Otixo Review

These days, just about everyone is juggling at least two cloud storage accounts, if not more. With all the generous free cloud storage offers out there, it makes sense to take advantage.

Additionally, businesses and freelancers often use multiple cloud storage services because colleagues and clients have different preferences, whether that’s Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive or another service.

Managing all of those cloud drives can be a real hassle, though. Remembering where files are, moving files from one service to another and streamlining projects that make use of multiple storage services can require a little help, which is where multi-cloud management tools can be of service.

In this Otixo review, we’ll be checking out one of the bigger names in the space, particularly for business users. Otixo supports over 30 cloud services, plus protocols like WebDAV and FTP. It also has some nice collaboration features, including workspaces for projects.

Stick with us as we run down Otixo’s features, cost and user experience. If you’re looking for cloud storage services to pair with Otixo, don’t forget to check out our best cloud storage guide, too.

Alternatives for Otixo

Strengths & Weaknesses

Features

Otixo serves as a hub for all of your cloud drives and provides several features you won’t find with rival services. This includes its own cloud storage servers and some useful collaboration capabilities that will appeal to business users.

At the same time, Otixo has a handful of big misses that limits its usefulness for certain tasks. For example, while you can copy a folder or file from one cloud drive to another, you can’t create persistent relationships between those drives. That means no cloud-to-cloud sync or cloud-to-cloud backup like you get with GoodSync.

While the primary app is web-based, Otixo has desktop clients for Windows and MacOS that you can use to manage your cloud files. There’re also apps for Android and iPhone.

In addition to managing all of your cloud content in a single place, Otixo integrates with various apps, a capability powered by Zapier. Those apps include social media services, digital notebooks, calendars, databases and project management tools.

Previewing with Otixo

For any cloud drive you connect to Otixo, you can preview images, documents and videos stored within. For file edits, though, you’ll need to either download the file and use a desktop app, or open the file in the cloud storage service it’s stored in to make use of its browser-based editor (see best cloud storage for documents).

While browser-based editing is a no-go, Otixo still works well for collaborations because it can be used to share files with others. You can also create workspaces and work groups to streamline projects, and there’s even a chat feature for project dialog. We’ll take a look at those features in more detail when we cover user experience, below.

We’ll also look at some of Otixo’s security features, including private end-to-end encryption for your uploaded files. On a final note before we move on to cost, with Otixo you actually get some cloud storage space, too. We’ll talk about just how much, next.

Pricing

Otixo has three plans available: a free plan and two subscription-based choices in Otixo Standard and Otixo Plus.

The free plan, as you can see in the table above, isn’t exactly free. If you plan on performing cloud-to-cloud transfers, you’ll be billed $0.49 per gigabyte to do so, which is a pretty hefty fee. If you plan on transferring more than 15GB per month, you might as well sign up for Otixo Standard, because it’s about the same cost.

Freeloaders get 5GB of Otixo work-drive storage, while subscribers get 10GB or 20GB per user, depending on which plan you go with. That storage space is cumulative, meaning you can divvy it up between users however you want.

Supported Clouds & Protocols

All told, Otixo supports over thirty cloud drives and protocols, with many big names available. Some of the top cloud storage providers include powerhouses Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive, as well as one of the best zero-knowledge cloud storage services in pCloud.

Noticeably absent, however, is Egnyte Connect, easily one of the best enterprise sync and share solutions available today. Also, only Amazon S3 is supported among cloud infrastructure solutions. We’d like to see Azure, Google Cloud and Rackspace Cloud Files included as well.

Otixo does support FTP/SFTP and WebDAV protocols, however, giving you even more possibilities to connect drives. The inclusion of OwnCloud is great, too, for those looking to integrate their personal cloud storage solution with other drives.

Another useful feature you’ll get with Otixo is to use it as a hub to centralize notifications from several other services, including most of the popular social media platforms, in addition to Microsoft Excel, Paypal and MySQL.

User Experience

Otixo, as we mentioned, lets you manage your hosted files from a web app, desktop client and smartphone app. That versatile approach makes it much easier to stay on top of storage limits, notifications and other happenings in your cloud drive set.

The web and desktop experiences are nearly identical, so once you figure out your way around one, you’ll mostly be able to navigate the other. That’s a good thing because Otixo takes some getting used to.

Links down the left-side margin are available for workgroups, workspaces and the Otixo file manager. If using the web client, you’ll also have access to an app directory.

The app directory lets you integrate Otixo with various services like YouTube, GitHub and Twitter. Doing so will let you receive notifications within Otixo when certain actions occur on those apps. This is a very useful management feature for businesses with a large set of internet tools to keep track off.

You can also automate certain actions, such as automatically sending chat messages received in Otixo to an Evernote notebook (if you’d like to learn more about Evernote, read our Evernote review).

