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Amazon S3

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Amazon S3 vs Google Drive: What are the differences?

Comparison between Amazon S3 and Google Drive

Amazon S3 and Google Drive are two popular cloud storage platforms that offer different features and functionalities. Below are the key differences between the two:

  1. Storage Capacity: Amazon S3 provides virtually unlimited storage capacity, allowing users to store and retrieve any amount of data. On the other hand, Google Drive offers limited storage capacity depending on the chosen plan, which can range from 15 GB to multiple terabytes.

  2. Pricing Structure: Amazon S3 has a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where users are billed based on the amount of data stored and the data transferred. Google Drive, on the other hand, offers tiered pricing plans based on storage capacity, ranging from free to higher-cost plans for additional storage.

  3. Integration and Flexibility: Amazon S3 is designed for developers and offers extensive integration options with other Amazon Web Services (AWS) products. It provides flexible API integration and supports various programming languages. Google Drive, on the other hand, is more user-friendly and seamlessly integrates with other Google products such as Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides.

  4. Collaboration and File Sharing: Google Drive offers robust collaboration features, allowing multiple users to work on the same document simultaneously and provides real-time updates. It also provides easy file sharing options with customizable permission settings. In comparison, Amazon S3 focuses more on storage and file hosting and lacks advanced collaboration features.

  5. File Syncing: Google Drive offers a desktop client that allows users to sync files between their local devices and the cloud, providing offline access and automatic file synchronization. Amazon S3 does not offer a dedicated file syncing client but can be integrated with other third-party synchronization tools.

  6. Security and Access Control: Both Amazon S3 and Google Drive offer advanced security measures such as encryption at rest and in transit. However, Amazon S3 provides more granular control over access permissions, allowing users to define detailed access policies and manage access at the object level.

In summary, Amazon S3 is a scalable and developer-friendly cloud storage platform with extensive integration options and virtually unlimited storage capacity, while Google Drive offers a user-friendly interface, strong collaboration features, and seamless integration with other Google products.

Decisions about Amazon S3 and Google Drive
Gabriel Pa

We offer our customer HIPAA compliant storage. After analyzing the market, we decided to go with Google Storage. The Nodejs API is ok, still not ES6 and can be very confusing to use. For each new customer, we created a different bucket so they can have individual data and not have to worry about data loss. After 1000+ customers we started seeing many problems with the creation of new buckets, with saving or retrieving a new file. Many false positive: the Promise returned ok, but in reality, it failed.

That's why we switched to S3 that just works.

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Pros of Amazon S3
Pros of Google Drive
  • 590
    Reliable
  • 492
    Scalable
  • 456
    Cheap
  • 329
    Simple & easy
  • 83
    Many sdks
  • 30
    Logical
  • 13
    Easy Setup
  • 11
    REST API
  • 11
    1000+ POPs
  • 6
    Secure
  • 4
    Plug and play
  • 4
    Easy
  • 3
    Web UI for uploading files
  • 2
    Faster on response
  • 2
    Flexible
  • 2
    GDPR ready
  • 1
    Easy to use
  • 1
    Plug-gable
  • 1
    Easy integration with CloudFront
  • 505
    Easy to use
  • 326
    Gmail integration
  • 312
    Enough free space
  • 268
    Collaboration
  • 249
    Stable service
  • 128
    Desktop and mobile apps
  • 97
    Offline sync
  • 79
    Apps
  • 74
    15 gb storage
  • 50
    Add-ons
  • 9
    Integrates well
  • 6
    Easy to use
  • 3
    Simple back-up tool
  • 2
    Amazing
  • 2
    Beautiful
  • 2
    Fast upload speeds
  • 2
    The more the merrier
  • 2
    So easy
  • 2
    Wonderful
  • 2
    Linux terminal transfer tools
  • 2
    It has grown to a stable in the cloud office
  • 1
    UI
  • 1
    Windows desktop
  • 1
    G Suite integration

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Cons of Amazon S3
Cons of Google Drive
  • 7
    Permissions take some time to get right
  • 6
    Requires a credit card
  • 6
    Takes time/work to organize buckets & folders properly
  • 3
    Complex to set up
  • 7
    Organization via web ui sucks
  • 2
    Not a real database

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What is Amazon S3?

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

What is Google Drive?

Keep photos, stories, designs, drawings, recordings, videos, and more. Your first 15 GB of storage are free with a Google Account. Your files in Drive can be reached from any smartphone, tablet, or computer.

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What companies use Amazon S3?
What companies use Google Drive?
See which teams inside your own company are using Amazon S3 or Google Drive.
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What tools integrate with Amazon S3?
What tools integrate with Google Drive?

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What are some alternatives to Amazon S3 and Google Drive?
Amazon Glacier
In order to keep costs low, Amazon Glacier is optimized for data that is infrequently accessed and for which retrieval times of several hours are suitable. With Amazon Glacier, customers can reliably store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month, a significant savings compared to on-premises solutions.
Amazon EBS
Amazon EBS volumes are network-attached, and persist independently from the life of an instance. Amazon EBS provides highly available, highly reliable, predictable storage volumes that can be attached to a running Amazon EC2 instance and exposed as a device within the instance. Amazon EBS is particularly suited for applications that require a database, file system, or access to raw block level storage.
Amazon EC2
It is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
Microsoft Azure
Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. You can build applications using any language, tool or framework. And you can integrate your public cloud applications with your existing IT environment.
Amazon Redshift
It is optimized for data sets ranging from a few hundred gigabytes to a petabyte or more and costs less than $1,000 per terabyte per year, a tenth the cost of most traditional data warehousing solutions.
See all alternatives