pCloud Storage Service Review

pCloud is a cloud hosting alternative to Dropbox and Google Drive where you can store your files online and is one of our favorite sites that we’ve used so far. Down below, we’re going to into a little more detail about what pCloud is exactly, and whether it’s worth your time and money.

They also offer the PCloud Transfer service that allows any user to send large files for free. In this pCloud review, we will take a closer look at all their features.

For $60, you can get access to 500 GBs of storage, with no file size limits for what you can actually upload. pCloud is compatible with Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, and more, making it very worthwhile for different types of users.

pCloud – General Info

pCloud is an exciting new entry into the realm of cloud storage services. Their focus is on file sharing and access anywhere, with a mobile app (pCloud for Android) that offers easy music and video streaming from your cloud storage. The automatic upload will sync all of your photos and videos. Selective sync is available on the desktop, meaning you can sync any folder on your desktop. In fact, it’s cloud-only, and will not place a synced folder on your computer.

For an additional monthly fee, pCloud Crypto offers client-side encryption, to ensure your data can’t be read by anyone but you and the people you authorize. They also integrate with all your favorite web services like Facebook, Picassa, WordPress, and Instagram. Read our pCloud review to learn what makes them stand out from the crowd.

Plans & Pricing

In this part of our pCloud review will analyze the pricing and plans offered by this cloud storage provider. The pricing of pCloud’s services is very competitive indeed. A nice thing about them is that they offer basically all of their features, except encryption via Crypto to their free users as well. What you’re paying for is simply more storage space and more download bandwidth for file sharing. The recent pCloud Lifetime plan is super affordable and eliminates the biggest risk of external drives – the risk of losing your files.

pCloud Transfer is a free service offered by pCloud that allows any user to transfer up to 5 GB to up to 10 recipients. Using this service does not even require registration. Pretty cool!

Plan	Price	Storage Allotment	Features
Basic	Free	20 GB storage, 50 GB download traffic from shared links	Mobile and desktop app, SSL transfer security, unlimited file size, file versioning, link sharing (up and down), integrations
Premium Monthly	$4.99/mo	500 GB storage, 500 GB download traffic from shared links	Same as Basic plan
Premium Annual	$3.99/mo	500 GB storage, 500 GB download traffic from shared links	Same as Basic plan
Premium Lifetime	$175/one-time payment	500 GB storage, 500 GB download traffic from shared links	Same as Basic plan
Premium Plus Monthly	$9.99/mo	2 TB storage, 2 TB download traffic from shared links	Same as other plans
Premium Plus Annual	$7.99/mo	2 TB storage, 2 TB download traffic from shared links	Same as other plans
Premium Plus Lifetime	$350/one-time payment	2 TB storage, 2 TB download traffic from shared links	Same as other plans

pCloud In-Depth Review

In this section of the pCloud review, we’ll go over the different aspects of this service so that you can make an informed decision about pCloud. We’ll start by going over some of the features that make it one of our personal favorite platforms for storing our files online.

One of the things you’ll find at the top of the pCloud interface is the automatic upload folder, and this allows you to upload all of your files from your phone. You can also use pCloud on your desktop and on your smartphone in tandem to great effect.

Backing Up Images

You can backup all of your images, or you can back up your videos as well if you like, as well as the type of file format you want to backup. It’s very easy to do too – you can just automatically set this up right from the mobile application.

If you go to your pictures, you’ll find a great interface to use for the images. There are some buttons at the bottom that you can use to scroll through your pictures really quickly; say for example if you want to look through a photo album. At the top, you can also even select a slide show option, complete with a repeat setting if you wish.

This slideshow option turns your photo collection to full screen while you watch. This slide show option would be really great for wedding photos or if you have a family album. You can even stream it to your TV, allowing you to play the slide show using all of the pictures that you have on your pCloud account.

In addition, if you choose to use pCloud backup all your photos, or you want to store a lot of photos on there, it’s got really good options for being able to adjust how you see the images. Toggling a button switches whether or not you want large tiles, so you can easily see all of your photos on your account.

You can also click a list button, which will show all the details about your pictures. If you want to change the sorting pattern, you can sort by ascending, descending, new to old, and more.

Intuitive Uploads

Another thing that you’ll notice is that in the bottom right-hand corner there’s an upload manager. The upload manager is very handy if you have multiple files uploading at the same time – you can see the progress of these uploads as you browse through your photos or any of the other files that you’ve backed up.

Looking at the bottom right-hand corner will show you all of the files that are currently uploaded to your account.

There are also a variety of ways in which you can back up your computer – pressing backups allows you to see the ways in which these backups can be carried out.

