MEGA vs Tresorit: Which Secure Cloud Storage Is Better in 2020?
MEGA and Tresorit sit near the top of our best cloud storage rankings. Security is the name of the game for these providers, and with both services offering a free, basic plan, they’re great for newcomers, too. Only one service can win this MEGA vs Tresorit comparison, though.
We’re going to compare Tresorit vs MEGA head to head in multiple categories. Our competitors will duke it out over features, pricing, ease of use, syncing and file sharing, speed, and security and privacy. At the end, we’ll declare an overall winner.
We recommend having our Tresorit review and MEGA review on hand, though. Our dedicated reviews offer a more in-depth analysis of each service. Although we’ll cover all of the important bases here, our goal is to compare these two services directly, not against the cloud storage market as a whole.
MEGA vs Tresorit: A Well-Fought Battle
We have six rounds ahead, and each round is worth a point. We’ll dish out points to our competitors as we go, and whichever service has the most points at the end will be our overall winner. Our comparisons are straightforward in that way, but there’s a little more going on behind the scenes.
As we always recommend, it’s best to read through each section rather than just skimming for the winners. Of course, you’ll get a chance to read some excellent CommQueR.com copy, but more importantly, you’ll get an idea about how we made our judgement. Some rounds simply come down to personal preference. While we may prefer one service, that doesn’t mean it’s the right one for you.
This is especially true in rounds like the first one, features. For example, Tresorit has excellent business features, but MEGA wins on the personal front. In rounds that are especially close, we’ll split hairs and make a judgement call, but again, this usually comes down to personal preference.
- 1
- Sync Folder
- File Link Sharing
- Folder Sharing
- Versioning
- 2
- Sync Folder
- File Link Sharing
- Folder Sharing
- Versioning
1. Features
Because Tresorit and MEGA offer end-to-end encryption, there isn’t much in the way of third-party integrations or other features (read our Google Drive review if that’s what you’re after).
Tresorit has an extension for Outlook that allows you to send encrypted attachments, while MEGA has a much less useful extension for Mozilla Thunderbird that functions in a similar way. That’s it.
Sharing is the battleground for these two cloud storage services, and Tresorit wins the day. Although MEGA has solid sharing capabilities on its paid offerings, Tresorit makes sharing easier while giving you more options.
In addition to setting a password and link expiration date, Tresorit goes a step further by allowing you to share version history, revoke access and tweak access permissions.
MEGA makes collaboration a little easier with its chat feature, but it’s not encrypted. Basically, it’s like a stripped down version of Slack tacked on to MEGA. It’s nice to have around, but not all too useful in practice.
We’d trade MEGA’s chat feature for Tresorit’s network drives any day. Tresorit lacks WebDAV support, but it has its own network drive feature to replace it. Basically, a network drive looks and acts like a local hard drive on your computer. The data stored on that drive is just in Tresorit’s secure cloud, not on your local machine.
Tresorit also includes data residency options for remote teams, as well as detailed version history for your files (more on the latter in a moment).
As you can see in our Sync.com vs Tresorit comparison, it’s hard to ask for many features when it comes to end-to-end encryption. Tresorit and MEGA both offer some, but Tresorit offers more, which is enough to earn it the win this round.
2. Pricing
MEGA topped our list of the best free cloud storage, while Tresorit didn’t even make the cut. Both services offer free plans, but when it comes to Tresorit vs MEGA pricing, MEGA wins. It includes 15GB of data for free, which is only rivaled by Dropbox (and that’s with some serious referral work, as you can see in our Dropbox review). The Tresorit free plan only comes with the stock 5GB.
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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 |
It’s not Tresorit’s free plan that sets it back this round; Sync.com offers 5GB on its free plan, too, and we rate it very highly for pricing. Tresorit’s paid plans are where the service falls apart. It’s just way too expensive. The first paid tier is over $10 per month and comes with only 500GB of storage. Some phones — high-end ones, but the point remains — include more storage space.
Worse, Tresorit’s top-tier personal plan, Solo, costs $30 when billed month to month and comes with only 2.5TB of storage. “Only” is relative, but it’s pretty easy to see how much more expensive Tresorit is. For the same price as the Solo plan, MEGA offers its Pro II plan, which includes 8TB of storage.
