Egnyte Connect vs Dropbox Business: Which Is Better in 2023
Dropbox and Egnyte are both highly functional cloud storage providers that can serve as a hub for your business. There are some differences between them, though. Our Egnyte vs Dropbox business cloud storage comparison breaks down which one is better.
Egnyte and Dropbox Business are two of the best business cloud storage services on the market. They take very different approaches to cloud storage, though. The Egnyte vs Dropbox comparison is only natural, then. However, which one is better for your company?
A lot separates these two cloud storage providers, and in this comparison, we’re going to cover everything from features and speed, to pricing and security. That said, we recommend keeping our Egnyte review and Dropbox Business review handy. We’ll hit the highlights, but our full reviews have all of the details.
Key Takeaways:
- Dropbox offers an unmatched user experience, but it lacks some of the deeper settings of Egnyte’s admin center.
- Egnyte is a little expensive and doesn’t offer much storage space, but its list of features is second to none.
- Both Egnyte and Dropbox offer a long list of third-party integrations, with Google Workspace and Microsoft Office 365 leading the pack.
If you want the short answer, Egnyte is the better option. It excels with a long list of third-party apps, features that enterprise clients need, plus excellent security. That said, Dropbox is a highly competitive option, focusing on the end-user experience with a slew of quality-of-life features.
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| 1TB$20 / month(All Plans) 15-days money-back guarantee | 3TB - Unlimited GB$15 / month(All Plans) | |
| Review | Review | |
| Sync | ||
| Sync Folder | ||
| Block-Level Sync | ||
| Selective Sync | ||
| Bandwidth Throttling | ||
| Sync Any Folder | ||
| Max File Size | 150 GB | 50 GB |
| Network Drive | ||
| File Sharing | ||
| File Link Sharing | ||
| Link Passwords | ||
| Link Expiry Dates | ||
| Folder Sharing | ||
| Folder Permissions | ||
| Link Download Limits | ||
| Upload Links | ||
| User Management | ||
| User Groups | ||
| Set User Roles | ||
| Monitor User Activity | ||
| Restrict User Storage | ||
| Remote Device Wipe | ||
| Productivity | ||
| File Previews | ||
| Edit Files | ||
| In-App Collaboration | ||
| Office Integrations | MS Office, Goolge Docs | |
| Notes App | ||
| Media Playback | ||
| Mobile Apps | ||
| Deleted File Retention | ||
| Versioning | ||
| WebDAV | ||
| Security | ||
| At-Rest Encryption | 256-bit AES | |
| In-Transit Encryption | TLS/SSL | |
| Two-Factor Authentication | ||
| Client-Side Encryption | ||
| Data Residency | ||
| SSO Integration | ||
| Custom Password Requirements | ||
| Support | ||
| 24/7 Support | ||
| Live Chat Support | ||
| Telephone Support | ||
| Email Support | ||
| User Forum | ||
| Knowledgebase | ||
| Misc | ||
| Free Plan |
Yes, there are quite a few differences between Box and Dropbox. Box offers better security and features, but Dropbox is still a great option.
SharePoint is part of Microsoft Office, and it offers a lot more functionality than Dropbox. That said, Dropbox is easier to use and deploy, so it may be a better option for your business.
OneDrive for Business integrates with Microsoft’s suite of Office apps while Dropbox simply offers cloud storage with external integrations. They differ slightly in features, with Dropbox offering Microsoft Office and Google Workspace integrations.
MEGA offers better security than Dropbox, and it comes with more features. That said, Dropbox is faster and offers multiple third-party apps.
Egnyte vs Dropbox Business: Which Is Better for Your Company?
Below, we’ve pitted Egnyte against Dropbox Business in a number of categories covering security, features, storage space, sharing and more. Each round, we’ll talk a bit about both services and how they compare to each other before declaring a winner. The service with the most wins takes the crown.
There’s more to this comparison than the round winners, though. Egnyte and Dropbox are two of the best cloud storage providers on the market, and they both have upsides and downsides. We’ll declare a winner, but the best cloud storage for your business will depend on what you and your employees need. With that housekeeping out of the way, let’s dive in.
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1. Features
For features, Egnyte and Dropbox both stand out with their third-party integrations. Microsoft Office, Google Workspace and a long list of other productivity tools top the list for both of our competitors. Instead of being just a place to park your files, Egnyte and Dropbox offer a hub for your business operations.
