MEGA icon
MEGA icon

MEGA

 907 likes

This cloud-storage service offers end-to-end encryption, selective synchronization, and shared folders without ads. Supports offline access, two-factor authentication, encrypted backup, a command-line interface, and dark mode for comfortable use.

MEGA screenshot 1

License model

  • FreemiumProprietary

Country of Origin

  • NZ flagNew Zealand

Platforms

  • Mac
  • Windows
  • Linux
  • Online
  • Android
  • iPhone
  • Chrome OS
  • Android Tablet
  • Windows Phone
  • iPad
  • Google Chrome  Browser extension for client-side password verification.
  • Mozilla Firefox  Browser extension for client-side password verification.
3.6 / 5 Avg rating (43)
907likes
35comments

Features

Suggest and vote on features
  1.  File Sync
  2.  End-to-End Encryption
  3.  File Storage
  4.  AES Encryption
  5.  Support for Large File
  6.  Encrypted Backup
  7.  Shared Folders
  8.  Cloud Sync
  9.  Ad-free
  10.  Two-factor Authentication
  11.  Dark Mode
  12.  Video Hosting
  13.  Works Offline
  14.  Command line interface
  15.  File Hosting
  16.  Selective Synchronization
  17.  Split and merge PDF files

MEGA News & Activities

Highlights All activities

Recent News

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Recent activities

  • FreemiumFrenzy, numa1961, u7741339 and anthonym016 liked MEGA
    2 days ago
  • Bobby_Reggine liked MEGA
    17 days ago
  • PredatorQ updated MEGA
    18 days ago
  • PredatorQ liked MEGA
    18 days ago
  • App icon
    Judith-TAGGRS added MEGA as alternative to TAGGRS
    25 days ago
  • rgnos liked MEGA
    about 1 month ago
  • App icon
    santhiaroo added MEGA as alternative to Cloudbrand
    about 1 month ago
Show all activities

MEGA information

  • Developed by

    NZ flagMEGA Cloud Services Ltd
  • Licensing

    Proprietary and Freemium product.
  • Pricing

    Subscription that costs up to $35 per month + free version with limited functionality.
  • Written in

  • Rating

    Average rating of 3.6 (43 ratings)
  • Alternatives

    200 alternatives listed
  • Supported Languages

    • English
    • Arabic
    • Dutch
    • French
    • German
    • Indonesian
    • Italian
    • Japanese
    • Korean
    • Polish
    • Portuguese
    • Romanian
    • Russian
    • Chinese
    • Spanish
    • Thai
    • Vietnamese

AlternativeTo Categories

Backup & SyncFile SharingSecurity & PrivacyVideo & MoviesWeb BrowsersOS & UtilitiesBitcoin & Cryptocurrency

Apple AppStore

  •   Updated May 22, 2025
  •   4.59 avg rating
View in AppStore

GitHub repository

  •  1,569 Stars
  •  272 Forks
  •  571 Open Issues
  •   Updated May 15, 2024 

Our users have written 35 comments and reviews about MEGA, and it has gotten 907 likes

MEGA was added to AlternativeTo by realnabarl on Jan 19, 2013 and this page was last updated May 29, 2025.

Comments and Reviews

   
 Post comment/review
Comment summary: MEGA's appeal largely stems from its generous free storage offerings and built-in encryption. However, users frequently report concerns about its reliability and security due to past controversies and technical issues, like slow uploads or failed synchronizations. Recent comments have highlighted changing storage terms, with new free accounts now receiving far less space. While considered a viable choice for secure cloud storage, its instability and issues with customer support can be potential deal-breakers.
Top Positive Comment
koushaldeva
Jan 22, 2016
5

This is a super size cloud storage man and with the extensions this is ultimate and the free storage is upto 50gb which is damm coooooooool you never ger those features anywhere .... MEGA is damm super

Top Negative Comment
John Fastman
Jan 10, 2017
38

For users seeking a stable, reliable, end-to-end encrypted file storage/sync service, Mega is probably a bad choice in the long run.

Firstly, it is a constant controversy magnet: from Kim DotCom (the founder) getting ousted and then making allegations against the service he created, to the discovery of fundamental security vulnerabilities, to Mega's servers getting hacked in November 2016, and on, and on... there are just too many confidence-deflating developments...

