Secure file sharing and collaboration have taken a new meaning in this post-pandemic world. Today, you need a file-sharing service that provides access to sensitive files and content to authorized employees to enhance their productivity. At the same time, the service you choose must be secure and quick to facilitate collaboration across remote employees and teams. Plus, it's good to have features such as automation, integration with other third-party and custom apps, notifications, and more.
At first glance, the above features may seem formidable and overwhelming. However, many file-sharing applications today have the above-mentioned capabilities, and Files.com is one such tool.
The abundant availability of such file-sharing apps also makes it difficult to pick the right one for your organization's needs. To help you through this dilemma, we have compared some of the top file-sharing apps across different aspects.
In this article, we'll be comparing two popular file-sharing apps – Files.com and Google Workspace Drive. Before we go into a head-to-head comparison, let's briefly understand what each of these services is and how they can benefit your business.
Files.com
Files.com is a secure file-sharing service that comes with a ton of features to match any organization's needs. A highlight of Files.com is that it supports many protocols such as FTP and WebDAV, so you can combine your on-premises storage with this service, thereby saving on cloud storage costs. Furthermore, Files.com supports real-time notifications, so you know when someone opens, edits, or deletes files.
Key Features:
- Offers unified control over all file transfers that happen in your organization. It even generates extensive reports that can be used for auditing and compliance.
- Integrates well with dozens of platforms and apps such as Azure, AWS, Zapier, Google Cloud, and more.
- Supports automated actions such as pushing files to a repository at scheduled times, pulling files, or even mounting them on devices for remote access.
- With Files.com, you can transfer large files (up to 10 TB).
- No coding or scripts is needed for transfer flows. This makes onboarding quick and simple.
- Complies with major security standards such as SOC-2 and HIPAA.
- Comes with desktop and mobile apps for easy access.
Files.com also scores high on security. It supports encryption for your data, both at rest and in transit. Besides encryption, it uses two-factor authentication, configurable password policies, and SSO integrations to prevent unauthorized access.
Files.com offers three pricing plans:
- Starter Plan $10/user/month – Includes up to 1 TB of storage and a daily API request limit of 50,000.
- Power Plan $15/user/month – Includes up to 5 TB of storage and a daily API request limit of 250,000.
- Premier Plan Custom pricing – Includes up to 10 TB of storage and a daily API request limit of 2,000,000.
Click here for a free trial.
Google Workspace
Google Workspace is a flexible cloud storage service that makes it easy to manage file-sharing among the internal and external users of your organization. It also encompasses many productivity apps like Gmail, Drive, Meet, Docs, Sheets, and more. All these apps can be accessed through mobile apps as well, thereby making Google Workspace a good choice for remote employees to collaborate and communicate with each other.
Key Features:
- Offers an integrated user experience to enhance productivity and collaboration.
- All the apps in Google Workspace integrate with each other seamlessly, so you can do all that you want through a single platform/interface. For example, you can start a meeting and share a doc from Google Docs itself, or can create a document from a meet window.
- Enables you to preview a linked file in the same tab.
- Automatically connects individuals to relevant colleagues and content.
- Comes in many editions to suit customer preferences.
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Now that you know what each of these tools is, let's see how they stack against each other.
Files.com vs. Google Workspace – A Detailed Comparison
In this section, we compare Files.com and Google Workspace across multiple aspects to help you understand the best fit for your organization.
- Audience The key difference is the audience segments of these platforms. Google Workspace is more of a cloud-based storage and collaboration platform that enables remote employees and teams to be productive. Files.com, on the other hand, is a file-sharing platform that empowers businesses to securely transfer business-critical information among their employees and with external stakeholders. Plus, it also offers cloud storage of 100 GB for free as an add-on service. In this sense, Files.com and Google Workspace don't compete, but rather they complement each other. Some organizations even prefer to use both services – Google Workspace for collaboration and Files.com for file transfer.
- Control and Administration Files.com has an admin portal through which you can onboard users, see who has accessed your files, what groups/departments have permission to view files, and more. It's a single pane through which you can effectively control the usage of your sensitive information. Google Workspace, on the other hand, doesn't have an admin console. That said, you can have granular control over who accesses your content through the sharing settings. You can choose to provide view/edit access only to select individuals or groups, and others can't see your sensitive documents. You can also change permissions on your documents at any time, but there's no central control panel to see who has accessed your file. This way, Files.com offers more control and visibility to your sensitive documents.
- Uniform Implementation of Security Policies Other than seeing and controlling access, you can use the admin portal of Files.com to implement uniform security policies across all your assets. For example, you can implement a policy where people within a certain group or department alone can access certain files. Likewise, you can provide access based on geographies, employee roles, etc. Such granular control is not available in Google Workspace. You can only provide or restrict access to groups and individuals, but beyond that, you can't implement security policies on usage and access.
- Automation Files.com comes with advanced automation capabilities that you can leverage to trigger events when a file is downloaded or shared. For example, you can create an automation workflow that will notify one or more individuals when files are received from a specific email ID, you can start batch processing after the files are downloaded, and more. Your options are endless, and this is what makes Files.com such a versatile tool. Google Workspace, on the other hand, doesn't support such automation.
- Integrations Both platforms integrate well with many third-party tools, though Google Workspace integrates with more tools when compared to Files.com. However, Files.com comes with APIs that you can leverage to create workflows with custom applications.
In all, Files.com and Google Workspace are collaboration and file-sharing apps designed for a remote working culture.
Final Verdict
From the above discussion, it's clear that Files.com and Google Workspace have different purposes, and can even complement each other. Ideally, you can use Files.com if you have to regularly share sensitive information with others within and outside your organization. In the process, you can choose to save the file in Files.com secure and free cloud storage for later reference.
On the other hand, Google Workspace is a good option to create documents and collaborate with your colleagues to work on them. Anyone can view or edit the content, and the owner/admin of the document can determine access and usage.
You can also use both tools together as well. This is possible because they have different purposes and can work well with each other. For example, you can use Files.com to automate pulling content from Google Workspace at scheduled intervals and can set actions on the file such as extracting its content, exporting it to a different format, etc. Alternatively, you can use Files.com and Google Workspace as standalone platforms for file-sharing and collaboration. It all depends on your organization's needs.
Bottom Line
To conclude, file-sharing apps have become essential in today's work culture as they support collaboration and productivity. To help you choose the best fit for your organization, we have compared Files.com and Google Workspace. Though both tools support file-sharing and collaboration, they are also different in their purpose and features. Out of the two, Files.com is better suited for sending and receiving business-critical files and for triggering automation accordingly. Google Workspace, on the other hand, is a high-productivity tool that supports collaboration among employees. Both tools come with cloud storage as well, though the exact storage size and the associated cost vary.
More importantly, both platforms complement each other and work well together, so that's something to consider if your organization can benefit from using both.
We hope this information helps with your decision-making. For more such insightful guides, browse www.ittsystems.com.