Beyond integrations, Egnyte offers a slew of useful tools. WebEdit is a simple but surprisingly effective tool that comes standard with your subscription. With it, you can select a file in your cloud storage and automatically open it with local software. It’s a small feature that seamlessly handles the often annoying process of digging through your local sync folder.
Collaboration Tools
Dropbox bolsters its integrations with a few first-party tools focused on collaboration. Dropbox Paper, which is a basic note-taking app, is the most important. It’s not the best note-taking option, with software like Evernote and Microsoft OneNote offering more features (read our OneDrive for Business review if you’re interested in OneNote). However, Paper is tied directly to your workspace.
Combined with integrations for Slack, Trello and more, Paper serves as a collaborative area for employees to share ideas and notes around other files stored in your account. Building on that, Dropbox also includes HelloSign so you can digitally sign documents directly from your account. Moreover, you can also add Dropbox to Office 365 to edit Office documents from the Dropbox app.
Instead of a note-taking app, Egnyte offers a basic task management tool. It’s not like Asana or Monday.com, but it gets the job done. Paper offers similar functionality with checklists and the like, but Egnyte’s task management tool is more focused. For productivity, though, it’s hard to go wrong with either service.
Security Features
Egnyte really separates itself with security features. Enterprise subscribers — more on that next — have access to AI-based threat detection and prevention, protecting your account from zero-day malware, unusual user behavior and more. You can also hook Egnyte up to public and private cloud storage sources, including Dropbox and Google Workspace.
Dropbox is focused on collaboration, moving files through your account as seamlessly as possible. However, Egnyte matches Dropbox and goes further with security features that make a difference for the most sensitive information. We’ll explore those more in the “security” round below.
Still, it’s hard making a decision this round. Egnyte is the natural winner because it simply offers more, but as we’ll talk about in the next section, it costs more, too. Your decision ultimately depends on whether your business values security over storage space. For most users, storage is more important, especially considering Dropbox already offers a high level of security.
2. Pricing
Egnyte and Dropbox Business are both expensive cloud storage products but in very different ways. Dropbox, Egnyte and Box Business occupy an expensive but feature-rich tier of online storage providers, separating them from excellent budget options like Sync.com (read our Box review and Sync.com for Teams review).
Egnyte Pricing
- Secure collaboration Privilege management Ransomware protection
- 1TB
- Everything in Business 3rd-party source support Content lifecycle management Threat detection
- 1TB
- Everything in Enterprise Lite Privacy & compliance Advanced ransomware protection & recovery Content safeguards
- 1TB
Starting with Egnyte, the pricing plans don’t look too bad. The budget-focused Team plan is available for one to 10 users for $10 per user per month. It’s a decent option, but the shared 1TB storage limit stings. pCloud Business offers the same amount of storage for the same price. The difference: pCloud offers 1TB per user, as you can read in our pCloud Business review.
Most users will need the Business plan, which expands the max number of users to 100. For twice the price per user, each gets the same amount of storage (plus a little extra).
For plans above that, you’ll need to reach out to Egnyte. It offers custom online storage with its Enterprise plan, and also offers an Enterprise Lite plan with a few missing features.
Dropbox Business Pricing
- Price per user, 30-day free trial
- 3TB
- Price per user, 30-day free trial
- 3TB
- Price per user, 30-day free trial
- 5TB
- Price per use, 30-day free trial
- 5TB
- Price per user, 30-day free trial
- Unlimited GB
Dropbox has a higher price on paper, but digging into the details, it’s clear that Dropbox offers more for less. The Professional plan leading the lineup is for a single user, offering 3TB of storage for around $20 per month. At that price, you’d be better off with a personal cloud storage service, such as Icedrive (read our Icedrive review).
Things get interesting with the Standard plan, which is Dropbox’s first true business offering. This plan is around $5 less than Egnyte’s competing Business plan, but with a lot more storage space. The Advanced plan offers unlimited storage space and a slew of additional features, including single sign-on (SSO) integration and tiered admin roles.
Dropbox vs Egnyte Prices
Dropbox and Egnyte are both expensive, but they handle the cost much differently. Egnyte favors users who reach out to support for an Enterprise plan, similar to Huddle (read our Huddle review). Dropbox, on the other hand, comes with a more reasonable list of plans that top out with unlimited storage.