In addition to backing up your computer, you can actually back up information from your other accounts as well. pCloud definitely make the case for their service quite enticing – you can go into your backups and save information from Google Drive or Dropbox accounts. If you’ve been storing your information on one of these services, you can easily transition by using this feature here.

​Increased Security For Your Files

Another feature is the crypto folder feature, which is an optional add-on coming in at an additional $399 a month, or you can try it for free for 14 days. This feature basically protects your data a little bit better and is going to make it so that no one but yourself has access to the file contents on their servers.

If you’re using this for private use, we don’t really think you’d have a problem, and we’d only really consider this if it was for business use, or if you have some really important confidential information that you want to secure.

​Sharing Content – Both Ways

You can also very easily share content – all you have to do is select the file that you want; you can also see what files you shared in the past.

You can actually adjust how you want to share things, such as inviting someone to look at a particular folder, where you can then share an upload link or download link, which are both quite useful.

Sharing an upload link is particularly unique and works by giving you an upload link that you can share with someone. You just have to click on a button to retrieve said link, send the link to someone, and they can use it to send you files with having an account.

We personally had never seen anything like this before, and we think it’s a really nice touch. There’s no file size limit either, so you could send this to someone who wants to send you a video file for example, especially if they don’t have a cloud or another web service that allows them to upload and share large files.

Downloading works in much the same way, and as you’d expect out of a cloud-hosting service. With downloads, you can even see statistics on how many people have downloaded that file, including the overall traffic as part of an elaborate report.

This is useful if you’re sharing that link on a social media page, or somewhere where it might get a lot of clicks and you want to be able to track that. Going further into settings, you can password-protect your links too.

So, if you want to send someone a link that’s password protected, you can click on the check box, enter a password for that file and then set an expiry date, or even create a shortened link.

Managing Audio Is Simple

Another thing that we thought was pretty cool is the interface that pCloud uses in terms of how you would manage your audio. If you click on the audio button, you can see that it functions as an alternative to Google music for example. This function sorts all of your audio on your account (without it being in a specific folder), allowing you to click on any of your music files to open them up and play them in a separate window.

This is the audio media player function within pCloud so it’s really great if you wanted to upload all of your music and take it off your computer, phone or wherever you want to pull that data from.

You’ll see, of course, that it has the normal controls that you would expect from a media player, such as being able to shuffle your songs, adjust your volume and more. You can even create playlists, or save a specific playlist too.

The mobile app has the same function, and you can actually use the audio player function on the mobile app in much the same way that you would use any music apps on a mobile device. If you have a large library of songs and a large amount of storage on your account, you could put your music collection onto your account and still have plenty of space for all of your other files.

​Desktop Integration of pCloud

There is also a handy functionality with the desktop interface; clicking on your system tray here in the bottom right-hand corner will show that you have the pCloud app installed (showing as a little cloud icon). If you click on this a couple of times, it will bring up all of your settings. This will give you a variety of options as to how you want to manage your pCloud Drive. By default, it tells you how much storage you have available on your account.

Going further, you can select your sync settings, where you can sync all of the information from your computer if you wish, or you can sync it by specific folders. We like this because some platforms/services offer extensive backup applications, that back up your entire computer. Any folders you’ve chosen for backup are automatically backed when changes are made. If at any time you want to stop the syncing process, you can click on the stop button – you can, of course, resume it if you decide to change your mind. You can have as many folders backing up as you want.

You can also see all the files that you’ve shared here under the shares option, which includes everything that you’ve shared with others, as well as what has been shared with you. This makes it very easy to manage all the files you’ve exchanged. Of course, you also have some general settings that you can go through and manage; but besides this, we really like the interface of the Cloud Drive manager. When you have set your pCloud backup up, it’s actually going to appear on your computer as a separate drive.

In our case, we had it set up as the ‘P drive,’ but you can set it up however you want. We think this feature is great because if you want to save files to your P drive account without having to actually take up space on your computer, you can do this very easily with this interface. Any time that I go into one of the folders on my P drive – say the music folder, for example, and I wanted to save some more files to one of my folders in here, all I have to do is just drag and drop a file into this location and it’s going to upload straight to the pCloud website.

All of the files taking up space on pCloud are going to be completely separate from my hard drive space, which is really great too if you have a computer that has limited drive space on it. You’ll be used to this if you’ve ever used some of the smaller laptops, that only have, for example, 16 GB or something on them. This interface is really good, because no matter what machine you’re using, you’re always going to have at least 500 GBs of storage separate, where you can drag and drop files onto it and save files without having the need for a lot of hardware-based drive space.

