MediaFire vs. ownCloud

MediaFire is suitable for individual users that want to store and maybe share files. It has a good initial space in the free version that can be enough for most users. The same applies for small teams that want to store documents (text, presentations) and share it between members (FileDrop features can help increase collaboration and productivity). If you have a big team or want to store big files you have to upgrade to the business or pro version (the price is interesting).

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Fast Uploads. Uploading is quite fast and it doesn't take extremely long.
• 10GB Overall File Storage Limit. With a Free Account, you can upload up to 10GB of files.
• Account Never Expires. We let a full year pass where we never logged into Mediafire at one point. And our files were still there!

Incentivized

• 100% of our data is stored ONLY on our servers and workstation. No external hosting anywhere.
• Open source, no recurring fees for any amount of data we need.
• Feature rich browser based application.
• Mature desktop sync client for PC and Mac.

Incentivized

• Download Page - When you generate a link to download some files it redirects users to a specific page where they can download the file. The page is sometimes confusing and with a lot of ads which can be a little bit annoying.
• Customization Option - you can find a customization section in "Settings", but there are just a few things that you can really customize. Maybe improving this would be nice to allow you personalize your environment (for companies, for instance).
• Blocked options for the free version - There are a lot of interesting options that are available just for business and pro versions. If you could at least test it before upgrading your version it would help users decide.
• Lack of PC sync client - Would be great if you could install a PC client that would synchronize your files.
• Problems when refreshing your files list in the browser. Sometimes it gets slow and you have to refresh the entire page to continue.

Incentivized

• Requires you to manage the infrastructure, software updates, backups and security because it is self-hosted
• The picture viewer in ownCloud is not really snappy by default (You need to setup plugins or some kind of cache)
• No video viewer by default
• The web UI requires a cache setup to have reasonable load times (to be fair, it is recommended in the admin page)
• I stopped using the calendar and contacts plugins because after each update they would break

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Mediafire needs to improve the end user usability and design. The file encryption at rest and transfer needs to be available which is a default feature in most cloud based storage providers. 3rd party integration needs to improved like outlook etc for ease of file storage and access. The large file allowance ranks above other providers.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Thanks to MediaFire I have been able to recover information stored many years ago on their servers, since they usually do not delete files after a certain time.
• It has helped me to be able to backup sensitive information from long before the existence of massive clouds, so if you did not make these backups you had to lose all the information, but thanks to half fire that did not happen to me.

• 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.

Incentivized