Pros & Cons
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- Many advanced syncing options
- Lets you annotate and edit documents, photos, and videos
- GDPR and HIPAA support
- Strong security features
- Mobile apps feature OCR tech
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- Relatively expensive
- Data governance costs extra
- Lacks private key management
- Can't edit files imported into Dropbox Paper
Dropbox Business Specs
| Authenticated External Sharing | |
| Cloud Storage Without Local File System Sync | |
| File Conflict Management | |
| Group Permissions | |
| Local File System Sync | |
| Mobile Apps | |
| Partial / Differential Sync | |
| Public Sharing | |
| Remote Wipe | |
| Team Folders | |
| White Label Branding |
Dropbox Business is a robust cloud storage and file-sharing app with enough range and flexibility to satisfy most small to midsize businesses. It features four tiers that target different work needs, such as collaboration and PDF editing. However, Dropbox Business is so much more than that. It includes file editing and annotation, rich multimedia support, optical character recognition, and IT-friendly features like device approvals and remote wipe functionality. I was impressed by the app's many excellent features beyond basic cloud storage, as it's a syncing toolbox that almost rivals Editors' Choice winners Egnyte (the top pick for data governance) and Microsoft OneDrive for Business (the top pick for Microsoft shops that need lots of storage).
Plans and Prices
Dropbox has four business tiers, each designed for a different productivity type. Running a solo business? Check out the Professional plan. Starting at $19.99 per month, it grants a single user a generous 3TB of storage, PDF editing, and the ability to track file engagement. On the multimedia front, Professional lets you record, review, edit, and annotate video files. The maximum file size is 100GB.
(Credit: Dropbox/PCMag)For teams of three or more users, there's the Standard tier, starting at $18 per user per month. With it, your team receives 5TB of storage and the ability to set administrators. Everything else is on par with the Professional plan.
Next up is the Advanced tier, which costs $30 per user per month. It increases the team's cloud storage capacity to 15TB and includes tiered administrator roles and upgraded security features, such as suspicious activity alerts and compliance tracking. The maximum file size remains 100GB.
Large organizations should consider the Enterprise tier. Its benefits are expanded security features and live support from Dropbox's tech support team. The Dropbox website doesn't list a price for this plan, so you'll need to contact a sales rep for a quote.
Dropbox Business doesn't offer a free tier, but you can sample it for 30 days by signing up for a monthly plan. That trial period expands to two months if you sign up for an annual plan.
Overall, Dropbox is on the pricier side of cloud storage and file sharing compared with the competition. Google Drive for Business and Microsoft OneDrive for Business cost $7 per user per month and $5 per user per month, respectively. However, Dropbox gives you more storage for your dollar. Egnyte's entry-level tier costs slightly more than Dropbox ($22 per user per month, paid annually), but includes data governance and ransomware protection.
Don't need the business-focused Dropbox? Check out our review of the consumer-end Dropbox.
Dashboard and File Uploads
To create an account, you must supply contact details, create a password, and provide payment information, team name, company size, and the number of users. Once set up, you can invite team members and collaborators or go straight to the admin console. There, you'll find helpful tips for inviting and managing members, accessing settings, and monitoring activity usage across your team.
Dropbox Business has a simple, easy-to-read dashboard. As an admin, you can see the team members, pending invites, and remaining licenses. Additionally, the dashboard lets you access activity logs, add files and folders, check sharing settings, view the team file folder, set up groups, and visit the help center. As expected from a cloud storage platform, Dropbox Business lets you restrict document sharing and allow or block collaborator comments.
You can request files from anyone via email, even if they don't have a Dropbox account (for instance, a client or contractor who isn't part of your staff). The service has a folder for deleted files, which I liked as a welcome safety net.
Depending on your workflow, there are multiple ways to upload files. I had no problem dragging and dropping files from my desktop to the Dropbox Business desktop app (available for Linux, macOS, or Windows) or uploading them to the web-based Dropbox page. That said, I wish I could change Dropbox Business's folder colors as I can in Microsoft OneDrive for Business. It's a cool, visually distinctive way to instantly recognize a folder's content.
File Editing and Collaboration Tools
Any file you place in the team folder is automatically available to everyone on the same account. Optionally, you can share a folder or document link and set it as public (so anyone with the link can access it). If you don't want a public file or folder, you can password-protect it (a feature that Backblaze lacks), restrict it to team members, or set an expiration date. Editing permissions are available for files and folders.
(Credit: Dropbox/PCMag)I found editing documents in Dropbox a simple task. Once I opened a PDF file, the app offered many annotation options, including highlighting, drawing, adding signatures, and editing the document's text. Importing a PDF from Google Docs and editing it in Dropbox was seamless in my tests. Likewise, creating and adding a signature to a document took just seconds. Dropbox also integrates with the web-based Microsoft Word for hassle-free editing.
Dropbox lets you edit photos and videos, but don't expect anything too elaborate. For example, you can crop, flip, and rotate the image and adjust the color and hue. Your options for editing videos are similar. You can also create a transcript from your uploaded video, though Dropbox only transcribes the first spoken sentence in testing. Don't like what you saw? Dropbox has manual transcription, too.
A Dropbox subscription includes Dropbox Paper, a proprietary collaboration space for Dropbox users to create and edit documents, comment, and assign related tasks. I quickly discovered that files not created in Dropbox Paper aren't editable in that app. As a result, you're better off creating original Dropbox Paper files if you want to collaborate on documents. If you need to send Dropbox Paper files to others, you can export them in the .docx and .md formats.
