451 Research conducted a survey of 1000 IT pros and found that Dropbox is the most popular cloud sync and share service (chart after the break). I’m not at all surprised by that. And that’s because Dropbox is still the best at cloud sync and share.

I’ve used Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, Box, Bitcasa, and myriad others. I’ve settled on just using OneDrive and Dropbox. The rationale for OneDrive was simple — it’s integrated into Windows, it’s cross-platform and I got 200 GB free with my Surface 2. For that amount of space, I was willing to put up with OneDrive’s quirks.

Dropbox is the best for two key reasons: first, it syncs tremendously fast. I can save a file at work and be 100% sure that saved file is waiting for me at home 10 minutes later. Not so with the others, although OneDrive has improved a lot in that regard.

Second, sharing is so much easier with Dropbox. Right click a file and select “Share Dropbox link” and you’re done. With OneDrive, there are so many more steps. Sure, OneDrive sharing is more fully featured, but I’d rather have a 2-click solution that works 99% of the time than a 6-click solution that requires the agony of opening a browser window and loading a webpage.

Reason 2b on why Dropbox is better: OneDrive has weird limitations on sharing. For example, if you try to share an APK on OneDrive, the person downloading can’t run it. That’s because OneDrive doesn’t have the correct MIME set for the APK. There are other scenarios that don’t play well, and the result is that I don’t trust OneDrive sharing. No problems whatsoever with Dropbox sharing.

I use both OneDrive and Dropbox. OneDrive and its 200 GB of space is for storage and syncing; Dropbox is for sharing. If Dropbox gave me 200 GB of space I’d probably use that exclusively.

So I’m not surprised that Dropbox is the most popular service among IT pros. Here’s the survey breakdown, as promised: