Best online storage: the top 4 cloud providers in 2022

With photos easily reaching 10MB on the latest smartphones, the need for cloud storage space is growing by the day. While it is possible to store photos and videos on the storage space of your device (or on an external hard drive), more and more people are opting for online storage. The latter is also known as “Cloud”.

Why is online storage so appealing? What is the best online storage provider in 2022? We will try to shed some light on these points in this article by presenting 4 providers that have caught our attention.

Best online storage services (in 2022):

Top 4 online storage services

There are a lot of providers that offer online storage. Dropbox, pCloud, kDrive, Mega, hubiC, iCloud, Google Drive, OneDrive, Sync, Amazon Cloud… Here, our goal is not to make a presentation of each offer, but to present you the 4 best cloud storage of our comparison. We have tested them all to keep only the elite.

The offers we will present below are all available in free version so that you can test them and compare them by yourself. You can then freely subscribe to a paid offer if you want more flexibility. At any time, you can cancel it.

Please note that the following online storage tools meet the following criteria:

Without further ado, check out our comparison of the best cloud storage of 2022.

1

pCloud: 10 GB free and lifetime offers

The best online storage right now is none other than pCloud. Much lesser known than some cloud storage tenors, this provider was started in 2013 and has grown at an impressive rate with a quality offering.

pCloud combines both excellent speeds and top-notch security so your uploaded files are never at risk. Their offering got even better a few months ago with the addition of data centers (servers) in Europe, not just the US.

This change further strengthens our opinion of pCloud and really justifies its position as the best online storage in our 2022 comparison. Thanks to its servers in Europe, pCloud manages to offer even better speeds to download and upload your files even faster. We have to admit that 3 years ago, the biggest criticism of the provider was its slowness. Now this is a thing of the past and you can easily upload and download your files.

If pCloud is our favorite online storage service in 2022, it’s also because it offers a complete free package that incorporates all its key features. With 10GB with no time limit, you can fully test its service and judge for yourself. Smartly, pCloud allows you to automatically import files from other cloud services, such as Google Drive or Dropxbox, to name just two.

kDrive is a great discovery and it is also the second best cloud provider of 2022. This young cloud service only dates back to 2020 but it is powerful and very successful. For the record, it was developed by the reputable web hosting company Infomaniak.

kDrive offers a powerful and secure online storage service. The data transferred to its servers is encrypted and saved in its datacenters in Switzerland. Exit the American laws on data (Cloud Act, Patriot Act…). Here, the provider is governed by Swiss legislation, which is much more protective of user confidentiality. Another important advantage is that kDrive is RGPD compliant. Thus, you will be able to modify or delete your personal information upon request.

Thanks to its geographical proximity (located in Europe) and the quality of its datacenters, data transfers are very fast as well as the speed of access to information in your cloud. If you have a good basic speed, the navigation on the drive is optimal.

The advantage of kDrive is its platform which offers a workspace adapted to the collaboration between several users. Indeed, it provides an office suite accessible from the drive allowing you to create a text document (like Word), a spreadsheet (like Excel) and a presentation (like Power Point). What is even more interesting is that you can directly edit the document online and share it with other users so that they can also modify it.

World famous, Google Drive fully deserves its second position in our ranking of the best online storage in 2022. With a free 15GB offer, it allows anyone to try its service without commitment and without time limit. All you need is a Google, Youtube, Gmail or other account to access Google Drive and access your files online.

Google Drive’s interface is not our favorite, but it allows you to store and share files easily with your friends and family. You must have already used this service when you were working together on a Google Doc or Sheet with colleagues in the office. On this subject, you should know that if other Drive users share documents to which you have access, this does not count against your 15 GB quota: only the files stored on your space will be counted.

Beware, your emails on your Gmail account can quickly take up space, especially if you have large attachments. Remember to delete them regularly to free up space. You can easily sort your mails by size to see which ones are the most voluminous.

Why Google Drive is not (in our opinion) the best online storage service? In addition to a less advanced security than pCloud, we can criticize its rather high pricing when you go on a premium subscription. Indeed, it goes without saying that you will not stay for years with 15 GB of storage. As soon as you put your photos on the Cloud, your space will fill up quickly.

In this comparison of the best online storage services, we also wanted to introduce you to Microsoft’s OneDrive, which caught our attention. This provider offers a free 5GB package that allows you to quickly get a feel for the service and whether or not it will satisfy you.

In comparison with the competitors, we can immediately underline the interface which (for our taste) is less pleasant. We can see right away that this service is really dedicated (in the first place) to Windows users with a “Windows-friendly” interface. If you are used to Windows since ever, you will be able to appreciate the user experience, but we were destabilized during our first use.

With the free offer, you will unfortunately be quite limited in terms of features, which we think is a pity since it does not necessarily make users want to go for the premium offer. In comparison, pCloud gives access to all the features, even with the free offer. The same goes for Google Drive (with a few exceptions).

Like the other online storage providers in our comparison, OneDrive has paid offers that will let you store more and unlock more features.

Their most relevant offering is the Microsoft 365 Family, which not only offers 6TB of storage, but also includes Office Outlook, Word, Excel and Powerpoint. If you needed further proof that OneDrive is developed by Microsoft, you are served! This subscription will cost you 99€ / year, a price that remains very reasonable for 6Tb of storage to share.

You will find a good comparison of OneDrive online storage offers on their official website via the link below:

Why is online storage so attractive?

Online storage has many advantages. First and foremost, it allows you to secure your files by backing them up on an external server, owned by a third party company (the cloud provider you choose). By doing so, you protect yourself from losing your device, the sudden death of your hard drive, or the accidental deletion of files (photos, videos, documents, music) from your device.

The best online storage providers offer copies of your documents on multiple servers in various locations. This way, even if a server were to go down unexpectedly, there are always backups.

Cloud storage is also very appealing because it allows documents to be synchronized between different devices. For example, the photos you take on your smartphone can be uploaded directly to the cloud, and thus be automatically accessible on your computer and other devices that have access to your online storage service. Simple and convenient, this option is appreciated by its users.

If the best online storage was not an obvious solution a few years ago, the situation has changed. Indeed, with the notable increase of upload/download speeds, the border of “slowness” has been removed. Today, a good online storage service will allow you to put several GB files online in just a few seconds.

Of course, this requires a quality internet connection, but this is becoming more and more common with the democratization of fiber… or 4G (or even 5G since late 2020) on compatible mobile devices. In short, online storage is fast, secure, and allows you to keep a lot of files that, without this additional storage space, would have ended up in the trash.

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