Hacker News Reader

Comment by crsv | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has never used Dropbox and has instead typically used Google Drive for doc sharing, could someone who's a user of Dropbox provide their perspective on how Dropbox is different and why it would make sense as a G Suite user to use dropbox vs Drive?

View on HN

Dropbox is simpler, has easier setup, less features, and in my experience a more reliable/quicker on-disk sync client. Google Drive has quite poor UX, which puts a lot of people off.

I use Google Drive, but I can see the appeal of Dropbox for someone who doesn't need Drive's web UI features and extras and just want something that works.

For me the main feature is that Dropbox is less confusing about where files and folders actually are. And has simpler sharing settings.

Now, with Team Drives and File Stream Goolge is catching up and of course Google Docs have no equivalent in Dropbox. (Dropbox paper is very limited). But Team Drives have very weird limits (max 20 subfolders deep, max 250000 files)

I moved from Drive to Dropbox as part of my plan to become less reliant on Google's ecosystem and start self hosting and/or paying for online services.

I've stuck with Dropbox for a while because it's easy to set up, portable, the iOS app is fantastic, and I feel like my data isn't being siphoned off to advertisers.

Same. I was a kool-aid drinking Google fanboy but started looking elsewhere a couple years ago. I found myself using Google products just because they were Google. Part brand loyalty and also it was nice to just have one account for everything. After a while I admitted to myself that there were better products. Deezer is awesome and I like it much better than Google Music, I've been on Firefox for a year now and much prefer it to Chrome (tried switching back just to see if Chrome had made any changes and I was back on Firefox in 24 hours). I prefer Simplenote to Keep and, other than my one spreadsheet in Google Docs I use Libre Office locally for my other docs/sheets.

The other thing I've noticed is how fickle Google is with their products, either not advancing them or straight up killing them. I used to use Listen for Podcasts and Reader for RSS and got disheartened when those were killed off. Dropbox is my latest switch, hell I even use DuckDuckGo more these days, too. The only Google products I can see myself using long term are Gmail (with my Google Apps Domain account) and Photos. Also, Maps is still the best Maps software. Other than that I don't use their services much at all these days.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com