Google Drive, SharePoint, Dropbox and Box All Meter Storage Differently

Convert everything to one annual number for your own headcount and your own data, then read what each price leaves out. Write down four figures: how many people need an account, how much data you hold today, how much of it has to be reachable by somebody outside the company, and how far back you need to be able to recover a file. Microsoft, Dropbox and Box you can price today from their own pages. Google you price by pricing Workspace, because Drive is not sold on its own. Then add the part none of them quote, which is the hours somebody spends deciding who may see what.

Almost never on the storage. It goes wrong on structure. Somebody capable sets it up in two weeks, everyone starts relying on it, and then that person changes role. Two years later there are nine hundred folders, four of them are still shared with a client who stopped being a client in 2024, the naming convention lasted about six weeks, and nobody can say which copy of the contract is current. All four platforms here can prevent every part of that. What went wrong is that nobody was ever assigned to keep doing it.

You do, entirely. You hold your own Zoho WorkDrive subscription in your own name and we work inside it as administrators. The files, the team folders, the permissions, the retention settings and the integrations are yours, so if you move to another provider or bring it in house, nothing has to be exported out of an account we control. We would rather earn the renewal than hold anything of yours as leverage.

For a lot of businesses, yes, and we would rather say it here than after an invoice. If you have fifteen people in one office, everyone already inside Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, and no obligation to prove who saw what, you already have file storage and there is nothing here worth paying us to manage. This starts being worth it roughly where the second question arrives: outside collaborators who need controlled access, a retention or eDiscovery requirement, a migration carrying years of history, or enough folders that nobody can answer who can open the payroll directory.

Microsoft, for most small businesses, and we are not going to dress that up. Business Basic is seven dollars a user a month paid yearly with a terabyte each, and if you already pay for Microsoft 365 then SharePoint costs you nothing further at all. Nothing on this page beats that on price alone. What the seven dollars does not include is anybody deciding how your folders should be shaped, or noticing that a share created for a project in April is still open in December, which is the whole of what we sell.

On a subscription the platform is supported and whatever you configured on it is not, and almost everything that breaks is what you configured. A sync client that quietly stopped on one laptop. A team folder whose permissions drifted after a reorganization. A retention rule that removed something it should have kept. An integration that stopped filing invoices in April. The vendor will confirm their service is healthy, which it is. Somebody still has to go and find the actual fault.

No, and it usually goes better if you do not. The normal order is the department whose files are in the worst state, then whoever shares with them most, then everybody else, with the archive moved last and quietly. Both systems run in parallel for a couple of weeks so nobody loses a document mid project. The one thing worth settling up front rather than in stages is the folder and permission structure, because retrofitting that onto a live file store is considerably harder than starting with it.

Often, and it is real work rather than a tidy up. We read the folder and team structure, who holds administrator rights, where external and client users sit, what the retention and recovery settings actually do, which shares are still live and which of them should not be. Then we tell you what we found before touching anything. Occasionally the honest answer is that rebuilding the structure costs less than untangling it, and if that is the answer you get it in writing rather than as a surprise halfway through.

Two to six weeks for most businesses, and longer where nobody currently agrees who may see what. The folder structure comes first, then permissions and external access, then the sync clients on the desktops, then the integrations into your other systems. Moving the data itself is rarely the slow part. Deciding what should not come across, and who owns the things nobody has opened since 2021, is what takes the time.

Possibly nothing, and that is a fine answer. Somebody who owns the file structure and genuinely keeps it current is most of this job. Where we tend to be useful alongside one is the migration itself, which is a short burst of work nobody has spare capacity for, and the permissions review that keeps getting deferred. We are also perfectly happy to be a second opinion on a structure rather than the people running it.

Two cases, and both are common. If your company already runs on Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace and everybody is content, you would be paying for storage twice the moment you add WorkDrive, and we would rather you kept what you have. And if your data genuinely cannot sit in somebody else’s cloud, Zoho WorkDrive is cloud only and cannot meet that, so the answer is a platform you host yourself and we are not it. You would hear both of those on the first call rather than the third.

We will say so before taking your money, and the fit review costs nothing. Files that nobody can find are usually unfindable because there was never an agreement about where things go, not because the search is poor. Moving that to a new platform moves the mess. If what you actually need is somebody to decide how work gets filed and then hold everyone to it, that is a shorter conversation and a much cheaper one.

Five hundred dollars a month, per organization. It is listed on the managed Zoho WorkDrive page and on this one. Unlike the figures on the cards above it is a management fee rather than a license, so your own WorkDrive subscription sits alongside it and we will price that with you before you commit. A migration carrying years of history off Google Drive, Dropbox, SharePoint or a local server is scoped and quoted separately, because the size of that varies enormously between one company and the next.

Thirty days’ notice ends it. Everything stays exactly where it is, because it was always in your Zoho account rather than ours. The files, the team folders, the permissions, the retention policies and the integrations all remain, and we hand over documentation of how it was built rather than leaving the next person to reverse engineer it. There is no export to negotiate and no term left to run down.

A rough headcount, including the people who will need an account but will rarely sign in. A rough figure for how much data you hold and where it currently sits. The names of the people who should hold administrator rights. A sense of which outside parties need to reach your files. And any retention, export or compliance requirement you are already under, because that shapes the tier before anything else does.