Box

My company has been using box for half a year, and we are happy with the functionallity of the product. Commenting, sharing, syncing, updating: These are easy to use functions, and we soon decided to buy a business subscription.

But it turned out that the subscription is hard to handle and confusing to understand. When ordering, box counts all connected users. And because we had already initiated contact (i.e. shared folders) wiith some external clients, they too counted as "seats", and had to be paid for. However, increasing internal and external users after the initial order did not affect subscription or billing, event though we shortly after had used (quote) "25 of 7 seats".

Some months later, I found that it was time to do some evaluation, and concluded that I only needed a handful (4) subscriptions. The rest could be short-term collaborators (clients, temps etc) that could go along without the enhanced functionality of the business user. But box refused to reduce our seat count until we removed all connected personal users from our folders, and even then the process took weeks to complete.

Installed box.com because I found a way to get 25gb for free. But it just doesnt work well. The sync client just hogs my cpu and stopped syncing anything a few days after installation. I had to remove it. Glad that I did not pay any money for it.

If you are thinking about using this service personally or for your enterprise, I would highly recommend that you reconsider. Its expensive, and the features that make the product so expensive do not even function properly, though box would claim that they do. For example, in the below github issue post, a box employee describes a bug in the api which moves one user's box content to another user account, stating that it can timeout, which makes automation or application development all but impossible if that particular api endpoint is used:
https://github.com/box/box-windows-sdk-v2/issues/481
With this information, I submitted a ticket to the support portal, which I found closed the next day with the rediculous comment below:

Jason PanHi,Thanks for reaching out. We&#39;re typically happy to have tickets open for bug fixes, but the behavior change planned for the future is considered to be feature release. Currently, the API endpoint is behaving by design. As always, any API changes are also reflected at the API changelog:<a href="https://developer.box.com/v2.0/docs/api-changelog" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">https://developer.box.com/v2.0/docs/api-changelog</a>Apologies for the trouble. For now, we&#39;re going to go ahead and close this case on our end.Thank you,Jason PanUser Services Platform Specialist

Apparently, box doesn't actually refer to the problems with its software as "bugs", or acknowledge that there is any problem at all. No, apparently the fact that certain features only work every once in a while is "behaving by design." Rediculous. The customer support for other, general use issues isn't any better either, so I would highly recommend a different solution for your cloud storage needs, as not only is the customer support horrible, but they don't even take accountability for the issues within their own development platform. Really sad for such a large company.

My university offers unlimited space on Box, and I assumed that Box Sync worked the same way as Dropbox. But unfortunately, it constantly spins without syncing claiming instead that it is "Scanning Files." I searched for this online and discovered that it is a common problem especially on Mac. Instead of scanning just the files that have changed, it rescans all of the files. So even though they claim that your space is unlimited, the number of files that you can sync is limited the time that they take to scan. You can choose to upload the files via FTP or web browser and then choose not to sync them at all (so that they don't need to be constantly rescanned). But that's not a replacement for Dropbox at all, and its not really as useful.

https://community.box.com/t5/Box-Troubleshooting-Forum/Box-Sync-is-S-LO-W/td-p/11100

[Edited by schackb, September 14]

They send a email confirmation to complete registration and so far when I can get them to actually send one a few seconds later when I try to use it it is already expired. Oh well, I am not trusting my documents to a site that can't do any better than this anyway.

[Edited by ruskelljd, August 31]