The majority of new customers will spend more with Egnyte, though. The per-month price is higher and the plans come with less storage space compared to Dropbox, which means Dropbox wins this round. Egnyte is better suited for businesses that have a larger budget and can afford to configure a custom solution.
3. Usability
As two of the best business cloud storage services, Egnyte and Dropbox both offer a sublime user experience. Getting set up is simple, as is accessing your files. No matter what you want to do, the setting is probably within a click or two.
Dropbox Business matches the look of the personal service with a home screen showing your recent files, a left-side menu for navigation and a few sharing options sprinkled among your files. The left menu also had dedicated tabs for Dropbox’s first-party tools and the app center, which allows you to integrate third-party apps in a single click.
Egnyte’s web app is like a bare-bones version of Dropbox, at least on its face. You have access to a standard folder hierarchy, recently viewed files, favorites and the trash. The only defining feature is Egnyte’s activity log. Whenever you select a file, Egnyte automatically opens the activity log associated with that file.
Settings Options
You have to dig a little deeper with Egnyte. In the settings menu, you can change just about anything. That includes setting a custom password model for your business, adding custom metadata to your entries and much, much more.
Dropbox offers a lot of settings, too, from a security check to on-the-fly reports. It doesn’t go as deep as Egnyte, though. Dropbox is a playground for the user, while Egnyte is a playground for admins.
Dropbox vs Egnyte Usability
The usability score depends on what’s important to your business. Egnyte is highly functional, with options for just about everything. If your business mainly needs long-term cloud storage, Egnyte is the better option. However, Dropbox is a great alternative if your business is more focused on collaboration and moving files around.
There are enough quality-of-life features with Dropbox to award it a win this round. The web app trades the options of Egnyte for a better user experience, which shows itself in small ways. For example, going to dropbox.com takes you directly to your account if you’re signed in.
Dropbox is our winner, but that doesn’t mean Egnyte is a loser. It still offers an incredibly deep user experience with settings galore. The front-facing web app isn’t as attractive or functional, but it still gets the job done better than most. We have an in-depth Egnyte Connect guide to get you started.
4. File Syncing and Sharing
Dropbox basically invented the file synchronization model that countless other services use today, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that its file sharing and syncing capabilities are excellent. In fact, Dropbox ranked on our list of the best cloud storage services for sharing.
Users have access to the standard range of sharing features, including link sharing, direct sharing and sharing through third-party apps. Thanks to Dropbox’s excellent list of integrations, you can send files to other apps directly — for example, sharing a file in a Slack channel or attaching it directly to a Trello card.
Egnyte matches Dropbox Business and even includes a file request feature allowing external collaborators to upload files directly to your storage space. Just like Dropbox, Egnyte allows you to share files through integrations, too.
In addition to Microsoft Office, Google Workspace is also on the list of third-party integrations. That’s extremely useful for moving files around and a defining feature of Egnyte. We have to mention WebEdit again, too, which allows you to virtually expand your local storage space and access the files in your account.
Storage Sync vs Smart Sync
The competition between Dropbox and Egnyte heats up when it comes to syncing. Both come with block-level sync, which makes uploading files much quicker. Instead of reuploading the file whenever you make changes, block-level sync only updates the parts you edited.
Both come with local syncing features, as well. For Egnyte, it’s Storage Sync, which allows you to sync with your local storage (for example, a NAS or small business server). If your business is mostly remote, you could sync a local server with Egnyte to give your employees access to company resources, avoiding a confusing virtual private network setup.
Dropbox Business comes with Smart Sync. In short, Smart Sync allows you to access files in your online storage from your desktop, as if the files were stored locally. This is far from a unique feature, with Egnyte offering something similar in the form of WebEdit. Still, it was enough to earn Dropbox a spot in our best cloud storage with sync guide.
This section is tricky, with both of our competitors operating at full tilt. Egnyte ekes out the win, though. It matches Dropbox with sharing features, and it goes further with Storage Sync. That said, Dropbox Business is still one of the best enterprise file sharing and syncing services on the market.
5. Speed
We tested Egnyte and Dropbox Business with the same 1GB test folder, uploading and downloading it twice, then averaging the results.
