The web is chock-full of cloud storage services these days, and that’s actually a good thing: you can choose from a vast range of apps with different features and pricing and opt for one that suits your needs and budget perfectly. I personally prefer Dropbox because it lives on my desktop, syncs files across all my devices and allows for easy file sharing with clients, colleagues, bandmates and friends.
Suyara is the latest contender to enter the ring, and comes in a-swinging with multiple plans for home and business users, a flexible file management UI, file previews and more. Today we’re going to pair up this new service from Spain to see how it fares against the heavyweights, and whether it can knock out the competition. Let’s glove up!
Overview
Suyara is a new place to store your files online, with affordable plans for individuals and professional teams. It’s only available as a web app at present, but offers 128-bit AES encryption, secure backups, high-speed downloads and resumable uploads. It’s perfect for users who are looking for a way to store, organize and share their files from wherever they are. If you haven’t yet settled on a cloud storage service, this is worth a look.
Get an overview of your storage space on the Dashboard
Getting started
You’ll need to subscribe to a monthly paid plan to try Suyara, which is a deal-breaker for some. For $5.10/month, you’ll get 50GB of storage space with support for up to 5GB per file you upload — and if you need more space, you can go for the Premium plan which scores you 500GB for $38.95/month. This is cheaper than Dropbox which costs $49.99/month for 500GB, but more expensive than Google Drive, which sets you back by $19.99/month for 400GB.
For business users, Suyara has plans starting at $64/month for 300GB of space, up to 20 users and an allowance of 10GB per file. Users can share files with colleagues or groups within their organization, and this is where Suyara shines brightest.
Interface
On signing in, you’ll be greeted by Suyara’s dashboard that gives you a clear visual summary of your storage space. Navigating to your storage is unfortunately not as straightforward — you’ll have to hop through Applications > Cloud Storage to see your files. Once there, clicking the Upload button opens a dialog where you can drag and drop files to upload them into your drive. As you’ve surmised, there are a few extra steps that could be done away with to improve the user experience.
Upload files by dragging and dropping them into Suyara
Your uploaded files show up with details as they would in your desktop file browser, and you can toggle between list and tile views, as well as sort by name, size and file type. You can preview over 200 file formats here, including images, PSDs and PDFs, but sadly, that list leaves out common audio and video formats, documents and zip files too. Frequent Gmail/Google Drive users who’ve enjoyed the ability to preview files — and in the case of documents, edit them as well — will find this a bit of a letdown, particularly because the app promises to be an extension of your desktop workflow.
Managing files
Suyara’s file manager does have a few neat tricks up its sleeve though — for one, you can organize files by creating folders and dragging multiple items into them. These folders can be shared as they are or compressed into zip files, and can be placed on the left sidebar for quick access. Similarly, items can be highlighted with colors for easy categorization. Also, uploads can run in the background, and even be resumed in case you lose your connection at any time. Plus, it packs a capable search tool to help you find files by extension or even part of the file name.
Move, share, color or password-protect files from the right-click context menu
Sharing files
Suyara lets you share files securely in a number of ways — by pasting a generated link or emailing it, or by identifying a colleague or group in your organization. You can specify how long your shared links should be valid for (between 1 day and 2 weeks), and your recipients will be able to download them off an elegant page which lists the files’ details. You can even share folders this way, but users will have to download contained files one by one off a similar page.
Share files and folders with groups in your organization
What’s missing?
While Suyara offers good performance and allows users to organize files easily, there are a lot of things lacking in this app that keep it from posing a serious threat to other services. For starters, you can’t upload or access files directly from your desktop (as you would with Google Drive, Box or Dropbox), you can’t save and retrieve multiple versions of the same file, and there isn’t any real support for mobile devices, either with native apps or a mobile-friendly site. Enterprise users will also miss being able to comment and collaborate on files, which are precisely the kind of things one will want to do with an app that allows file previews and group sharing.
My experience with Suyara
Suyara is no slouch when it comes to speed and security, but other than that, I’m not sold on its feature set. Without a desktop plugin, my workflow isn’t as smooth as I’d like it to be; without mobile apps, I can’t access or share my files while on the move. Plus, the only way you can upload files is by dragging and dropping, which means you’ll be out of luck if you ever have to upload files with an older browser. All this makes Suyara a poor choice for a backup solution, but perhaps worthwhile as a repository to share large files with clients professionally.
Publicly shared files are presented attractively
That being said, Suyara is very affordable, and may make sense to users who are looking for no-frills cloud storage that won’t break the bank, or basic storage infrastructure for a team. Hopefully we’ll see some new features to round out the offering in the days to come, but until then, you may be better off sticking with the reigning champions in the cloud storage league.