SugarSync Versus Google Drive

As we discussed in a blog post this past May (see How Google Beats Dropbox and SkyDrive), we made the transition from a local file storage solution to a cloud-based solution, and based on our needs, Google Drive beat out Dropbox and SkyDrive for our business. What it basically boiled down to was cost and functionality: Google Drive seemed the best choice as their costs were reasonable and their desktop app was more platform agnostic, allowing us to sync both Windows and Mac desktops and laptops as well as sync Windows, iOS and Android devices. SkyDrive isn’t there yet from a mobile standpoint, and Dropbox was just too expensive.

However, we DID make the following pretty clear: “One of the things that makes SmarterTools a successful business is that we are never really content with how things run or with how we do things. We always look for improvements.”

That constant evaluation brought us back to SugarSync. While Google Drive was stable, and extremely cost effective, we started noticing some issues with the GDrive desktop clients. The main issues seemed to center around our MacBook Pros and the occasional issue with missing files. While we could log in to the Web interface and see the files, the desktop sync was spotty, at best. Oddly enough, Windows users didn’t see any problems. We did contact Google support and our efforts netted us some possible solutions, but nothing concrete. To their credit, contacting Google customer support was fairly painless – more so than we thought.

So, we went back to take a look at SugarSync. We liked their interface initially, but again we had cost to consider. A quick call to them with an explanation of what we were encountering led to a nice offer from their Sales team, and an assertion that our 30-day trial would allow us to get everyone set up and running, so we could run full sync tests, without a cost to us. After that, if we decided to sign up, we had a nice promotional offer in our back pockets to use.

I’m happy to say that, after 2 weeks, we’re seeing few issues with keeping everyone synced, regardless of their platform or device. There ARE one or two issues that we were able to overcome, but nothing like what we were seeing with Google Drive. I do have to say that, with Dropbox, it was much easier to remove users from the overall sharing “team” – you simply had to remove them from the Team and Dropbox took care of removing shared files from the user’s account, and, therefore, their synced devices. With SugarSync it’s not quite that easy. Regardless, SugarSync has been very responsive and helpful throughout our testing. We’re very optimistic about our future with SugarSync. While we don’t rest for long, at least we’re resting comfortably with our selection. If you’re looking for a cloud-based file storage solution, you may want to give them a try.