More Storage?
pCloud does offer even more storage, if you need it, at least for the lifetime plans. I’ve paid twice for the 2 TB plan (twice on sale at $250 each time) and extended my storage to 4 TB.
pCloud Shows Up as Drive Letter P
But now that I’ve got the price out of the way, I’ll talk about why like the service so much. First of all, I like that it just shows up as a drive (as drive letter P, how clever!) and I can decide which files to put into it. I like this better than just syncing an entire 2 TB folder, that will be taking up space on your hard drive. I also don’t like how “backup” services pretty much back up your entire hard drive(s). A lot of what’s on my hard drive does not need to be backed up.
Syncing Folders is Available
But, if you do like folders that sync, like Dropbox, that option is available. pCloud even improves upon that feature by allowing you to sync many folders anywhere on your hard drive(s). Unlike Dropbox (and others) that only let you selectively sync folders inside your Dropbox folder (but no where else).
Remote Upload
Remote Uploading is a handy feature that allows you to upload files found on the internet at (probably) considerably faster speeds than it (probably) would take than downloading it to your computer, then uploading it to pCloud. This feature can be done through there website, and I believe through Chrome. I don’t believe it works in Firefox. I haven’t tested it in other browsers.
Other Features
They also offer apps for Windows, Mac’s, Linux, Android and iOS. They also offer WebDAV support. There are no file size limits and no bandwidth limits (that I know of). I haven’t run into either one. I’ve uploaded files that were about 150 GB and been fine. I’ve also uploaded/downloaded plenty also without any limits. There are limits to your sharing bandwidth though. 500 GB for same storage plan and 2 TB for the 2 TB storage. I haven’t tested beyond that to know if you do get more store on “Custom” storage plans like my 4 TB plan.