What is the Difference Between Google Drive and Google Drive for Work?
How to buy extra storage in Gmail and Google Apps
Google has an online file storage service called Google Drive that competes with Dropbox and Box as a method for storing documents, photos and videos online. Everyone who has a Gmail account can use it to log into Google Drive which shares storage space across the two services and G+ Photos (formerly Picasa Web Albums).
Google Drive for Work is a near-identical service that is part of Google Apps for Work, Google’s suite of business productivity tools. While Google Drive is free, Google Apps for Work starts at US$5 per user a month.
What are the main differences between the free Google Drive and the paid Google Drive for Work?
What’s different about the paid version of Google Drive?
- Storage. The free version gives you 15GB, the paid version is double that at 30GB for the standard Google Apps for Work plan. A Google Apps plan with unlimited storage costs US$10 per user a month (double the standard plan) with a minimum of five users. Businesses with less than five users get 1TB per user.
- Support. There is no support for the free version of Google Drive. Users can look for answers through Google’s forums but that means waiting for a reply from Google staff or power users. The paid version gets a 24×7 phone number for support calls.
- Sharing. The paid version has an audit capability that lets the administrator review activity across all documents, employees and actions within the Google Apps organisation. The admin can see how documents have been shared internally with colleagues or to external contacts.
- Reporting. The paid version has fine-grained admin controls, such as who can pin files offline and who can use the sync client, to give the business more control over the environment.
- Programming. An audit API grants programmatic access to this data for companies that want to write their own code.
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