Adobe’s Creative Cloud
With the back end of any web application comes the need for a proper front end to help lift everything up. Adobe has always been more directly tailored to graphical artists, film and video makers, and the distribution of such content. With an Adobe subscription comes the usual tools to be expected at this point including Photoshop, Premier, Acrobat, and Illustrator. For UI/UX tools, Adobe now has XD to help design and shape the user’s brand for their website. For anything needing an artistic touch, Adobe helps users not only design, but share between other users.
Dropbox
Placing greater emphasis on the collaborative aspect of cloud work is Dropbox’s offering of cloud storage aims to allow users to more easily share work and documents with other users and teams. Regardless of device type or location, so long as all members have internet access, they can see content others produce as well as put forth content for others to use and view in turn, regardless of size and content type. Dropbox’s tool also easily integrates with other social platforms including Zoom and Slack to include Dropbox content more directly in daily operations. Administrative tools are easy to use, come with the latest encryption tools, and by default backs up all files to the cloud. That said, the experience does feely rather janky at times, and maybe fairly difficult to use in conjunction with other workplace tools.
Adobe Pricing
To reiterate, Adobe’s suite of applications has been a household brand for artistic designs. Its payment model is still a monthly subscription to a membership with varying price tags for whoever is buying it. Individuals can subscribe to each application individually for anywhere between $9.99 and $24.99 per month, or can subscribe to all for a comparative discount at $54.99 per month. Teams of people can share a license for any of the apps for $35.99 per month or share a license for all the apps at just $84.99 per month. Educational institutions provide all apps for $35.99 per month or $15.99 per month for small work groups and departments, $330.00 per year for classrooms and labs, and $142.00 per year for departments of a hundred students or more, and some negotiable pricing for broad-access across an entire faculty. There is a free membership, but the tools on offer are much more limited.
Dropbox Pricing
Similarly, Dropbox uses a monthly subscription for its monetization model with discounts shaving off anywhere between $2-$6 monthly for a yearly subscription. Plus users are charged $11.99 per month individually for 2TB of storage, 30-day recovery time, 2GB of transfer space, and 3 eSignatures per month for a single user. Family and household users are charged $19.99 per month individually for everything covered by the Plus plan for up to six people and a Family folder to more easily transfer items between users. Professional users are charged $19.99 for 3TB of storage space, 180 days of recovery time, advanced sharing controls, up to 100GB of transfer space, and anything that Plus covers. For startup organizations, Standard charges users $18 per month for 5TB of storage space, easy-to-use external user control and content protection, and automatic backup functionality for teams of three or more. For more adept teams, Advanced charges users $30 per month for everything covered by Standard, constant security monitoring, data classification functionality, and up to 100GB of transfer space for three or more team members. For much bigger teams, Dropbox does offer varying resources at a negotiable price tag.
Final Overview
Using either service really depends on what the user is looking for to augment their workspace. Whether users decided on Adobe is somewhat arbitrary as Adobe is just one of many software providers with a greater focus on art tools. As for something like Dropbox, there probably isn’t much that Dropbox accomplishes that Google Cloud does for cheaper and with greater proficiency.