Egnyte’s Speeds
Starting with Egnyte, we measured a download speed of 450 Mbps and an upload speed of 21 Mbps on a wired connection. That gave us an expected upload time of six minutes and 49 second and a download time of 19 seconds, ignoring network overhead.
| Egnyte | First Attempt: | Second Attempt: | Average: |
|---|---|---|---|
| Upload | 6:37 | 6:35 | 6:36 |
| Download | 0:33 | 0:33 | 0:33 |
Oddly enough, Egnyte was faster than our expected time on the upload end. Our projections are imperfect because network conditions change constantly, but they still provide some insight. Egnyte was as fast as it could be when uploading files, at least based on our testing.
Downloads were just shy of double our expected time. That’s a lot, but the difference shouldn’t matter too much in practice. Upload times are the most important, as they usually represent a more significant bottleneck for files in your account.
Dropbox’s Speeds
For Dropbox, we measured a download speed of 460 Mbps and an upload speed of 22 Mbps on the same wired connection. That changed our projections to an average download time of six minutes and 30 seconds and an average upload time of 18 seconds.
| Dropbox | First Attempt: | Second Attempt: | Average: |
|---|---|---|---|
| Upload | 7:17 | 6:33 | 6:55 |
| Download | 0:17 | 0:20 | 0:18 |
For downloads, Dropbox Business was on the money, thanks to a first trial that was slightly below our projection. Upload times were solid, too, though our first trial was more than 45 seconds longer than our expected time. Still, our average was within half a minute of our expectation.
Dropbox is fast, but it’s not as fast as Egnyte. For downloads, Dropbox shoots ahead, but uploads are more important. Because of that, we’re giving the win to Egnyte this round. That said, you shouldn’t have an issue with speed either way.
6. Security and Privacy
Egnyte and Dropbox Business are similar when it comes to security, though one clearly has an edge this round. Neither offer zero-knowledge encryption, which isn’t too surprising. Business-focused services generally use server-side encryption to open up file sharing opportunities and integrations. If security is what you’re after, make sure to read our best zero-knowledge cloud storage guide.
Even without client-side encryption, Egnyte and Dropbox are two of the most secure cloud storage services available. Both offer AES-256 encryption for data at rest, while protecting files in transit with an SSL/TLS layer.
Advanced Security
Egnyte goes a bit further, though. Enterprise subscribers have access to Egnyte Key Management, allowing you to manage your own encryption keys. That makes a huge difference for your most sensitive files and folders, giving you control over who has access to what. Dropbox Business doesn’t have such a feature.
Still, both come with two-factor authentication, including support for the best 2FA apps. They both offer SSO integration, too, though Dropbox Business reserves the feature for its most expensive Advanced plan.
Privacy
Privacy is where our competitors really split. Egnyte isn’t as secure as some of its competitors, but it values privacy more than Dropbox. Egnyte collects all of the personal information you’d expect, including your name and email address. When it comes to the content in your account, the privacy policy clarifies that “Egnyte does not access your account.”
Dropbox doesn’t access your account, either, and it collects a similar slate of information. However, Dropbox has a nasty data breach on record that compromised over 68 million users. The service has upped its security since, separating the data in your account from its metadata on different servers.
More concerning is Dropbox’s board of directors, which includes a former U.S. White House official known for advocating for warrantless wiretapping laws. That doesn’t mean Dropbox is looking through user accounts — it probably has more important things to do — but the connection is still a bit concerning.
Security and privacy breaches, either internal or external, benefit from hindsight. Dropbox has a shaky history, and although things look good now, its track record isn’t perfect. Because of that and Egnyte’s Key Management, we’re giving the win to Egnyte.
The Verdict
With our competitors deadlocked with three wins each, we have to split hairs to declare a winner. We’re giving this comparison to Egnyte on the merits of its unmatched speed, excellent third-party apps and deep user/storage customization. If you have the money for the Enterprise plan, Egnyte earns the win even more.
Winner: Egnyte
You shouldn’t discount Dropbox Business, though. It matches Egnyte when it comes to third-party apps but shifts the focus to the end user. Dropbox is familiar, and if you’re constantly moving files around, that makes a difference.
Keep in mind that Dropbox differs from Dropbox Business, as you can read in our comprehensive Dropbox vs Dropbox Business comparison guide.
Egnyte is the better option overall, but Dropbox is still a great alternative. So, which one are you going with? Why did you choose it? Let us know in the comments below and, as always, thanks for reading.