Connecting cloud drives to Otixo is a relatively pain-free process. You’ll need to be in the file manager view, where there’s a little cloud icon near the top-right corner; click it to add services.

On the next screen, you’ll find a list of cloud service icons available for connection. Click on the cloud service you want to add, give the connection a name, then click on the “authorize” button. You’ll be prompted by the cloud service to grant Otixo permission to access your digital assets.

Do that, and the integration will be complete: your cloud drive will now appear down the left-side navigation column of the file manager. Click on the drive name there, and you should see all of your folders and files displayed in the main window.

From there, you can upload files to your cloud drive, copy or move content from one drive to another and share content. Note that you can’t upload entire folders to Otixo, just files, which is a bit bizarre.

You can also only share files to workspaces you’ve set up, a feature designed to streamline projects.

Within a workspace, you can add files no matter what cloud drive it’s stored on, and invite others to access that space. To make adding others to spaces a little easier, you can set up teams (e.g., marketing department, developers) using the work groups view beforehand.

Dropbox Business, Egnyte Connect and other cloud storage tools designed for businesses let you set up team folders for collaborative efforts. However, with that approach, collaborations are limited to files stored within a single cloud drive. Being able to access files stored in multiple different cloud drives is a big advantage for collaborations, and one of the best reasons to use Otixo.

There’s even a chat feature you can use to communicate with project members, although Otixo also integrates with Slack if you prefer that tool.

Cloud to Cloud Operations

The most glaring weakness we found when testing Otixo is that cloud-to-cloud operations are pretty limited. You can move a folder or file from one cloud drive to another by clicking on the menu button for the object you want to move.

That’s easy enough, and a feature that’s essential for multi-cloud management. However, we’d have liked to see cloud-to-cloud sync and cloud-to-cloud backup capabilities like you’ll find with MultCloud (read our MultCloud review).

We shot a message to Otixo to find out if those are features the company intends to implement. From the response, it doesn’t look good.

Security

While Otixo misses big in the types of cloud-to-cloud operations you can perform, it makes up for that a tiny bit with the ability to add an additional layer of security to the files you store in the cloud.

With most cloud storage providers, including Google Drive and OneDrive, the provider itself manages file encryption. That means the company can decrypt your files, whether to scan content for marketing purposes or discover pirated content like torrented movies (read best VPN for torrenting).

With Otixo, you can privately encrypt any files uploaded to your connected cloud drives. The encryption is end-to-end and since only you will know the encryption key, only you can decrypt your files. In that respect, it works a bit like Boxcryptor, a zero-knowledge tool you can read about in our Boxcryptor review.

The encryption method used is 256-bit AES, which is the protocol used by most cloud storage services for security, as well as financial institutions and governments. It’s also the protocol recommended by the National Institute of Technology and Standards.

You must encrypt files as you upload them with the tool.

Unfortunately, because you can only upload files and not folders, you’ll have to encrypt files one at a time, too. This is definitely something Otixo needs to think about fixing.

A bigger problem is the absence of two-factor authentication. Without this feature, it’s much easier for someone to use a stolen or cracked password to access your data, because there’s no additional security credential required when logging in from unfamiliar machines.

Otixo’s website does indicate the feature is coming soon, albeit only for Plus subscribers.

Support

Otixo provides support via email only. There are no live channels available to receive help, such as chat or telephone.

On top of that, Otixo doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to answer emails to support, at least for free users. We sent the company a couple of emails, and still haven’t received a response after five days.

According to the company’s website, Otixo Plus subscribers receive 24/7 support and an average response time of four hours, however. Unfortunately, we were unable to test that promise.

If you do find yourself in a bind and can’t wait for a reply, you can look to Otixo’s online support center for help. As a resource, it has a decent amount of guides for getting started, working with various cloud drives, using WebDAV and FTP, setting up workspaces and more. The site is searchable, too, to help you find relevant content quickly.

Final Verdict

Otixo is a multi-cloud management tool that gets a lot right and nearly as much wrong. On the plus side, we love the fact that the service has desktop and mobile apps, and that it supports a broad range of cloud drives and apps.

The workspace capabilities will also be of use to businesses looking to streamline projects spread out across multiple cloud services. Some of the app integrations powered by Zapier look useful as well.

On the other hand, we were pretty surprised to find Otixo doesn’t let you automate cloud-to-cloud file transfers for either sync or backup. You can only manually copy or move content from one cloud to another, which will be too time-consuming for heavy cloud users.

While we like the fact that you can add private encryption to individual files you upload, we’d also like to see the capability extended to entire folders. No two-factor authentication is an even bigger concern.

All in all, Otixo right sits near the top of a multi-cloud market which, to be honest, is pretty weak. We fully expect that market to grow within the coming years, however, as multi-cloud management comes into more demand.

Let us know what you think about Otixo in the comments below, and thanks for reading.