Secondly, the service is quite slow or, at best, sporadic. The client can be very slow even to index and upload files. The Firefox plugin seems completely broken (as of the time of this review).

Thirdly, the 50GB "for free" sounds just too good to be true (and things that sound too good to be true usually are). You should always exercise a healthy degree of skepticism when you're being offered something "for free" (e.g. Chrome and Gmail and Facebook and Yahoo! Mail are "free" because you pay for them with you privacy when every detail of what you do online is used to make ads - where will THAT data end up in 20 years?). "Freemium" services offer a little (e.g. 2-5 GB of storage) in the hope you'll like the service and buy more. 50 GB is an order of magnitude greater. For me that stretches believability.

Fourth, MEGA's predecessor, MegaUpload, was shut down - however unfairly - by request of US authorities acting ostensibly to protect Hollywood copyrighted material. It's more than likely MEGA is being used to share files illegally, and that therefore it will be targeted/closed in a similar way. It's heritage doesn't inspire confidence that the service will be around for the next 10 years, just exactly. Also, Mega's original founder, Kim Dotcom has alleged that the service is under the control now of people who have less than stellar reputations.

If you're looking for a stable, reliable, end-to-end/zero-knowledge encrypted file backup/sync service, you're better off paying at least a small amount for a reliable service without the security pitfalls and constant controversy.

Examples include:

  • SpiderOak (US - very well established - Mac/Win/Linux - less good mobile)
  • Tresorit (Switzerland, sync, hugely secure - Mac/Win/Linux/Android/iPhone - excellent but expensive)
  • Sync.com (Canada, sync like Dropbox but with built in encryption - cheap, no Linux client)
  • iDrive (US, backup and sync - cheap but no Linux client)

However, if you want to have a low price for lots of storage AND have encryption, a good choice is using a non-encrypted service together with Cryptomator, which is an open source encryption app for Linux, Mac and Windows and which lets you set different passwords for different folders (Use a password manager like KeePass to generate and remember them). Cryptomator is specifically designed to give you privacy in the cloud and its free and open source. You can easily pair it up with excellent and low cost services like pCloud (Switzerland) and Seafile.de (Germany), or any other sync service of your choice. Such services are likely to be around much longer than Mega, judging by how things have been going with it so far, but that's just my guess.

Mohamed Ahmed
Feb 7, 2017

Believe it, it's really 50GB storage.

John Fastman
Feb 7, 2017

I didn't write that I doubt it's 50GB. My point was that the combination of this - which is an order of magnitude greater than competitors offer - together with the fact that Mega's code was found to contain security vulnerabilities, that the predecessor service was shut down amid much controversy, that their founder no longer supports them after having been ousted... and so on... does nothing to create an atmosphere of trust around Mega to any level where I'd believe it's a good place to put my files, trust their crypto, security practices, that they are trustworthy - be that ethically or that they will be around next month/year. It's just not a background I associate with a company that deserve my trust.

Mohamed Ahmed
Feb 8, 2017

I get your point. But if your files are so important don't put it on the cloud, there is no web service, mobile app, or operating system that is 100% secure.

John Fastman
Mar 12, 2017

No, but there are services which are:

  • open source (e.g. any service you like + Cryptomator) and/or
  • audited and found to be secure (e.g. Tresorit)
  • not covered in controversy
  • don't raise suspicions with a disproportionately high level of "free" storage.

It's not a binary situation of trust the cloud or not. By all means use the cloud, but be smart and sceptical, and look at the reliability, reputation and transparency of a company before you trust them with things you value.

Natterjack565
Jun 28, 2017

John, Just to say I mistakenly clicked the "not helpful" button, so +2 to your review!

Massick
Dec 21, 2017

I can only talk from my experience, and this is the fastest free cloud service I've ever used. Maybe all the disproportionately high level of "free" storage is a countermeasure for all that bad reputation. Again, I use it and I'm very happy with it.

