Icedrive vs Tresorit 2020: A Cloud Storage Battle
Tresorit is a secure cloud storage option with advanced file-sharing options, while Icedrive is an affordable new service making a splash on the scene. Find out which one is better in this Icedrive vs Tresorit matchup.
— Last Updated: 2020-10-28T18:34:59+00:00 Facts checked by: Andrea Babic
Cloud storage has become one of the most ubiquitous types of software, with most people using it in some way, even if they’re not entirely aware of it. Staying on top of all the alternatives can be difficult, though, especially as new services like Icedrive enter the fray. Keep reading this Icedrive vs Tresorit comparison to see how the newcomer stacks up against one of our best picks for the most secure cloud storage.
Both Icedrive and Tresorit performed well in our reviews (check out our Icedrive review and Tresorit review for more details), so this is bound to be a close contest.
However, if neither of these services seem up your alley, we recommend checking out our best cloud storage list, which should provide you with plenty of other options. Our top pick is Sync.com, which is a cheap and easy-to-use cloud storage provider with excellent security.
Icedrive vs Tresorit Matchup
Whenever we compare cloud storage providers, we run the two services through six rounds focused on features, pricing, usability, file syncing and sharing, speed and finally security and privacy. If we end up with a tie, we’ll consider the margins of victory to determine a final winner. So without further ado, it’s time to see which of our two contenders is the better choice.
- 1
- Sync Folder
- File Link Sharing
- Folder Sharing
- Versioning
- 2
- Sync Folder
- File Link Sharing
- Folder Sharing
- Versioning
1. Features
We’ll start our comparison by taking a look at the features that Icedrive and Tresorit offer. We won’t take the core functionality of cloud storage — namely file syncing and sharing — into consideration here, as we’ll judge these in their own round further down.
Icedrive Features
Starting with Icedrive, the new service doesn’t place a heavy emphasis on providing extra features. However, there are still some things worth mentioning. First up is the file preview system, which not only lets you view documents and images stored on the cloud, but even stream video files directly without downloading them.
Versioning is also solid, as Icedrive retains old versions of files indefinitely whenever you make an edit. These old versions don’t take up any of your cloud storage space. However, we’ve been told by Icedrive’s customer service that once it reaches a critical mass of users, it will have to start imposing time limits on its versioning.
Deleted files are also retained indefinitely, but with the caveat that anything placed in Icedrive’s trash folder still uses your allotted storage space.
Unfortunately, there are no collaboration tools to speak of, and Icedrive lacks integration with services like Google Docs or Microsoft Office. If you’re mainly looking for a way to work on files and documents at the same time as other people, you should check out our best cloud storage for collaboration list.
Tresorit Features
Moving on to Tresorit, it’s a similar story to Icedrive. Tresorit’s heavy focus on security means that many advanced features, such as collaboration tools, simply aren’t possible.
What Tresorit does offer is a great degree of transparency into your cloud storage. You can view a detailed activity log for every file or folder, which shows you if anything has been added, changed or deleted and by whom.
Although Tresorit offers plans for individual users, it’s a business solution first and foremost. This is reflected in its extensive admin center. Here you get detailed information about each user assigned to your account, including their files, activity and devices.
You can also generate detailed reports of your cloud storage usage and create policies to govern how your users interact with the service if you’re on one of the business plans.
Tresorit also makes it onto our best cloud storage for versioning list, as it keeps old and deleted files for an unlimited amount of time as long as you’re on the Solo, Business Plus or Enterprise plan. If you’re on the cheaper Premium plan, you only get versioning for up to 10 past versions, while the Business Standard plan provides up to 50 versions.
Finally, Tresorit also lets you set up throttling for uploads and downloads individually if you don’t want the application to take up too much of your bandwidth.
Since neither service is particularly feature-heavy, this round is a close one. We’ll give Icedrive the edge though, as the file preview system is bound to be more important to the average user than detailed admin controls and bandwidth throttling.
2. Pricing
If all you want is a cheap way to store your files online, then pricing is undoubtedly one of the most important criteria when considering which cloud storage provider to choose.
One of the best ways to establish yourself as a new service in the cloud storage space is to offer good value for money, and it’s clear that Icedrive is well aware of this. First, there’s the free plan, which is fairly generous. It offers 10GB of free cloud storage and access to most of Icedrive’s features, which earns it a spot on our best free cloud storage list.
However, Icedrive’s free plan leaves out zero-knowledge encryption and some more advanced file-sharing options. Thankfully, these features aren’t crucial, though some people might find them useful.
If you’re looking for more storage, there are three Icedrive paid plans that provide 150GB, 1TB and 5TB, called Lite, Pro and Pro+.
Besides the amount of storage you get, the only other difference between the plans is the transfer cap, meaning how much data you’re allowed to upload or download in any given month. For the Lite plan this is 250GB, while the two Pro plans limit you to 2TB and 8TB, respectively.