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Free
| |
Pro Lite
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Pro I
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Pro II
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Pro III
| |
More storage for less money is the point when it comes down to Tresorit vs MEGA (that’s a theme we see with Tresorit in general). MEGA offers four tiers of service, as well as its free plan, ranging from 400GB to 16TB. The top-tier Pro III model is only a few dollars more than Tresorit’s Solo plan, and it comes with 13.5TB more.
The same is true for our competitor’s business plans. Tresorit offers three business tiers, each of which cost $20 or more per user upon renewal (there’s an introductory offer on its Business plan, though). MEGA takes a simpler approach: 10 euros per user per month — around $12, at the time of writing — with no limits on storage or bandwidth.
MEGA is cheaper than Tresorit, but moreover, it offers more storage space. No matter if it’s personal or business, Tresorit’s offerings always feel too expensive for what they bring. MEGA’s offerings are a deal. Plus, its free storage is second to none.
3. Usability
MEGA isn’t difficult to use, per se, but when comparing it directly to Tresorit, it’s clear which one is the winner. Tresorit isn’t above criticism, with some strange processes and naming conventions. It doesn’t carry all of the baggage that MEGA does, though, leading to a much more streamlined user experience.
Starting with MEGA, it offers three ways to access your storage: the web portal, the desktop app and the mobile app. Out of these three, you’ll probably use the web portal most. It’s easy to use as far as cloud storage services go, though slightly more complex than pCloud (read our pCloud review).
The desktop version is where MEGA’s problems start. The MEGA desktop client doesn’t have much in the way of features, and it functions more as a way to create a dedicated MEGA folder on your machine.
This MEGASync app, as it’s called, is different from MEGA Privacy, a Microsoft Store app. It’s a strange overlap, and although it’s easy to overcome, it creates an unnecessarily confusing user experience.
Tresorit has a few issues, too, but they’re not unnecessary problems. From a usability standpoint, everything is how it should be. Using Tresorit is similar to Google Drive, OneDrive and Dropbox, so if you’ve used any of those services, you should be fine.
There’s a web app, desktop app and mobile app — Tresorit even has a Linux client, earning it a spot in our best cloud storage for Linux guide — and all three options are viable. The desktop application has a few more bells and whistles over the web one, but no matter how you want to manage your account, Tresorit gives you plenty of options.
The issues come from Tresorit’s strange naming conventions. All of your data must go inside a “tresor” (Tresorit’s name for master folders), so you can’t just upload files directly to your account. Furthermore, you can’t drag and drop files into the root directory, and you can’t directly edit files in your account. It’s the price you pay for end-to-end encryption.
This round isn’t as clear as the first two. We like MEGA’s user experience overall — it allows you to stream music directly in your vault, and it even includes a command line interface — but setting it up is a little cumbersome. Tresorit has some idiosyncrasies, but it offers an inviting and easy-to-understand interface. We’re giving the win to Tresorit, but it could go either way.
4. File Syncing and Sharing
Tresorit made our short list of the best cloud storage for sharing, coming in behind Sync.com and pCloud. On the sharing end of things, Tresorit is superior, as we already discussed in the “features” round above. Simply put, it includes more options for sharing. Neither service offers block-level sync — it’s not possible with the encryption model — and both offer selective sync.
Both also offer an external upload folder. For MEGA, it’s the MEGAdrop folder, while for Tresorit, it comes in the form of file requests. No matter the name, this feature allows people outside of your account to upload files to it, which is especially useful for collaboration.
What stands out this round is Tresorit’s excellent versioning capabilities. Each time you replace or update a file, Tresorit stores a snapshot of the previous version. Here’s the kicker: there isn’t an upper limit. No matter if you fall victim to cybercrime or simply want to revert to a previous version, Tresorit gives you that option.
That, along with Tresorit’s breadth of sharing options, makes it the superior choice for file syncing and sharing. It even includes Tresorit “path,” which lets you easily copy the directory path of a file without digging through your account.
5. Speed
MEGA and Tresorit are both pretty lousy when it comes to speed. Because of the encryption overhead — read our description of encryption for more — our competitors take longer than the OneDrives of the world (read our OneDrive review). Still, one of them has a clear advantage this round.
Starting with MEGA, its upload speeds were abysmal during our testing. It took nearly an hour to upload a folder that should’ve taken no more than 30 minutes, based on our connection.
Downloads were much faster, taking only around 30 seconds longer than what we’d expect. Uploads are far more frequent than downloads, in most cases, though, so MEGA doesn’t get a pass.
