Backblaze, headquartered in San Mateo, provides cloud storage and online backup, boasting trust with over an exabyte of data from customers in 175 countries. A backup service specialist, Backblaze describes their B2 cloud object storage service as S3 compatible and purpose built to provide simplicity, reliability, and affordability. B2 Cloud Storage is available at $0.005/GB/Month, with single-tier pricing.
N/A
ownCloud
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
ownCloud is a self-hosted open source file syncing and sharing option, from the Boston-based company of the same name.
$5
per month
Pricing
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
ownCloud
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Standard
$5
per month
Enterprise
$12
per month
For Teams
$13
per month
For Single Users
$15
per month
Community
Free
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
ownCloud
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Two pricing models are available: consumption-based pay-as-you-go, and capacity-based storage bundles.
Pay-as-you-go consumption-based cloud storage costs $6/TB per month, with your first 10GB free. Egress is free up to 3x of average monthly data stored, and unlimited to many leading content delivery network (CDN) and compute partners.
Capacity-based storage, called B2 Reserve, is designed for companies looking for all-inclusive pricing on a single invoice. Storage bundles start at 20TB and can be purchased for one, two, or three years. Egress is always free.
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
ownCloud
Features
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
ownCloud
File Sharing & Management
Comparison of File Sharing & Management features of Product A and Product B
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
10.0
Ratings
17% above category average
ownCloud
8.5
Ratings
1% above category average
Versioning
10.00 Ratings
9.00 Ratings
Video files
10.00 Ratings
7.80 Ratings
Audio files
10.00 Ratings
8.10 Ratings
Access control
10.00 Ratings
9.50 Ratings
File search
10.00 Ratings
8.10 Ratings
Device sync
10.00 Ratings
9.30 Ratings
Document collaboration
00 Ratings
7.80 Ratings
Cloud Storage Security & Administration
Comparison of Cloud Storage Security & Administration features of Product A and Product B
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
10.0
Ratings
14% above category average
ownCloud
8.5
Ratings
2% below category average
User and role management
10.00 Ratings
9.00 Ratings
File organization
10.00 Ratings
8.70 Ratings
Device management
10.00 Ratings
7.70 Ratings
Cloud Storage Platform
Comparison of Cloud Storage Platform features of Product A and Product B
I would consider Backblaze as a second or a third tier backup solution. Not in terms of quality, but I'd recommend having at least one more backup saved somewhere else. And with the cost as low as theirs, Backblaze is the perfect solution. It also provides very friendly recovery options on both the personal and business side.
OwnCloud/Nextcloud is a great application for cloud storage of files, and makes sharing specific files or folders easy and fast. It also makes a great tool for real-time collaboration, including real-time chat and simultaneous editing of documents or spreadsheets. I have used ownCloud to assist clients in sending large files that could not be emailed -- for example, one of my clients is a Video Production agency. They produced a commercial to air, but could not email the file as it was 400MB. OwncCloud came to the rescue. I set up a temporary share and allowed him access to upload into that folder. Once the file was in the folder, I generated a share link that was then forwarded to TV stations for instant viewing in a browser. Each TV station then downloaded it and was able to add it to their scheduling system quickly. From the Photography side... I am able to deliver large amounts of files quickly and easily to my clients, and they can download or view on mobile devices easily. Since I use ownCloud on a daily basis, I cannot think of any reason why I would not use this software
OwnCloud is easy for me to use, and I believe it would be for others too. The barrier for most people will be the set up. For a technology professional like myself, ownCloud's setup is pretty straightforward, but it's not the sort of thing most casual users will be able to handle. Also, it's on the user to maintain the service. These can be taken care of by paying someone to do it for you.
Compared with other cloud services, ownCloud has been the most efficient. It doesn't create a noticeable drain on resources and very quickly syncs across all my devices. I'm usually able to save a file on my laptop and by the time I walk over and sit down at my desktop machine, it's already there. I don't need to wait as often as I have with services like OneDrive.
Regarding the community edition, there is a reasonably good support on the IRC, forums and in the issue section on Github. Perhaps a much more individual approach would be available if the premium support was chosen and the instance of the server was provided by the Owncloud company that also offers some premium extensions, not available generally. However, we did not need this level of support yet.
Because they continuously had times they required updating the account and there were hiccups when that happened, over time, I became skeptical of their ability to keep my files secure. They were the first cloud backup storage company I had ever used and I stayed with them for almost two decades. Then it happened that we did have to do a recovery two different times because of hardware failures. It was anything but a smooth or complete recovery, and their price kept rising as their service declined. Hundreds of files were totally lost in the process. I guessed that among their strategies, it might well have been a re-focus on their part to build up their enterprise accounts and didn't seem to care about small business. I finally had enough and left them as a client.
ownCloud is better than Google Drive and Microsoft's OneDrive. I have not used Google Drive in some time now, so it may have improved. OneDrive has become better over time too, but my go-to is still ownCloud. Firstly, I prefer to have my data under my control. No other service can offer the level of control that ownCloud does. Setting that aside, in my experience Google Drive never quite got syncing right. Unless you have a very small collection of files and you're not synced across many devices, Google Drive fails to achieve a complete sync. The icon is always showing that Drive is syncing (and not up to date). I've had similar issues with OneDrive, but these days on Windows 10 OneDrive usually can achieve a complete sync across multiple devices, but it often hogs CPU and Network resources to do so, and it's still slower than OneDrive.
The per-byte pricing has saved us 30% over the competing Wasabi service which charges on a three-month minimum which causes us to pay for deleted objects.
The company grew from 4 employees in 2013 when ownCloud was initially deployed to about 40 in 2017 and still using it with a very similar setting without any major upgrade on the same Linux VPS. 95% of all company data are stored and shared via ownCloud successfully. No clear data about ROI but clearly the perfect adoption rate by all people and its ubiquitous use makes it an essential part of the company workflow.