The Lite plan only offers an annual subscription, which is priced at $19.99 per year, while the two more expensive plans are available on both a monthly and annual basis. The Pro plan costs $4.99 per month or $49.99 per year, while the Pro+ plan will run you $17.99 per month or $179.99 per year.
 | |
Free
| |
Lite
| 1-year plan $ 1.67/ month $19.99 billed every year Lifetime plan $ 1.64/ month $59.00 one time payment, Monthly price for 3 years of use |
Pro
| |
Pro+
| |
Lifetime Plans
These prices are excellent on their own, but Icedrive takes it one step further by giving users the option of signing up for a lifetime plan. Instead of paying a monthly or yearly fee, you instead purchase lifetime access to the service for $59, $149 or $499, depending on which paid plan you choose.
Although it’s always a risk to purchase lifetime cloud storage plans — as you never know if the company will go out of business or change its mind later on — you need to use Icedrive for only three years for the lifetime plans to pay off.
Tresorit, on the other hand, has always been on the expensive side of things when compared to other cloud storage alternatives. Although there is a free plan called Tresorit Send, it doesn’t actually provide you with any cloud storage. Instead, it’s a way to send files to other people using end-to-end encryption.
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Small Business
| 1-year plan $ 20.00/ month $240.00 billed every year |
Business
| 1-year plan $ 12.00/ month $144.00 billed every year |
Enterprise
| 1-year plan $ 24.00/ month $288.00 billed every year |
When it comes to the paid plans, there are five options, two of which are for individuals and three for businesses. Starting with the personal plans, you have Premium and Solo. The first offers 500GB of storage with a file size cap of 5GB, while the second increases this to 2500GB and 10GB, respectively.
If you opt for monthly billing, these plans will run you $10 and $25 per month, or $8.33 and $20 per month if you pay for a year up front. In terms of features, they are largely similar, though the more expensive Solo plan gives you access to encrypted file requests (meaning other people can request access to your files or folders).
Free Trial
The detailed activity history mentioned in the previous section is also not available on the cheaper plan. If you’d like to try the software before committing to anything, Tresorit offers a 14-day free trial for all of its plans, which is great since there’s no proper free cloud storage option.
For business users, there are three options: Business Standard, Business Plus and Enterprise. The first two of these come with 1TB and 2TB of storage and cost $15 and $20 per month, respectively, or $12 and $16 on an annual plan. The Enterprise plan, meanwhile, is intended for larger business and, as such, offers flexible storage caps.
Note that these prices and storage allotments are per user. For example, a business of five people would receive 5TB of storage on the Business Standard plan and pay $75 per month.
When you compare these prices, it’s an easy win for Icedrive. Tresorit has never been a cheap option for cloud storage, and it clearly shows when you compare it to a much more affordable option like Icedrive. That means our score is now 2-0 as Icedrive cements its early lead.
3. Usability
Next up for our comparison is usability. Essentially this means how well the software is designed and how easy it is to set up, learn and use. This is a crucial round, as it doesn’t matter how many advanced features are included in a piece of software if actually using it is an exercise in frustration.
Luckily, both Tresorit and Icedrive offer exceptionally well-designed and user-friendly interfaces that require little from the user in terms of setup. In contrast to a lot of other cloud storage providers, such as Dropbox or Google Drive, both Icedrive and Tresorit offer complete desktop applications rather than shoving everything into the system tray.
Simple Sync & Portable Application
Looking at Icedrive first, there are two separate applications available. The first is a simple sync client that gives you access to a basic control panel, sync folders and the Icedrive virtual drive.
If you want more functionality than this, there’s also the “portable application” which essentially mirrors the Icedrive web dashboard. A lot of cloud storage providers don’t offer anything like this, instead limiting users to a small system tray application and forcing them to use a web browser for any advanced actions.
The portable application — and by extension the web dashboard — is very sleek, which makes it a pleasure to use. The “transfers” section in particular is great, as it provides you with a clear and detailed overview of files currently downloading or uploading.
As we mentioned at the start of this round, Tresorit takes a similar approach to usability. With the exception of the user management features, the desktop application includes everything that the web dashboard does, which is great. It’s also well designed and pretty to look at, which is always a nice bonus.
Get Started Guide
When you first create your account, Tresorit provides you with a helpful “get started” guide that takes you through the various features the service offers. It also sets up a checklist of actions you can perform to get the most out of the software, including installing the desktop and mobile apps, setting up and sharing a folder, and visiting the web dashboard and admin console.
The client and web dashboard are both easy to navigate, with everything located exactly where you’d expect. The main menu on the left-hand side of the client gives you access to your files, shared links and file requests, and most of the actions you can perform can be found if you right-click a file or folder.
