When comparing Box vs Amazon S3 , the Slant community recommends Box for most people. In the question“What are the best cloud backup services?” Box is ranked 14th while Amazon S3 is ranked 31st. The most important reason people chose Box is:
Its free plan comes with 10 GB!
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Huge Data (10 GB) in free plan
Its free plan comes with 10 GB!
Pro Sharing and privacy features built for business and IT users
Such as advanced sharing options, task assignment, notifications. Making an easy way to stay up to date on assigned tasks.
Pro Cross-platform desktop and mobile
Box is available for Windows, OS X, iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phones. Which mean access to ones files no matter the device or platform used.
Pro Extendable via plugins
There are plug-ins for applications that allow interactions with Box.
Pro Salesforce and NetSuite support
Pro Free for small sites
The free tier will cover most personal home pages.
Pro Easily scalable
There's no cap in storage or traffic. Cost is based on usage.
Pro Super cheap with a year's worth of free service
S3 storage costs $0.03 per GB and gets cheaper the more is stored, PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests are $0.005 per 1,000 requests and GET and all other requests are $0.004 per 10,000 requests. And with some restrictions is available for free for a year.
Pro Fast setup
You can provision a S3 bucket, upload files, setup the DNS, and go live in under 10 minutes.
Pro Fast
S3 is fast even without a CDN.
Pro Easy to setup with CDN
Simple to set up with Amazon's CloudFont CDN.
Pro Supports custom root domains
To set up a custom domain, Amazon Route 53 has to be configured as the DNS provider with the domain registrar, two buckets have to be created and configured with the name the same as the domain - one including, one excluding www. A more in-depth explanation can be found here.
Pro No security risks
There's no server to manage, so no security issues to patch or keep watch.
Cons
Con Log in on every use
Any time the app is opened the user's log-in needs to be typed in, which can become annoying. While it is a nice privacy feature, an option to turn it off would be nice.
Con No Linux client
They are not willing to listen to Linux community. They've also deleted a bunch of messages from Linux users on their forum
Con Missing collaborative apps
Not being able to easily back up office works through an integrated office suite can be a set back when comparing to backup apps like Drive. While you can set certain apps to save their files to the Box folder, it is not as easy as using something like Google Docs, which not only saves while you are working but as soon as you are done, with no extra steps.
Con Credit card needed
Amazon will try to retrieve the money every month after one year trial. If you have no money you will be banned.
Con Setting up automatic public permissions is confusing
By default, S3 sets uploaded files to private. You can configure your S3 bucket to auto-apply public permissions by copying and pasting a template. But the template might be intimidating to some users.
Con Confusing web interface
Amazon S3's web interface is quite confusing, especially for first-time users, but there are many tutorials online that help beginners to set up a static site on S3.
Con No SFTP support
Amazon S3 does not have SFTP support, instead the S3 web interface has to be used.