View Apple iCloud here

As an Apple user, you must have heard of iCloud, but we don’t blame you if you find it confusing. This is Apple’s own cloud storage, and if you have an iPhone or iPad and have an Apple ID, you’ll have 5GB of free storage.

For those who have joined the Apple ecosystem (iPhone, iPad and Mac users), this is the easiest way to sync contacts, notes, files, photos and more between devices and access them on all of their devices. For example, you can use the Files folder on your iPhone or iPad to view all of your files stored in the cloud.

Since iCloud seamlessly integrates with all Apple products and services, it truly is the best cloud storage for those who are fully supportive of Apple. And I mean all in: All your computers are Macs, your mobile devices are iPhones or iPads, you use Apple productivity software (Pages, Numbers, Notes), and so on.

Unfortunately, Apple only provides a measly 5GB of free iCloud storage, which isn’t too bad if all you want to do is store some Pages and Numbers documents, but not enough for photos and videos. It’s long overdue for Apple to increase that limit (Google offers 15GB for free), but at the very least it should stop counting iOS backups. Starting fall 2021, Apple is offering to “borrow” you as much iCloud storage as you need to back up and restore data on a new device for up to two weeks. This is a nice feature for those who are buying a new Apple device, but it won’t help you protect your data if your iPhone gets lost/stolen/damaged.

From there it’s $0.99 / £0.79 per month for 50GB, $2.99 ​​/ £2.49 for 200GB or $9.99 / £6.99 for 2TB. You can enable Family Sharing on the 200GB and 2TB plans – if you do this, it doesn’t mean your family members can see all of your cloud data. It simply means that your entire family’s iCloud usage will count towards the same storage limit. These paid tiers are now called “iCloud+” and include several new benefits. There’s iCloud Private Relay, free storage for HomeKit-enabled security cameras, a Hide My Email feature, custom domain names for iCloud email accounts, and more contact options for recovering your account. All of these great features help solidify our belief that iCloud is the best choice for those who use Apple devices to the fullest.

The main benefit of paying for additional iCloud storage is that almost all Apple apps can seamlessly sync through it. Photos, productivity apps, Mail, Calendar, and anything you drag into iCloud Drive in Finder on Mac are immediately available on all your Apple devices. A significant number of iOS apps can also be backed up and synced through iCloud.

If you rely on non-Mac computers or non-iOS mobile devices from time to time, the limitations of iCloud will disappoint you. Apple provides a full suite of web apps on iCloud.com, but they’re pretty mediocre. Apple provides an iCloud app for Windows that syncs data and integrates your iCloud mail with regular Windows apps like Outlook, but there are no native productivity apps for Windows or Android: if you want to edit a Pages document, you need to use the web interface.

We love using iCloud, but we also pay for it. Most decent cloud services require a small fee.

If you are an avid Apple user, you may want to consider the Apple One service package. It’s much more than a cloud storage solution and therefore out of scope for this article, but the value on offer may tip the scales in iCloud’s favor for you.