In addition to the web dashboards and desktop clients, both Icedrive and Tresorit offer mobile apps for Android and iOS. These can be used to automatically upload photos and videos, as well as access your files on the go.
Seeing as both Tresorit and Icedrive are exceptionally well designed and easy to use, there’s no clear winner in this round. In fact, there’s so little difference between the two from an ease-of-use point of view that we’re going to call this round a tie, bringing our score to 3-1 in Icedrive’s favor.
4. File Syncing & Sharing
The ability to sync and share files is by far the most important feature of any cloud storage service. Beyond just keeping your data safe on the cloud (for which online backup services are the better option), this is the main reason why people use cloud-based storage, and as such is important enough to warrant its own round in our comparison.
File Syncing
Icedrive does well with syncing. You can set up as many “sync pairs” as you want, and Icedrive doesn’t require you to place all of it in one central folder like Sync.com or Dropbox do.
In addition to the sync folders, Icedrive also sets up a virtual drive on your computer. You can drag and drop files here, and they’ll be easily accessible through file explorer as long as you have an internet connection. The files stored in your virtual drive also don’t take up any of your local storage space, as they’re stored exclusively in the cloud.
Unfortunately, things aren’t quite as good for Icedrive in terms of file sharing. Although you can certainly share files with other people, Icedrive lacks some of the more advanced sharing options that other cloud services, such as pCloud provide. Furthermore, it’s not possible to share entire folders, which forces you to create links for each individual file when you have several to share.
You can share files in two ways, either by creating a public link and sharing it with another person manually, or by having Icedrive email them an invite to the shared file directly. If you’re on one of the paid plans, you can enable password protection and an expiration date for your link, but that’s it in terms of advanced sharing features.
Tresorit offers the same sync functionality as Icedrive, and adding a new sync folder is as simple as right-clicking it and selecting “add to Tresorit.” The only difference between the two services in this area is that Tresorit supports selective sync, meaning you can pick and choose which files inside a folder get synchronized with the cloud.
File Sharing
Although both services offer similar sync features, there’s a stark difference when you look at file sharing. In contrast to Icedrive’s rather lackluster sharing options, Tresorit not only lets you set a password and expiration date for your shared links, but also provides detailed access logs.
Furthermore, you can also require other people to enter their email before accessing the file or folder. This means that you get to see the email address of anyone who opens your link, providing a degree of transparency that Icedrive simply doesn’t offer.
Like with Icedrive, you can either create a link and manually share it, or have Tresorit compose an email for you that includes the link. To this end, Tresorit is integrated with Gmail and Outlook, as well as whatever your default email application is. With all of these sharing features, it’s easy to see why Tresorit made our list of the best cloud storage for sharing.
To summarize this round, both services get top marks for their file syncing potential, but Tresorit clearly outdoes Icedrive with its more extensive file-sharing options. That means this round goes to Tresorit, which leaves us with a score of 3-2 in Icedrive’s favor as we proceed to our final two rounds.
5. Speed
That brings us to our speed round. While this criterion certainly isn’t as important as features or pricing, it can still make or break a cloud storage service. After all, nothing is more annoying than waiting a long time if you need to quickly upload and share a file or folder.
To test the speed of both Icedrive and Tresorit, we uploaded a 1GB test folder on a connection with a download speed of 32 Mbps and an upload speed of roughly 6 Mbps. That means we expect our upload to take around 24 minutes and our download as little as four to five minutes.
Although it’s usually a factor, geographical distance didn’t play much of a part in this comparison. This is because our test was performed from North Macedonia, which means we were relatively close to both Icedrive’s servers in the UK and Tresorit’s in Ireland and the Netherlands.
| First attempt: | Second attempt: | Average: | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Icedrive upload | 0:28:44 | 0:28:28 | 0:28:36 |
| Icedrive download | 0:05:01 | 0:04:55 | 0:04:58 |
| Tresorit upload | 0:30:56 | 0:30:45 | 0:30:51 |
| Tresorit download | 0:05:22 | 0:05:15 | 0:05:19 |
As you can see, both services performed quite well. That said, Icedrive was almost 10 percent faster than Tresorit when uploading, which means this is another win for the newcomer. This leaves the score at 4-2 as we head into our final round.
6. Security & Privacy
Finally we arrive at our last round, which focuses on privacy and security. Although we already have an overall winner, whether Icedrive can pull even further ahead still remains to be seen. Security is Tresorit’s primary reason for existing, though, so it’s going to be a tough round for Icedrive to snatch.
AES vs Twofish Encryption
Encryption is by far the most important thing for both security and privacy, albeit in slightly different ways. On the security side of things, both services use strong encryption protocols — AES for Tresorit and Twofish for Icedrive — with 256-bit key sizes. That means that even with the most powerful supercomputer on Earth, you’d need trillions of years to crack it.
