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Box vs iCloud Drive: Which is best?

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Let us help you decide between Box and iCloud Drive.
Companies have long turned to in-house servers to store large amounts of data, while individual consumers have generally specced up computers (opens in new tab) and laptops (opens in new tab) with large enough hard drives for their needs before turning to external hard drives or the humble USB stick.
Investing in storage can be expensive, and technology can fast go out of date leaving you with slow and poor-performing equipment, not to mention that on-site servers can be expensive and difficult to maintain for businesses.
The digital era has brought with it a plethora of online solutions, from cloud storage to cloud computer backup and pretty much everything in between. We compare two storage products in this Box (opens in new tab) vs iCloud Drive (opens in new tab) showdown.
Box is favoured among users for its vast amounts of integrations with productivity apps: the company claims there are more than 1,500, some of which including Office 365 (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), Google Workspace (which includes Docs, Sheets, and Slides), Adobe, Slack, Airtable and Docusign. In fact, this is probably Box’s key selling point – it doesn’t require you to use its own apps but instead encourages you to continue working on apps you are already familiar with.
Of course, there is browser access to your files, but for drag-and-drop simplicity and plenty of background operations, it makes sense to download the desktop client. It doesn’t integrate system-wide, but instead goes with a Dropbox-style single folder, inside which you can place anything you like. 
It’s great for businesses, with plenty of team management controls including file access, live collaboration and history. Users can choose to share files both inside and outside of the organization, so collaboration should be top-tier.
Box is somewhat let down by its file size limit, which is capped to 5GB for Personal Pro accounts, or a miniscule 250MB for free subscriptions. Business Starter, Business, Business Plus and Enterprise are capped at 2GB, 5GB, 15GB, and 50GB respectively, while customizable Enterprise Plus plans can upload 150GB files. For many, this may be acceptable, but on lower plans it can be restricting and for media companies dealing with large files – like videos – it could be the nail in Box’s coffin.
iCloud Drive may be more of an all-encompassing solution, giving users access to its word processing apps Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, as well as a couple of other applets like Calendar, Reminders, and Notes.

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