Amazon thinks it’s hot to trot with its newfangled Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player—an online backup/multimedia storage service that it rolled out in March. With Amazon Cloud Drive, you can access your files from any computer—and you can playback your MP3s from any computer or Android device. But here’s some news: SugarSync has had this functionality for quite some time. If you had your interest piqued by the Amazon Cloud Player, here are a few reasons why you should also consider SugarSync.

Price - Winner: Tie

Both Amazon Cloud Drive and SugarSync offer 5 GB of storage for free. But Amazon has a little bit better pricing when you start asking for more storage. Amazon offers prices of about $1 per GB, with the next package up being $20 for 20 GB a year. SugarSync’s next step up is 30 GB for $49.99 a year.

Amazon Cloud Drive has another perk: MP3s that you buy from Amazon.com are stored in your Cloud Drive for free.

But SugarSync has an even sweeter deal—you can get 250 MB of bonus storage for each referral. You can earn up to 250 GB of free space this way, which is a savings of $250 a year.

Desktop Client – Winner: SugarSync

Amazon Cloud Drive includes an MP3 uploader client, but for the most part, you’ll be fiddling with your files from your web browser. SugarSync has much more robust desktop functionality. SugarSync makes it easy for you to synchronize and backup selected folders and automatically make files available online or offline across a number of devices. As a backup solution, Amazon Cloud Drive just isn’t quite where SugarSync is at yet—especially when it comes to syncing frequently updated files.

Music Player – Winner: SugarSync

The Amazon Cloud Player is slick, and it’s easy access to all of your Amazon MP3s is a definite plus. But the fact that it’s only available for Android means it’s easily trumped by SugarSync. SugarSync’s music player is certainly more limited in terms of user interface, but if you are an iPhone user, then the choice is obvious. There is no iPhone support for the Amazon Cloud Player currently.

Long Term Support – Winner: Amazon

This one is hard to predict outright, but as we’ve all learned after a decade of watching tech companies, software as service outfits come and go. SugarSync provides an excellent, reliable service, but it’s not infeasible that it may one day close its doors, which would be an immense inconvenience to anyone who relies on the service. While there’s certainly no indication that SugarSync is in any sort of trouble, it’s something you should keep in mind.

Amazon, on the other hand, has many more eggs in many more baskets to keep it afloat. Remember: Amazon is first and foremost an online retailer. But it also offers a wide range of hosting and other services for software developers. Amazon is a giant in the tech space, and isn’t likely to go away anytime soon.

But then again…

We have seen large companies shut down services that they provide. Case in point: Yahoo!’s planned discontinuation of Delicious.

Bottom-line

The Amazon Cloud Player and Amazon Cloud Drive are certainly very cool services. But SugarSync does all of that and more. The only reason you should use Amazon instead is if you have lots of Amazon MP3s, or you don’t want to go through the effort of racking up free referral space. (This author can attest to the merits of doing so, however—I have 250 GB of free SugarSync space.)

References:
https://www.sugarsync.com
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/