When looking for digital privacy, though, it doesn’t just matter how strong the encryption is, but who has access to the keys. Luckily both Icedrive and Tresorit support client-side encryption, meaning only your device has the power to decrypt your files.
This is also known as zero-knowledge encryption, and it is mandatory for any cloud storage service aiming for maximum privacy. In the case of Icedrive, it’s worth mentioning that only files that you place in the dedicated “encrypted storage” (which is only available with the paid plans) will have this kind of protection.
That means that there is no way for anyone but you to decrypt and see your files with either service. However, the actual content of the files you upload isn’t the only area with potential for privacy problems, as you also have to consider metadata.
Privacy Policies
Even if someone can’t access your files, things like file types, upload dates, file sizes and other activity information can still say a lot about you and the contents of your files. We went through the privacy policies of both Icedrive and Tresorit to see how they handle this kind of information, and luckily there was nothing in either that raised any red flags.
Both services retain a small amount of personal details about you, such as your name, IP address, email and so on, but both state that they only share this information (as well as the rest of your metadata) with others in very specific circumstances.
This mostly boils down to complying with various laws and regulations. Basically, if a judge serves Tresorit or Icedrive a subpoena for your metadata, they have very little choice but to comply. Luckily, your files will be useless due to zero-knowledge encryption, and this kind of caveat is something that most technology companies have in their privacy policies anyway.
Digital Privacy Laws: UK vs Ireland & the Netherlands
This leads us to another important privacy concern, namely where your data is physically located. Digital privacy laws vary wildly depending on the country, and some governments have a much lower barrier to snooping on your digital activities.
Icedrive hosts its servers exclusively in the UK, while Tresorit stores personal users’ data in Ireland and the Netherlands. None of these countries are all that great for digital privacy, with the UK and the Netherlands being part of the Five Eyes and Nine Eyes spy networks, respectively.
The UK also passed a law called the Investigatory Powers Act back in 2016 that gives law enforcement the ability to digitally surveil its citizens.
Tresorit’s alternatives aren’t much better, as the Netherlands are considered one of the most widely wiretapped countries in the European Union (check out our guide to VPNs in the Netherlands for more info), and Ireland’s digital privacy laws are woefully unclear.
However, if you pick one of Tresorit’s business plans, you’re given a lot more control over your server location. You can pick from 11 different countries, including some with great digital privacy protections, like Switzerland.
Two-Factor Authentication
Besides encryption, support for two-factor authentication (or 2FA for short) offers a solid extra layer of security in the event that a cybercriminal gets access to your password. Tresorit, being the security-minded service that it is, offers 2FA, but Icedrive doesn’t. This is a bit unfortunate, because this is the only thing that keeps Icedrive from a perfect score with regard to security.
It’s this lack of 2FA support that becomes the deciding factor in this round, as otherwise both services feature practically identical security and privacy. That means Tresorit wins our final round, which leaves the score at 4-3 as we reach the end of our comparison.
The Verdict: Icedrive Wins
After a close and hard-fought battle, Icedrive takes the overall victory with a slim one-point lead. However, almost all of our rounds were incredibly close, with the only convincing win being Icedrive’s in the pricing section and, to a lesser degree, Tresorit’s win in file syncing and sharing.
Ultimately, deciding which is the better service will depend entirely on your individual needs. If affordability is important to you, then Icedrive is the clear winner, while Tresorit is the better option if you need advanced file-sharing options or two-factor authentication.
If you’re interested in how Icedrive stacks up against some of our other top cloud storage picks, you can head over to our Icedrive vs Sync.com, Icedrive vs pCloud or Icedrive vs MEGA comparisons. You can also see how Tresorit stacks up against Sync.com by heading over to our Sync.com vs Tresorit comparison.
What do you think of our comparison? Do you agree that these are both excellent cloud storage services, but that Icedrive’s affordable prices gives it a clear advantage? Or do you think we missed something that would tilt the scale back in Tresorit’s favor? Let us know in the comments below. Thank you for reading.
FAQ
Yes, Tresorit is among the most secure cloud storage providers, as security is its primary focus.
Yes, Icedrive also gets top marks for security, with the only problem being the lack of two-factor authentication.
Tresorit is significantly more expensive than Icedrive: it’s almost double the price for half the storage on the two most comparable plans.
If you’re looking for cloud storage for multiple users, need advanced sharing options or worry about security without two-factor authentication, then Tresorit is the better choice. On the other hand, if you don’t need any of these, Icedrive is just as good at a significantly lower price and with better speeds, to boot.
Originally a software engineer, Aleksander decided to leave the office lifestyle behind to live as a digital nomad. He now spends his time writing about technology and tourism, which allows him the freedom to call many different places home. When he’s not writing, he likes to read fantasy/sci-fi, listen to podcasts about history and politics and travel.