DropBox vs Google Drive

2022. Google is adding new Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Keep optimizations for tablets



Google introduced Android 12L earlier this year to make tablets easier to use, and at I/O, the company announced plans to update more than 20 Google apps on tablets to optimize them for larger screens. Today, Google said it’s adding several new features for Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Keep to get started on this promise. The most notable feature announced today is the ability to drag text or images between two Workspace apps when you have them open side-by-side. Google notes that you can now drag text or images from apps, such as Chrome or Sheets, and drop that content right into an existing document or spreadsheet cell. In Google Drive, you’ll be able to quickly upload files by dragging and dropping them into the app. You can also add links to Drive files by dragging the file into an open app like Keep.


2021. Dropbox to acquire secure document sharing startup DocSend for $165M



Dropbox acquires (for $165 million) DocSend, the service helps customers share and track documents by sending a secure link instead of an attachment. When combined with the electronic signature capability of HelloSign, which Dropbox acquired in 2019, the acquisition gives the company an end-to-end document-sharing workflow it had been missing. Dropbox, DocSend and HelloSign will be able to offer a full suite of self-serve products to help our millions of customers manage the entire critical document workflows and give more control over all aspects of that.


2020. Dropbox introduces slew of new features for business



Dropbox introduced a couple of updates for business users. To help people manage the multitude of passwords across our lives it's moving into territory of password managers like LastPass or 1Password. Dropbox is also getting into the online vault business. The idea with these tools is to give you a secure place to store your important documents in a digital context, rather than using a safe deposit box as in the past. You can share a pin with trusted loved ones to give access to these documents like a will or insurance policy in the event of an emergency. The company is also getting into the backup business, giving Dropbox Plus users the ability to regularly backup the entire contents of your PC or Mac and retrieve it fully should you lose your computer or experience a full-out machine failure.


2019. Dropbox unveiled feature to send big files



Dropbox unveiled a new feature called Dropbox Transfer that allows to send large files. The maximum file size is 100 Gigabytes; files may come from the local system or may be picked directly from a user's Dropbox to speed up the sharing even further. Dropbox does not reveal if the file size will count against a user's quota on the size. Recipients download copies of the files so that originals remain untouched. Dropbox account is required to create a new file share. Dropbox notes that users who download the files don't need an account though. The new service is currently available to select customers only but will become available to all Dropbox users in the near future.


2019. Dropbox adds cold storage layer



Many people move files to Dropbox for backup purposes and then rarely access them again. So Dropbox engineers realized it made little sense to have everything stored in the same way when many files weren’t being accessed much after the first day of putting them on the service. The company decided to create two levels of storage, warm storage (previously Magic Pocket) and a new level of longer-term storage called Cold Storage, which lets Dropbox store these files less expensively, yet still deliver them in a timely manner should a customer need to see one. Dropbox customers obviously don’t care about the engineering challenges the company faces with such an approach. They only know that when they click a file, they expect it to open without a significant amount of latency, regardless of how old it is. But Dropbox saw an opportunity to store these files in a separate layer.


2019. Dropbox aquired e-signature service HelloSign



Dropbox is to acquire for $230 million HelloSign, a company that provides lightweight document workflow and eSignature services. This can also been seen in the context of the Extension capability that Dropbox added last year. HelloSign was actually one of the companies involved at launch. While Clark says the company will continue to encourage companies to extend the Dropbox solution, today’s acquisition gives it a capability of its own that doesn’t require a partnership and already is connected to Dropbox via Extensions. Dropbox is going to remain HelloSign as a standalone business within the Dropbox family.


2018. Dropbox expands Paper into planning tool with timelines



Dropbox updated Paper, its document-driven collaboration tool. It added a timeline feature, pushing beyond collaboration into a light-weight project planning tool. As you would expect with such a tool, it enables you to build a timeline with milestones, but being built into Paper, you can assign team members to each milestone and add notes with additional information including links to related documents. You can also embed a To-do lists for the person assigned to a task right in the timeline to help them complete the given task, giving a single point of access for all the people assigned to a project.


2018. Dropbox adds automatic OCR for all PDFs



Dropbox users have a useful new feature - optical character recognition that automatically transcribes all their images and PDFs. Dropbox’s text recognition engine is rolling out to Dropbox Pro, Business Advanced and Enterprise accounts over the next few months, but admins might want to check to see if they can get early access. When it comes into effect, every image and PDF you have will be scanned for text, which will be added to metadata allowing you to search for it that way. Of course, all this data will be kept as secure as the document itself. Handy, though of course much depends on how accurate the transcription is.


2018. Dropbox improves its collaboration layer - Paper



Dropbox adds some enhancements to its collaboration Paper to keep people working in it without having to switch programs. Now you can paste a number of elements into Paper and get live previews. For starters, they are letting you link to a Dropbox folder in Paper, where you can view the files inside the folder, even navigating any sub-folders. When the documents in the folder change, Paper updates the preview automatically because the folder is actually a live link to the Dropbox folder. This one seems like a table stakes feature for a company like Dropbox. In addition, Dropbox now supports Airtables, a kind of souped up spreadsheet. With the new enhancement, you just grab an Airtable embed code and drop it into Paper. From there, you can see a preview in whatever Airtable view you’ve saved the table. Finally, Paper now supports LucidCharts. As with Airtables and folders, you simply paste the link and you can see a live preview inside Paper. If the original chart changes, updates are reflected automatically in the Paper preview.


2018. Dropbox released new add-on for Gmail



Dropbox announced a new add-on to manage Gmail attachments in Dropbox. It displays the attachments in a side panel after which you can save them if you so choose directly into your Dropbox, and the experience is the same in the mobile app or on the web. Being able to access Dropbox without leaving Gmail or other G Suite tool could potentially save users time and effort spent copying and pasting and switching programs. It's a somewhat surprising partnership, as Google and Dropbox compete on the cloud storage front: Google Drive storage has many of the same features as Dropbox.