Amazon Drive (discontinued) vs. ownCloud

Amazon Drive can be helpful in a variety of scenarios. It works best as a cloud back up - a place to store files, photos, and videos that are important and need to be safeguarded. I would not recommend it for collaborative document management and feel that there are other platforms better suited for that need. Amazon Drive can be programmed to upload specific folders from your desktop computer automatically. This is very helpful and takes the guesswork out of protecting your documents.

Incentivized

OwnCloud/Nextcloud is a great application for cloud storage of files, and makes sharing specific files or folders easy and fast. It also makes a great tool for real-time collaboration, including real-time chat and simultaneous editing of documents or spreadsheets. I have used ownCloud to assist clients in sending large files that could not be emailed -- for example, one of my clients is a Video Production agency. They produced a commercial to air, but could not email the file as it was 400MB. OwncCloud came to the rescue. I set up a temporary share and allowed him access to upload into that folder. Once the file was in the folder, I generated a share link that was then forwarded to TV stations for instant viewing in a browser. Each TV station then downloaded it and was able to add it to their scheduling system quickly. From the Photography side... I am able to deliver large amounts of files quickly and easily to my clients, and they can download or view on mobile devices easily. Since I use ownCloud on a daily basis, I cannot think of any reason why I would not use this software

Incentivized

• Worldwide accessibility, including from China's great firewall.
• Highly flexible with different server options: Aurora, MariaDB, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server.
• Lengthy free trial lets you really dive deeply and explore the solutions offering and all that Amazon has to provide you with.

Incentivized

• 100% of our data is stored ONLY on our servers and workstation. No external hosting anywhere.
• Open source, no recurring fees for any amount of data we need.
• Feature rich browser based application.
• Mature desktop sync client for PC and Mac.

Incentivized

• Less storage than Google Drive, Google offers 15GB of free space - vs. Amazon's 5GB.
• Also, unlike with Google Drive, you can't back up your work with Amazon Drive ( I also use Google Drive, since I have a Gmail account).
• A lot more expensive than Google Drive, which is 1.99/month...but they are more in line with Dropbox pricing.

Incentivized

• Requires you to manage the infrastructure, software updates, backups and security because it is self-hosted
• The picture viewer in ownCloud is not really snappy by default (You need to setup plugins or some kind of cache)
• No video viewer by default
• The web UI requires a cache setup to have reasonable load times (to be fair, it is recommended in the admin page)
• I stopped using the calendar and contacts plugins because after each update they would break

Incentivized

The system is very easy to use and it's use of apps for almost all devices and hardware makes it even easier to manage and store photos and documents. I highly recommend this as an easy to use solution for novices!

Incentivized

OwnCloud is easy for me to use, and I believe it would be for others too. The barrier for most people will be the set up. For a technology professional like myself, ownCloud's setup is pretty straightforward, but it's not the sort of thing most casual users will be able to handle. Also, it's on the user to maintain the service. These can be taken care of by paying someone to do it for you.

Incentivized

It is safe but has little added value.

Incentivized

Compared with other cloud services, ownCloud has been the most efficient. It doesn't create a noticeable drain on resources and very quickly syncs across all my devices. I'm usually able to save a file on my laptop and by the time I walk over and sit down at my desktop machine, it's already there. I don't need to wait as often as I have with services like OneDrive.

Incentivized

Overall great software to use for file share, storage, and collaboration. Its security is great and the user management is spot on. The only thing that makes me dock it a point is that the device management as a subset of user management is kind of clunky. It hasn't been an issue yet, but it could compromise security in the future. Overall, would recommend

Incentivized

Regarding the community edition, there is a reasonably good support on the IRC, forums and in the issue section on Github. Perhaps a much more individual approach would be available if the premium support was chosen and the instance of the server was provided by the Owncloud company that also offers some premium extensions, not available generally. However, we did not need this level of support yet.

Incentivized

If you compare based on functionality and user-friendliness, other services like Google Drive and Dropbox are better options. However, if you are simply looking for somewhere to securely and reliably host your digital files, Amazon Cloud Drive is a great option. Adding to that the fact that Amazon Cloud Drive is far more cost effective over time and comes with Amazon's well-known reliability and professional support, you'll find you have all the reasons you need to select it as your go-to for cloud storage.

Incentivized

ownCloud is better than Google Drive and Microsoft's OneDrive. I have not used Google Drive in some time now, so it may have improved. OneDrive has become better over time too, but my go-to is still ownCloud. Firstly, I prefer to have my data under my control. No other service can offer the level of control that ownCloud does. Setting that aside, in my experience Google Drive never quite got syncing right. Unless you have a very small collection of files and you're not synced across many devices, Google Drive fails to achieve a complete sync. The icon is always showing that Drive is syncing (and not up to date). I've had similar issues with OneDrive, but these days on Windows 10 OneDrive usually can achieve a complete sync across multiple devices, but it often hogs CPU and Network resources to do so, and it's still slower than OneDrive.

Incentivized

• Being free, everything ACD gives is profit. In this service, I have saved files for years and I find the storage very complete and secure. I think it is possible to earn even more if other services are included in the cloud, such as Microsoft Office 360 does it with OneDrive.

Incentivized

• The company grew from 4 employees in 2013 when ownCloud was initially deployed to about 40 in 2017 and still using it with a very similar setting without any major upgrade on the same Linux VPS. 95% of all company data are stored and shared via ownCloud successfully. No clear data about ROI but clearly the perfect adoption rate by all people and its ubiquitous use makes it an essential part of the company workflow.

Incentivized