Expert rating
Benefits
- Robust Office support
- Add Office apps with paid plans
- Great Business Options
Disadvantages
- The web app is clunky
- 5GB Free Tier
Our Verdict
If you need a cloud plan for a family or small team and you already use Microsoft’s Office apps, OneDrive is a great option.
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We’ve rounded up the best cloud-based storage services for your Mac, and OneDrive definitely deserves a spot on the list.
While I’d say it’s not as intuitive as Google Drive, if you use Microsoft Office to some extent you’ll find a lot to like.
The app may exist in Finder just like its competitors, but with a variety of storage plans that add access to Microsoft mainstays like Word, Excel, etc., it has a lot of potential for the workplace – or for families with working children. on school projects.
But it’s not all good news. The OneDrive web app feels slow compared to Google Drive (but not as slow as iCloud Drive), and the base 5GB storage is woefully low for free users (although it’s still better than the 2GB of Dropbox).
First impressions
OneDrive is found in Finder like many of its competitors.
Microsoft
The 5GB base storage is definitely low, but Microsoft really wants to encourage you to choose one of its paid plans. You can spend $99.99/£79.99 per year to access Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and more, with 1TB of storage per person (6TB total). That covers six users, so you can give everyone in your household access to Office and OneDrive for a relatively low price. The Microsoft 365 Family plan costs just $30/£20 more than the Microsoft 365 Personal version which costs $69.99/£59.99 per year. The most basic option is Microsoft 365 Basic at $19.99/£19.99 per year for 100GB of cloud storage. As with most services these days, Microsoft also offers monthly prices of $1.99/£1.99 (100GB), $6.99/£5.99 (1TB), $9.99/ £7.99 (6TB for 6 people) per month.
Whichever option you choose, OneDrive is a model citizen when it comes to macOS. The app is lightweight and sits in the Finder so you can drag and drop it as you see fit.
OneDrive features
As I already mentioned above, one of the best aspects of OneDrive is that (for a price) it opens up the rest of the Office ecosystem, both for Mac and iPhone or iPad.
These apps perform fairly uniformly across all Apple platforms and use OneDrive to sync between platforms. If you don’t like Google Docs or Sheets, having Word and Excel documents spread across your devices can be a huge boon.
You can also download content directly from an Xbox console if you own one, meaning it’s easy to grab your favorite clips and drop them straight into OneDrive to then edit on your Mac or PC.
The inconveniences of OneDrive
The OneDrive web app is slow.
Microsoft
More storage at the free tier would be great, but the biggest problem with OneDrive, much like iCloud Drive, is that its web app can feel slow. It’s just not as easy to move between files and access items from the web view.
It’s also better suited to finding Office documents (which makes sense), but I kept running into an issue where it would just tell me I couldn’t upgrade my storage tier during testing.
The problem stopped after a while, but it’s certainly strange that OneDrive doesn’t seem to want to take my money.
The essentials
If you need a cloud plan for a family or small team and you already use Microsoft’s Office apps, OneDrive is a great option.
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