Amazon S3 vs Google Drive: What are the differences?

Amazon S3: Store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. Amazon Simple Storage Service provides a fully redundant data storage infrastructure for storing and retrieving any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web; Google Drive: Integrate your app with Google Drive. The Drive SDK gives you a group of APIs along with client libraries, language-specific examples, and documentation to help you develop apps that integrate with Drive The core functionality of Drive apps is to download and upload files in Google Drive. However, the Drive SDK provides a lot more than just storage..

Amazon S3 can be classified as a tool in the "Cloud Storage" category, while Google Drive is grouped under "File Storage".

Some of the features offered by Amazon S3 are:

• Write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 terabytes of data each. The number of objects you can store is unlimited.
• Each object is stored in a bucket and retrieved via a unique, developer-assigned key.
• A bucket can be stored in one of several Regions. You can choose a Region to optimize for latency, minimize costs, or address regulatory requirements. Amazon S3 is currently available in the US Standard, US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), South America (Sao Paulo), and GovCloud (US) Regions. The US Standard Region automatically routes requests to facilities in Northern Virginia or the Pacific Northwest using network maps.

On the other hand, Google Drive provides the following key features:

• Create & collaborate.- In Google Drive, you can create new documents, spreadsheets and presentations instantly. Work together at the same time, on the same doc, and see changes as they appear.
• Work better with the products you use everyday.- Say goodbye to bulky email attachments. Send a link from Google Drive in Gmail and everyone has the same file, same version—automatically. Your pictures in Google Drive are instantly available in Google+, so you’re never more than one click away from sharing with your circles.
• Powerful search.- Google Drive helps you get to your files faster. Search for content by keyword and filter by file type, owner and more. Google Drive can even recognize objects in your images and text in scanned documents.

"Reliable", "Scalable" and "Cheap" are the key factors why developers consider Amazon S3; whereas "Easy to use ", "Gmail integration" and "Enough free space" are the primary reasons why Google Drive is favored.

According to the StackShare community, Amazon S3 has a broader approval, being mentioned in 3235 company stacks & 1616 developers stacks; compared to Google Drive, which is listed in 2093 company stacks and 2019 developer stacks.