The Best Cloud Storage Options for the iPad

Apple's iCloud Drive is already part of the fabric of every iPad. iCloud Drive is where the iPad saves backups and is used for iCloud Photos.

As expected, iCloud Drive is an excellent all-purpose storage solution for the iPad. Although it shines in an iOS-centric world, it is somewhat limiting for users who share the workload between computer, tablet, and smartphone. It doesn't offer the same document editing, in-document searching, and other extras offered by the competition.

One area where iCloud rules the roost is refresh speed. It's lightning-quick to get a file you just popped into your iCloud Drive folder on your computer to show up on your iPad.

iCloud Photos is the easiest way to keep cloud backups of your photos if you use the iPad and the iPhone.

A free iCloud account comes with 5GB of storage space, but some people with large photo and video libraries may want to bump up to the $0.99 a month 50GB plan. Other plan options include $2.99 a month for 200GB of storage and $9.99 a month for 2TB.

Sometimes a tie-in to a platform is a significant bonus. For example, iCloud Drive works great with Apple's Pages, Numbers, and Keynote apps. However, sometimes, not having a tie-in to a major platform is an asset, which is the case with Dropbox.

While the choice of cloud storage comes down to your particular needs, the advantage of Dropbox is how well it works with all platforms. Do you use Microsoft Office a lot? No problem. More of an Apple apps person? Not an issue.

Dropbox falls on the more expensive side, offering only 2GB of free space and charging $120 a year for 2TB of storage, but it is worth it if you need the flexibility to work with any platform. Dropbox is one of the few cloud storage options that allow you to boot into Adobe Acrobat to edit PDF files on your iPad. For light editing, such as adding text or a signature, you don't need to load Acrobat. Dropbox even comes with a document scanner, although if you have extensive needs in the scanning department, you should go with a dedicated app.

Dropbox has robust search capabilities and supports saving files off-site and sharing them across the web.

Box is closest to Dropbox in terms of being an independent solution. It has many of the same features as Dropbox, including the ability to save documents for offline use and to leave comments on documents, which is great for collaboration. You can edit text files on Box right in the iPad app, which is awesome. However, it doesn't allow PDF editing and isn't quite as ubiquitous in working with other apps like Dropbox.

One nice bonus of Box is the 10GB of free storage, which is among the highest of any cloud storage service. Although the free storage plan limits the file upload size to 250MB, it is attractive for moving photos ​off the iPad. The premium plan ups the file size upload limit to 5GB and the overall storage to 100GB for just $10 a month.

As expected, Microsoft's cloud storage options are ideal for heavy users of Microsoft Office. It interacts seamlessly with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and other Microsoft products. It also does a great job of marking up PDF files without leaving the app.

Similar to Dropbox and a few other cloud services, you can set OneDrive to automatically back up your photos and videos. It is fast when loading previews for all files except Microsoft files. For a Word document or Excel spreadsheet, OneDrive launches the Word or Excel app. This is great for times when you intend to edit the document, but for viewing documents, it makes the process much more awkward.

The best deal on OneDrive is the Microsoft 365 Personal plan that gives 1TB of storage and access to Microsoft 365 for just $6.99 a month.