TBayAreaPat
Apr 4, 2025
0

from Brave AI; "MEGA, a cloud storage service, is headquartered in Auckland, New Zealand. The company offers zero-knowledge encrypted cloud storage, ensuring that only the user can decrypt their data." 20 GB storage free.

yhnavein
Jan 2, 2025
0

I liked Mega back in the day, when it worked. But it's not the case anymore. Upgraded to a paid tier, did a backup of my machine and that's pretty much it. Mega does not work anymore - not possible to log in, sync files, or anything. Support did not help to resolve the issue, as this is apparently a standard behaviour when you have thousands of files under sync functionality. Miraculously managed to cancel the paid subscription before it was automatically renewed.

RIP Mega. It was a great journey, but this is a deal breaker. Bye

dabockster
Jul 9, 2024
2

Definitely a more "private" file backup service, but is more buggy than their competition. They've also set up their company in some quasi-stateless setup. Good for certain uses, but not as an everyday backup system for data you can't afford to lose.

romanio412
Jan 22, 2024
1

I have used MEGA for two years and I'm utterly disappointed.

This service is unreliable:

  • the mobile app takes a lot of time to open and it's very, very slow (I've looked into this, and the reason it is so is because of bad code and lacking some most obvious optimisations); most of these issues become notiable once you have more than 1 TB of data, I have around 4.
  • to give you an example, the search in the mobile app is extremely glitchy, once you searched for something it would display the results, and then once you're scrolling through the results it would re-run the search and refresh the results. This is annoying.
  • the synchronisation of pictures from the mobile phone is glitchy: it takes a long time to start, it sometimes completely ignores certain images and videos; when I installed the app on my friend's phone there was a total of ~1500 images and videos to sync in bulk: apparently that's too much for MEGA. After many attempts and restarts of the app, the syncronisation wouldn't start at all. Sometimes it would synchronise a certain amount of images and then it would just stop.
  • if I wanted to share a file from another app (let's say WhatsApp) to a cloud drive on my phone, the mobile app would take at least 12 seconds to start, even when repeating the operation (hot start). It seems to me every time you start it, it fetches the manifest file from the server. Again, the lack of optimisation.
  • the synchronisation is based on the file's Modified Date attribute: if I am editing my local files without changing the modified date (bulk processing of photos, for example), upon save the files get overwritten with the version from the cloud.
  • when you cold start the app (e.g. after a PC reboot) it takes about 16 hours for it to get into a usable state: for 16 hours and sometimes longer it recalculates the hash of every file on the disk trying to determing whether the file is the same.
  • it's impossible to reach the support to tell them about the issues: they don't respond to emails (although having a dedicated support mailbox), they don't respond to an in-app support submissions, etc. They don't look respond to the comments on Google Play. I have failed to find any way to contact the support team.

The cherry on top and the reason I'm finally leaving and searching for an Alternative has happened today:

  • at some point they released an update that failed to install on my Windows PC: it reported a failure and rolled back to the older version;
  • it was running like that for a couple of months, I would ocasionally try to run the update, but it wouldn't budge;
  • yesterday I noticed that the files don't get synchronised at all, bidirectionally, so I decided to try and update it again: the update finally had been installed successfully, however after I ran the App it reported that all my folders are out of sync. Preparing to wait another 16 hours for a new synchronisation to go, I started ticking the checkboxes to start the re-sync for all my folders when I noticed that instead of scanning the local drive it's re-fetching the content from the cloud and overwriting my files. I immediately stopped the sync and started reading the log files: turns after the upgrade the App found an old manifest database somewhere and started doing the synchronisation based on the old db: this essentially ended up corrupting my data. Had I not noticed it immediately, the scale of the disaster could have been much greater.

This comment is getting too long and I probably have complaints for 3 times more than I have already written, so I'm going to stop here.

TLDR: MEGA is unreliable and potentially dangerous. If you don't want you files corrupted, if you need a robust service, this is not for you.

The reason why I chose it a couple years ago was the sheer amount of storage they were giving (10 TB) and End-to-end encryption, and back then not a lot of services could provide this. However, now there's better alternatives.

arsCynic ??
Jul 29, 2023
0

Works on every device without a hassle.

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7 of 35 comments

What is MEGA?

MEGA, the successor of MegaUpload icon MegaUpload , is a cloud storage and file hosting service produced by Mega Limited. This cloud-storage solution claims to protect your privacy with end-to-end encryption and offers a "Secure Collaboration" feature.

MEGA Videos

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