Dropbox Review: Not as good as it used to be

When considering the best cloud-based storage services for your Mac, it’s impossible not to think of Dropbox.

In many ways the granddaddy of them all. Dropbox grew to be a market leader but has since been overtaken by options like Google Drive and OneDrive.

It’s not that it’s a bad service. Dropbox remains a reliable way to sync data and files to the cloud, and its Mac app has gotten much more performative after some years where it was relatively sluggish.

It just doesn’t offer any must-have features and rivals have much more generous free tiers.

First Impressions

Dropbox

Given I chastised Apple’s iCloud for its 5GB limit for free users, Dropbox’s paltry 2GB starting offering feels so far behind the likes of Google with its 15GB of Google Drive space.

The next plan up from there jumps to $11.99/£9.99 per month (billed monthly), or $9.99/£7.99 a month if you pay for a year upfront. While that’s about on par with what others charge for 2TB of space, it’s a shame there aren’t any tiers in between. There are business focused plans for 3TB and 9TB but these seem extortionaltly priced compared to the competition.

Still, pricing aside, Dropbox is an easy app to install and start using thanks to the same Finder functionality you’ll find in its contemporaries, meaning it’s easy to drag and drop files between devices.

Dropbox features

Dropbox

While many cloud services offer menu bar apps within macOS, Dropbox’s is a sizeable drop-down window so you can see more information about recently uploaded and updated files, and I really appreciated the way I could look at what was uploading more quickly than I could on alternative services.

Uploads also feel pretty snappy, and the fact it’s been around for so long means it has the kind of app integrations that will make other options jealous.

One of my favorite features is PDF signing, which lets you throw a file to someone, get a signature, and get it back without opening it up to deeper edits.

Dropbox annoyances

Dropbox

Aside from being pricier than its rivals and lacking in storage options at the low-end, Dropbox just doesn’t feel as straightforward to use as many other cloud storage services.

It certainly feels closer to something like OneDrive, with a whole host of options close to hand. That’ll delight some, but for others it’ll feel like a cluttered mess.

The Bottom Line

Fast upload speeds and a handy menu bar item aside, Dropbox is too expensive and oftentimes too complex to recommend for anyone other than longtime users that have built workflows around it.