Offcloud vs Transfercloud – Which is better?
Both have the word cloud in their names, both are popular choices, and both are blue. Which one is better? Will the darker blue Offcloud celebrate its victory? Or is the lighten Transfercloud champion? I am here to answer this simple question with my own experience gathered as a user for the past few weeks.
So who will win? The wave or the cloud? I will take you through this duel in specific categories with the first one being:
Looks
If your friends see you using some site, you want it to be a beautiful site, right? Who does use the old 1994 website in 2019? We want our web to be beautiful, slick and sexy.
Overall design goes to Offcloud. There is something in the contrast of light colours, sidebar and big shiny buttons. Transfercloud is more simplistic, goes for easy to read design, but it is not my personal preference. I like the feeling I get from Offcloud’s UI.
The next category is more objective because it is the Torrent client.
Torrent client
Downloading speed is an essential factor; nobody wants to wait for hours to download one file. However, torrenting is not as simple as usual downloads. The two main factors are seeds and the client used for torrenting. Fortunately, you know the number of seeds, all trackers list this number. Generally speaking, your download will be quicker with more seeds, but beware, not all seeds are the same. Some have limited bandwidth.
The second factor is torrent client, which you don’t know (you don’t know what either of these services uses the exact implementation of BitTorrent). But the test results speak for itself.
| Services | 5 seeds | 10 seeds | 50 seeds | 100 seeds | P.t. 14 seeds |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transfercloud | 100 KB/s | 1 MB/s | 3 MB/s | 5 MB/s | 1 MB/s |
| Offcloud | 76 KB/s | 523 KB/s | 2,4 MB/s | 4,2 MB/s | 400 KB/s |
Download speed
Download speed is tough to measure because each person connected to the internet has a different network. Different ISPs use different speeds, and it is just too complex issue to say that this test will end the same/similar way all over the world. And everything changes all the time.
So, I tested downloading to my exact location, and both speeds were almost identical; there was no significant difference. I checked other locations as well through proxies and VPNs.
There were some differences across the globe, but Tranfercloud was faster in most of the areas. Its speeds in India were at a different level than Offcloud; however, both services suffered severe slow-downs in the whole East Asia region.
Extra Features
In this part of the comparison, let’s focus on remote connectivity, streaming functions, extensions and integrations – overall, anything that is the “extra” reason to use it.
Streaming comparison is simple: neither of these services offers a video player; thus, this is a tie.
But the horsepower is somewhere else than at streaming. It is in the remote connectivity of these services. Both offer Google Drive, Mega, FTP, and WebDAV connection. Transfercloud offers MEGA, Amazon cloud, Microsoft Onedrive, OpenDrive, pCloud, HiDrive and Yandex as well, which makes it a winner in the remote connections. And let’s not forget the SFTP that Transfercloud has.
Browser Extension is a victory for Offcloud. It covers all mainly used browsers while Transfercloud has none. But I heard that Transfercloud is working on some, so who does know what will tomorrow bring?
Offcloud also has RSS, Zapier, and IFTTT support, which Transfercloud hasn’t implemented, and there are no signs of adding them soon.
Let’s list these features in a handy table.
| API | Video streaming | Google Drive/others | SFTP / FTP | Browser Extension | Extras | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who is winner? | none | none | Transfercloud | Transfercloud | Offcloud | Offcloud |
Conclusion
I would never guess that fight of both “clouds” would be that exciting. These services have different aims, features, and qualities. But there is a winner of this clash.
Offcloud has edges in the Extra Features part and better design (personal opinion), but Transfer cloud has both speeds faster, And core features count more than integrations.
That is why Transfer cloud is better than Offcloud. What do you think? Do you agree with this result? If you are interested in Transfercloud review, you can read more about it here. And Offcloud has its spotlight here.