Google Drive vs Microsoft OneDrive head-to-head review

Google and Microsoft offer reliable, fast, easy to use storage clouds with clients that run on a number of different operating systems. Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive both raise the bar for cloud storage but we feel Microsoft offers the best deal with its OneDrive service. Microsoft’s OneDrive comes with more free storage space, offers the same feature set as Google and costs significantly less if you want to go beyond the 15GB capacity. While both Google and Microsoft offer document creation and editing facilities, Microsoft’s Web Apps brings the familiarity of Office’s user interface. Users that have grown up on Word, Excel and Powerpoint will feel right at home and firms may find this could reduce time spent on training and support. Winner – Microsoft OneDrive.Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive (nee SkyDrive) have been around for a few years now. We take a look to see which service will best suit your business needs.

Capacity and pricing

Google account holders automatically get 15GB of storage for Google Drive at no extra charge. From time to time, Google does promotions giving away free storage. Sometimes these are permanent (such as 2GB for free when carrying out a security audit on user accounts) or are time-limited (such as offers that come with new phones or downloading certain Google apps). This capacity is split between Drive, Gmail and Photos, so may not always be as much as you think, especially if you have had Gmail for any length of time.

Microsoft’s also offers 15GB. This can be increased by 3GB when enabling photo uploads and by a further 5GB more in 500MB increments when refering friends. Both firms offer considerably more space for a fee.

Google prices its storage in dollars. 100GB costs $1.99 per month and 1TB costs $9.99 per month. You can even get 30TB for $299.99 per month – but this is aimed more at the enterprise.

Microsoft offers 100GB for £1.99 (not quite as good value as Drive when exchange rates are considered. 200GB costs £3.99 per month and 1TB costs £5.99 per month but also includes an Office 365 subscription. Microsoft becomes better value the more storage you use.

Unless you need terabytes of cloud storage space, a scenario which seems unlikely for a single user account, it is difficult to see why you would want to spend extra getting Google Drive over Microsoft OneDrive. There was no difference between performance during testing and the only advantage Google Drive has is the extra storage space.

Set-up

Downloading and installing Windows clients for Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive is trivial. Users need to configure the location of the folder that is set to synchronise with the respective service.

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