The opposite happened during our Tresorit testing. Its upload speeds were decent, if a bit longer than we’d expect, but the downloads took a few seconds shy of forever.
What’s strange about Tresorit’s download speed is that files actually download in a reasonable amount of time. In our testing, the file or folder would hang at 97 percent, and the time spent there accounted for more than half of our overall download time.
As mentioned, though, upload speeds count for more than download speeds, and Tresorit wins on that front. Neither of our competitors are fast — if that’s what you’re after, read our Egnyte Connect review — but Tresorit’s faster upload times are enough for a win.
6. Security and Privacy
MEGA’s already at a loss coming into our final round, and unfortunately, we’re going to rub salt in the wound. Both services tout security above all else, and both achieve their goals. The difference between them comes in the privacy department.
Let’s start with security first, though. Both of our competitors are zero-knowledge cloud storage services. In short, a zero-knowledge model means that the service provider can’t access your data even if it wanted to. That’s because it doesn’t know your password. MEGA and Tresorit offer a recovery key that you’ll need to recover your account in case you forget your password.
Two-factor authentication options are present with both, and Tresorit’s business plan also supports single sign-on services like OneLogin. There’s a difference in encryption, though. Both services encrypt your files at rest with AES, but MEGA uses a 128-bit key while Tresorit uses a 256-bit one. In practice, the key size doesn’t matter, but more doesn’t hurt.
After thoroughly scrambling your data, MEGA and Tresorit send it through an SSL/TLS channel, which provides a second layer of protection. Tresorit goes a step further by hashing your data with HMAC-SHA512 before sending it off and signing it with a digital signature. Still, both services provide top-notch security for your files.
Privacy is where things change. MEGA’s privacy policy is reassuring, but its past isn’t. Kim Dotcom founded MEGA.nz in 2013 before quickly leaving the company in 2015. Since then, he’s made several claims that MEGA is controlled by the Chinese government, the New Zealand government and some Hollywood executives.
Our MEGA review — linked above — goes into detail about these claims. Here’s the skinny: although Kim Dotcom’s claims haven’t been thoroughly confirmed, they hold some weight.
At the very least, we know the vast majority of MEGA’s shares are the hands of powerful people in China and New Zealand. Worse, there’s evidence of some meddling with shares between these people and the New Zealand government, in particular.
Tresorit is a breath of fresh air by comparison. First, it’s based in Switzerland, which has some of the best privacy laws in the world, though the main data centers are spread out to the Netherlands and Ireland. We usually don’t know about privacy issues until a controversy comes up, but nine years after Tresorit’s founding, there hasn’t been one, which is usually a good sign.
As for what Tresorit collects, there isn’t anything outside of obvious information (for example, your name and billing information). You don’t have to take our word for it, though. Tresorit’s privacy policy is basically free of legal jargon, allowing even laypeople like ourselves to get a grip on what Tresorit is legally allowed to do. If you don’t want to read the full privacy policy, Tresorit includes TL;DR snippets next to each section.
This round is clear. MEGA is certainly secure, and although it has refuted the collection claims, the circumstances for those claims still exist. Tresorit is free of that, plus it includes a few extra security goodies.
7. The Verdict
Tresorit is our clear winner with five round wins to MEGA’s one. This matchup is a lot closer than the points suggest, though. Features, ease of use, speed and sharing all depend on use case and personal preference. We prefer Tresorit in all of those sections, though there’s an argument for MEGA. It comes down to pricing and security.
Winner: Tresorit
MEGA is a lot cheaper and comes with more storage. If you’re just looking to sync files across machines, it’s the better option (Dropbox and Google Drive have worse privacy practices). If you’re syncing highly sensitive information, though, we’d stick with Tresorit. With MEGA, we simply don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes, and you can’t un-sow the seed of doubt.
Do you agree that Tresorit is the better option? Or is MEGA more your speed? Let us know in the comments below and, as always, thanks for reading.
Jacob Roach is a Midwesterner with a love for technology, an odd combination given his corn field-ridden setting. After finishing a degree in English at Southern New Hampshire University, Jacob settled back under the Arch in his hometown of St. Louis, MO, where he now writes about anything tech. His main interests are web technologies and online privacy, though he dips his toes in photography and the occasional card game as well. You can reach him at jacob[at]commquer.com.