File Backup

PCloud backup is pretty simple. Through the PCloud desktop app, you can choose individual folders or drives on your computer to back up. There is no “sync folder” created on your computer, so your files will live exclusively in the cloud. Any changes to your folders will be automatically updated in the cloud as well, provided the pCloud app is running. This makes it possible to back up entire machines, but with only 2 TB offered as a maximum, it might be hard for most.

On mobile, PCloud’s automatic backups shine. Videos and photos are automatically uploaded to the cloud, making it a great all-around backup app for mobile and desktop users alike. Not having to even think about backing them up makes it a great replacement for whatever default cloud backup your device uses. An intelligent search like that offered by Google Photos would have been nice to see, however.

File Restoration

Files can be restored simply by downloading them. The PCloud app makes this pretty simple with the ability to download individual files or entire folders all at once. There is no drive mirroring per se or anything like that. So, you’d have to just go through, and manually select what you want rather than just performing a one-click restore of an entire system or drive. The company has recently introduced the pCloud Rewind, an option that allows users to go back up to 30 days in the past, and restore or download previous versions of files.

Security

Security is an area that falls a bit flat in this pCloud review. All customers, even free ones, get SSL transfer encryption, which is nice. However, if you want data encryption, you’ll need to pay an additional monthly $4.99 charge to activate pCloud Crypto, their client-side encryption service. The good thing about Crypto though is that it’ll work on the mobile app as well, making sure your data are absolutely secure. If you’re willing to shell out for it, the encryption is top-notch.

Advanced/Other Features

Aside from the pay-to-access encryption, pCloud offers in-app audio and video streaming. Those alone make it worth considering as a powerful mobile option and alternative to Google cloud services like Google Play Music, for example.

PCloud file sharing is fairly strong, but there is no means to customize permissions for files. If someone has access to a file, they can do whatever with it, including editing it. At least file versioning is a potential savior. It’s kind of unusual since sharing is such a big part of their system. A saving grace is an integration. The pCloud app integrates very well with social apps like Instagram and Facebook.

They’ve got the power users in mind though with no file size limitations. The only limitation you have is your storage pool itself, which, admittedly, caps out pretty low for big data backups. A potential downside lies in their file versioning, which only stores 30 days’ worth of versions for free users and 180 for paid ones.

A recent, awesome feature of pCloud is the Public Folder. Once you enable this feature in your pCloud account, you will be able to create Direct links to the files, photos or videos that you add to the Public Folder. Another cool functionality is that users can now set passwords and expiration dates to their pCloud download links. Detailed statistics for download links are also available. Another recently introduced functionality is the pCloud Save. This is a truly addictive feature because it allows users to save anything from the Internet directly to their pCloud accounts.

pCloud – Pros & Cons

Pros

• Great mobile app with streaming;
• Great encryption, if you’re willing to pay;
• 24/7 support;
• Free accounts can earn bonus storage;

Cons

• Encryption as an add-on is odd;
• No collaboration;
• No permissions customization for sharing;

pCloud Alternative Options

In this section of the pCloud review, we will provide three alternatives that are on par with or better than pCloud’s services.

pCloud vs Dropbox

As far as pCloud alternatives are concerned, we just have to mention Dropbox. Because pCloud owes a lot to this popular cloud solution. Like pCloud, Dropbox is super easy to use. It works automatically, and has great integrations with most apps and operating systems. However, pCloud offers a larger array of options for power users relative to Dropbox.

pCloud vs Box

Box is another great alternative to pCloud and Dropbox for that matter. It offers excellent security, it’s quite easy to use, and it has a very good app design. Plus it offers a generous amount of free storage. The one area in which pCloud is definitely a better choice is collaboration, however.

pCloud vs Sync

Sync is another great pCloud alternative. Sync’s strong points are fast upload speeds, great support, and high levels of data security. On the other hand, Sync doesn’t offer file previews. In addition, decryption speeds tend to be slow. This is the tradeoff for the highly strict security policies. Plus, unlike pCloud, Sync does not have a file-sharing feature for mobile devices.

Our Verdict

All-in-all, pCloud has plenty of premier options that make it stand out as a cloud-based file hosting service. It includes all of the usual features you expect, as well as some very intuitive additions and ease-of-use perks that make it a delight to use. Make sure to check it out and let us know what you think of pCloud!

pCloud is a pretty solid cloud storage service. The security is good, the mobile app is awesome, and the support is top-notch. If you do choose to go with a free plan, you can earn additional storage as well, which is a really nice touch. Overall, it’s a good service, and it’ll be interesting to see how it grows in the future since it’s still quite young. At any rate, we would recommend giving pCloud a shot.

Thank you for reading our pCloud review, and please use the comment form to share your thoughts on pCloud!