In short, Google Drive is equally at home on both Apple and Windows devices.Ĭontrastingly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Apple iCloud is most at home on iOS, macOS, and iPadOS devices. It is intuitive to use and responsive even in poor network conditions, and we frequently use it in place of the desktop and mobile apps. Google Drive’s web app is also the best we’ve seen. Apps are available for the platform iOS, macOS, iPadOS, Windows, and Android. Google Drive is, overall, the more compatible and widely supported of the two platforms. Unfortunately, Google’s ambiguous privacy policy isn’t particularly reassuring.Īpple also provides end-to-end encryption for some data categories (Image credit: Apple) iCloud vs Google Drive: Performance This means that data stored on the platform could, in theory, be accessed by Google employees or anyone that Google provides your data to, including law enforcement. Google also encrypts data both in transit and at rest, but offers no end-to-end encryption. There are also several data categories (iCloud Keychain/iCloud tabs and Safari History/Wi-Fi passwords) that are encrypted from end-to-end. Both platforms enable you to use multi-factor authentication, which we highly recommend.Īlmost all data stored on iCloud’s servers is encrypted both in transit and at rest to 128-bit AES standard. ICloud is the more secure platform, although Google Drive has made several necessary steps forward recently. However, before moving on, we need to consider each platform’s security features.

On this basis, we give Google Drive a slight win.

This makes the platform more suitable for creatives who are constantly co-designing with colleagues and pitching content to clients. Google Drive also offers better collaborative features, such as shared drives. This is ideal if you’re a freelancer or anyone working with more than one organization or volunteer group. However, we do like that Google Drive enables you to log into several accounts and swap between them easily. In fact, there’s very little to distinguish the two platforms when it comes to the nitty-gritty of storage-related features. Personally, however, we find Google Drive works best with these third-party suites. Both platforms can also be integrated with the Adobe Creative Cloud suite as well as other creative suites such as Affinity.

Google drive vs onedrive privacy