Dropbox Business vs Personal: 6 Reasons Businesses Should Switch

If you are someone who already uses Dropbox for personal use, and is wondering what are the differences between Dropbox Individual VS Business, this article is for you.

If you are part of a team, business, or organisation, you’ll also be wondering why you should consider Dropbox Business over the Individual accounts (Basic and Professional).

At Web Imp, we count on Dropbox Business (read our case study) to enable all of our staff to work effectively from anywhere. We are glad to have made the shift to Dropbox Business, and here are the reasons why your business should too.

What is the difference between Dropbox Business and Personal?

First of all, what is the difference between Dropbox Business and Dropbox for personal use? Let’s talk about Dropbox for personal use first, something you can think of as the “base Dropbox model”. 

Dropbox Personal; has basic features such as file sharing and cloud storage. It is accessible from anywhere and can be synced automatically. You can also start Dropbox Personal with a basic free account.

At first glance, the Individual plan doesn’t look much different than plans for Teams and Businesses. A lot of the features are very similar.

Dropbox Business builds upon these features and amps it up even further.

It provides features such as large storage space (5TB, up to unlimited), sharing control, SSL encryption and 256-bit AES, along with sharing permissions, junk cleaning, file tracking, live customer support and more.

The biggest differences and main reasons why a business should get Dropbox Business are in the organisation management and administrative tools.

If you or your team are still using the basic version of Dropbox, here are 6 reasons why you should make the switch.

6 main reasons businesses should use Dropbox Business over Dropbox Personal.

1. Dropbox Business is specifically built for organizations

What you love about Dropbox is still there in Dropbox Business, just bigger, better, and more secure.

From granting selected users access privileges to sensitive information (to enable secure sharing of information) to a specific selection of assorted admin tools, Dropbox demonstrates understanding of your business needs.

Exercise greater control over user access

Business documents are kept separate from personal Dropbox documents in a clear, controllable space where the files can be organised as you please. 

The aforementioned administrative tools also allow for the transfer of user privileges and tracking of user activity such as sign-ins and edits, and you can even set up a two-step verification if you’re a stickler for security.

Admin users are also granted permission to remote-wipe data from devices. This is useful in cases where an employee leaves the company, or if one of your staff accidentally loses their device.

The administrator console bestows you power over control and visibility features, all the while providing users with tools to protect their accounts.

Dropbox also integrates easily with over 300,000 apps (like Slack, Zoom, Google Docs), so your company’s favorite tools and software are likely supported.

2. Dropbox Business enables greater team collaboration

While regular Dropbox will do just fine for light users, Dropbox Business understands the needs of the teams that use it professionally. 

Make use of People Pages

Whether you’re collaborating with someone on an intense short-term project or have a colleague you’re always cc’ing in every document and email, Dropbox Business makes linking up with them easier, even while they are working remotely.

People Pages are a Dropbox Business-only feature that you can access from within the Dropbox app itself.

Now, you can view automatically-created People Pages for the colleagues or team members you’re always collaborating with. 

These pages helpfully summarise all the information you’ll need about the colleague you’re working with. The People Page displays files, folders, meetings, and updates.

This helps streamline your search for relevant documents and gets you what you need in record time.

To make things even easier for managers, you can Slack, email, or even create a Zoom meeting with colleagues directly from the People Page.

That’s not all—their contact information and the calendar (including your upcoming shared Zoom meetings) will be available on their People Page, granting an easy access at a glance to the need-to-know information.

Other content that the People Pages contain include shared content, which refers to the content they have shared with you and collaborated with you on within the last 90 days.

This is helpfully summarised under Recent Activity, highlighting when a file was last shared or edited within Dropbox.

People Pages is an incredibly useful tool to have, especially when your team works remotely. The ability to set up meetings in just a couple of clicks right from your Buy-Steroids-USA.net shaves off valuable time that you could spend on producing quality work instead. 

