Box
A secure platform for content management, workflow and collaboration
Summary
Our users have written 11 comments and reviews about Box, and it has gotten 432 likes
- Developed by Box, Inc.
- Proprietary and Freemium product.
- Subscription that costs between $5 and $25.
- Average rating of 1.8
- 238 alternatives listed
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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:
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.
it works great. plays better with other parties than dropbox. also their free tier is amazing; i still haven't hit the limit
No Linux app, which makes it less useful for those working across platform. Web service still works, obviously, but is far from ideal.
Not a day goes by we don't have problems with box. It's document search capabilities are just as bad as Dropbox in 2010. It seems to give up after 1000 words and doesn't support pages or google docs. Drive at least supports the latter and seems to never give up indexing a doc. Google Drive File Stream is better in every way. The only thing it Box does "better" is it allows real time iCloud stuff through an iFrame, but the feature has no off button, makes document loading slower, and has terrible android/windows/chromeos support... if you need collab, use Google Docs like we have been doing for the past decade. The instances where real time collab is necessary are very rare.
Speaking of which, Box has the worst Google docs support out of any of their competitors. Yes, it does allow you to save gdocs on your box, but no one using their app will see it... unlike how you would see them in every other service, as shortcuts that open up in a browser. At this point, Google File Stream is easily the best Cloud Document Storage service out there, with Box being a distant second.
[Edited by Oldarney, December 03]
[Edited by Oldarney, December 03]
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]
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.