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Desktop and Mobile Apps
The desktop app includes Dropbox Badge, a feature that extends some Dropbox functionality to Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. A badge appears on any of the documents saved in your Dropbox, so you can add comments, share a file, view a file's history, and see who is viewing or editing the file. Dropbox recommends using the desktop app to upload entire folders and large files since the website uploader has a 10GB limit. Any files you mark as favorites are available offline. That's a nice feature, but Evernote and Google Drive (at its Enterprise tier) let you access all files offline.
Dropbox has a significant API presence for custom integrations, making it compatible with popular apps from Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Slack, and other companies. This is a great addition if you want to integrate customer relationship management (CRM) software. Just visit the Dropbox App Center and install what you need.
In addition to a desktop app, Dropbox has mobile apps for Android and iOS. In fact, Dropbox recently added some new mobile features exclusive to iOS. Now you can see file activity and team feedback in the file preview mode. Of course, the apps let you create files and folders, sync them, and share them.
Another iOS-exclusive feature lets you organize audio and video files into a cool, playlist-style timeline. I appreciated the music streaming service-like playback controls that let me skip forward or backward by 15 seconds per file, change the playback speed, or set a file to repeat. If you're an audio or visual artist on the go, I can see this feature being useful. Especially since you can minimize the video to run in the corner of your phone's screen, even outside of the Dropbox app (similar to what you can do with YouTube Premium).
(Credit: Dropbox/PCMag)The apps include another important mobile capability: document scanning using your phone. They outline whatever document you're trying to scan, whether it's as small as a business card or as large as a full-size page. They also straighten the image (even with the mildly crumpled receipt I threw at it during testing) and let you capture up to 10 pages at a time. Scans are saved as PDF or PNG files. As with other documents in the Dropbox system, you can add comments or @-mention people to notify them to take a look at a file.
In addition, you can also sign documents, annotate images with a date or custom text, or scan documents into your Dropbox using optical character recognition (OCR). With OCR, an image of text is converted into machine-readable text, allowing you to search for scanned documents by keywords. I scanned a book page and was able to quickly search by chapter name. Although this feature is useful for scanning a few pages, it may not be optimal for scanning document stacks. For that, you're better off with Abbyy FineScanner.
Advanced Sync Tools and AI-Powered Search
Selective Sync is a cool feature that helped me save hard drive space by designating certain files and folders as available locally, online, or in a mixed state. Another tool, Smart Sync, works similarly, except Dropbox made the file and folder decisions based on my usage patterns.
Streaming File Sync allowed me to share a file with a collaborator before it was fully uploaded. In essence, the tech lets you stream a file to another device, which can be useful when you're pinched for time.
Like most tech companies, Dropbox has its own AI assistant, Dash, that you can download and add to your Dropbox account (free for 30 days, $19.99 per month or $180 per year afterward). When signing up for Dash, you choose how you want to integrate it into your current apps and workflows. For example, I do most of my computing using Google tools, so I quickly connected my Google account to my Dropbox account so Dash could access all of my files.
In testing, the chatbot let me ask general questions, but when connected to Google Workspace, it worked as a search tool. My Google Drive is a bit cluttered with documents, including article drafts and short story excerpts, so I appreciated that it quickly found my resume when I typed in "pull up my resume." Likewise, when prompted, Dash gave me many details about a character I wrote. That said, it remained suspiciously silent when I asked, "What LLMs power dash?" For unorganized people, Dash can be a good tool for unearthing files from the chaos of your virtual desk. Still, you could accomplish those tasks without it, with a little time and dedication. As always, be protective of your information and the extent to which you surrender it to these corporate algorithms.
Dropbox has other features that I was unable to test. LAN Sync is a Dropbox Business feature that speeds up syncing when a file exists on a Local Area Network (LAN) drive or folder. During the sync process, Dropbox proactively searches your LAN for the new file, bypassing the need to download it from Dropbox's servers. This may be helpful for SMBs with computers networked via a single router. And Remote Wipe works the same way as the smartphone security feature. IT can scrub devices if a team member leaves the company, or if hardware with Dropbox Business installed is lost or stolen.
Security Options: GDPR, HIPAA, and MFA
On the data security side, Dropbox holds ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, and ISO 22301 certifications, as well as SOC 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3 attestations. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance is not active by default; you must enter into a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with your organization before complying. Activity audit logs are also available to administrators, helping maintain compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX).
Dropbox has its own data centers, which give it direct control of data safety and potential regulatory compliance issues. It also complies with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and includes a forensic-level audit log. This means you can track team members, file access, and share information without digging into logs or requiring a system administrator.
(Credit: Dropbox/PCMag)The service lacks user-controlled encryption key management, so any keys are under Dropbox's control. However, Dropbox has placed strict controls on which data technicians can access for troubleshooting. Although this may not be enough to qualify for the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), it's good enough for many cases. Dropbox also supports several two-factor and multi-factor authentication (MFA) strategies, including Google Authenticator and Windows Authenticator.
Administrator accounts have several efficiency and security tools at their disposal. Whether individual accounts can open or edit a file can be set by the admin. They can also track and manage their team's storage by running detailed reports on what files and folders are taking up space. Finally, admins can view deleted content and restore it if needed.
Dropbox has data governance, but it's an additional service you add to your existing Dropbox account (you must contact the sales team for a quote). If data governance is critical to your business, check out Egnyte. It comes bundled with a subscription.