3. It improves remote working productivity

It is good that Dropbox allows online collaboration on the same document. It improves the way the teams cooperate.

But sometimes, you want to stop others from making changes to your document while you are making changes.

Shared File locking

That’s where Shared File Locking will come in handy.

Locking a file while you’re working on it gives you complete autonomy, meaning that people won’t be able to edit it while you’re doing so.

However, your colleagues will still be able to view, comment on, and share the file with others

How do you unlock the file?

Simply request the original owner to unlock the file by clicking a button to send a notification! If your team member is away from the computer and it’s an urgent matter, your administrators can also help unlock the file from their admin console!

This allows team members to edit in peace – without someone else editing it before trying to save it, resulting in two versions of the same document.

Shared File Locking encourages one person to work on the document at a time, smoothing out the editing process.

If you’re running into issues with multiple people accessing and changing the same document at the same time, this feature is for you. It improves the effectiveness of collaboration, and improves productivity.

Additionally, Dropbox Business incorporates machine learning. This especially comes in handy with automatic image text recognition—an incredibly handy tool for those companies who handle lots of scanned forms.

This particular tool allows users to search for text in images and PDF using optical character recognition.

Access from anywhere – it’s great for remote working

Last but not least, mobile is king in the 21st century. That’s why Dropbox Business is available on  Windows, Android, iOS, and even Linux. 

You also don’t need a powerful machine to use it’s suite of tools. You can rest assured that as long as your remote workers will be able to collaborate on files in Dropbox.

4. It provides enterprise level security and privacy controls

Despite its widespread accessibility, Dropbox still takes its security incredibly seriously.

Member data reports, individual account conversion, and directory restrictions are additional security features introduced to simplify data security for Dropbox Business teams and users, keeping your information exactly where it ought to be.

Dropbox understands that security and privacy are paramount for any business. To keep your data safe, Dropbox Business incorporates multiple layers of protection.

Enterprise-level data encryption

These measures include secure data transfers, encryption, network configuration, and application-level controls distributed across a scalable, secure infrastructure.

By distributing encrypted files logically and spreading other data across multiple services, data syncing speeds up and becomes more reliable than ever, in addition to enhancing security.

If your business deals with sensitive material, and you need to provide your clients with confidence of your data security, you definitely need to switch to Dropbox Business.

Password protected files

Want to send confidential files with an additional layer of protection from prying eyes?

You can set up password protected files and links, so that only a trusted person can access the documents.

5. Restore lost documents with Dropbox Rewind 

Anyone who has ever used a computer or a failing hard drive understands the pain of losing an important file.

Sometimes the pain comes in the form of an accidentally deleted file, or a file that has been saved wrongly.

Dropbox Rewind understands this, and grants administrators the power to restore team content to a previous point in time.

This can be useful in many circumstances—mass file deletion, virus attacks, or simple bad luck can cause corrupted documents, which cause trouble later down the line.

Dropbox Rewind can help roll back team content with ease about 180 days, or about 6 months. This quick-recovery feature is available on all Dropbox Business and Education plans.

It could potentially save your team a lot of trouble. 

6. Make use of the Productivity Solutions Grant to get up to 80% subsidies for Dropbox Business

If you are a Small Medium Enterprise (SME) that is registered in Singapore, you can get up to 80% subsidies when you sign up for Dropbox Business, via the Productivity Solutions Grant (PSG).

On top of getting a document management system and cloud storage solution built for businesses and organisations, you even get funding support for switching over.

Web Imp is a pre-approved SME Go Digital vendor, and we a trusted partner of Dropbox Singapore. To find out more about eligibility and criteria to be met, feel free to ask us.

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We’ve worked with clients like Reveres Management, who loved the ease of cloud backups, and the ability to restore old files. Read this case study to learn how they saved on IT costs by using Dropbox Business.

Ready to start your Dropbox Business journey to simplify remote working? Let the team at Web Imp help in your transition.

Simply drop us a message, or read more about Dropbox Business first.