Hightail - Review 2022 - Keo Raws1985

Teams collaborate in all kinds of different ways. Hightail (formerly YouSendIt) seems to be trying to please all of them, offer something between file-syncing services like Dropbox, and those focused on delivery, such as DocuSign. It also lets people track sent files and informs them exactly when a recipient has downloaded ane. It has fifty-fifty added a limited Basecamp-like feature, chosen Spaces. Hightail no longer offers integrated eastward-signatures, however, which used to be its primary feature. Information technology'south seems to exist trying to practice too many things, nevertheless, offering unique options but non excelling at whatever of them. Some teams may find information technology useful, but it isn't nearly as easy to use or powerful as whatsoever of the PCMag's Editors' Choices for online storage and syncing: Google Bulldoze, Microsoft OneDrive, and IDrive.

Price and Free vs. Paid Accounts

Hightail offers a free level of service with some limitations, as well as a paid Pro account for $fifteen.99 per user per month. With a gratuitous account, you can only send one file of upwards to 250MB at a time, and the links to them expire after i calendar week. Free users only get ii delivery options: verifying the receiver's identity and getting a return receipt. When identity confirmation is selected, the recipient must create a Hightail account to admission the file. If you don't choose this selection, the recipient can download the file straight from an emailed link, and you're informed when they do.

Ane convenience for costless users is that they tin buy upgradesà la carte. Premium Delivery ($9.99 per file) lets you send whatsoever file upwards to 2GB in size with an expiration date ii weeks abroad instead of 1 week. Calculation countersign protection costs $3.99. Without password protection, links you share are public, but they are a scramble of letters and numbers, which wouldn't be simple for anyone to guess. Still, if yous're sending sensitive documents, you'd want to add password protection or take a Pro business relationship, which includes password protection in the cost. Microsoft OneDrive offers the same level of security for no added charge. Google Bulldoze doesn't offer it at all.

Free account users as well have a 250MB upload limit in each Space they create. Spaces are groups of visual files, usually lumped together because they are all related to the same projects. Complimentary users tin can create equally many Spaces every bit they want. I'll go into more item on how Spaces work a bit later in the review.

Pro users likewise get unlimited Spaces with no limit on how much information they keep in them. They as well have no limit on upload size. Pro users tin can ship multiple files at a time and can cull whatever expiration date they desire.

Every bit a indicate of comparison, DocuSign charges $120 annually ($ten per month) for an Individual, and twice that for a DocuSign Professional person account. Other online storage options tend to cost less, only most of them offer a slightly different service than Hightail does, focusing more on storage and collaboration, and less on file delivery. Yet, Dropbox Pro costs $9.99 per calendar month or $99 per year for 1TB of space and a few other perks. With a Dropbox Pro account, you do get an alert when someone has downloaded something you've shared, and y'all can add together countersign protection to things you share.

SugarSync has a $9.99 per calendar month plan, too, simply information technology only gives you lot 250GB of space. For the most bang for your cadet storage-wise, IDrive offers 1TB for but $59.50 per yr. Microsoft OneDrive is nearly every bit competitively priced, with a 1TB account going for just $6.99 per month or $69.99 annually. With that plan, however, Microsoft throws in an Microsoft Part 365 subscription, which could exist a huge value-add if you need Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and so on.

In terms of free infinite, you lot get more with Box, which offers 10GB to offset. But beware that Box limits uploaded files to 250MB for non-paying members. For $10 per calendar month, you can increase your Box storage allotment to 100GB, and your maximum upload size goes upward to 5GB.

OneDrive offers fifty-fifty more free infinite: 15GB for U.S. users (though subsequently this year that'due south going downwardly to 5GB). Google Bulldoze gives you 15GB, just information technology's spread beyond Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos (if you've chosen original photo resolution). Y'all might worry most eating up the infinite speedily, only not all files count against your limit. Anything y'all created with Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides (what near people call Google Docs) doesn't count.

How to Get Hightail, and the Basics

To employ all the features in Hightail, yous need to install ii desktop applications (both bachelor for both Windows and Mac), or you can utilise the Spider web interface. There are mobile apps for iOS and Android, which may come up in handy any fourth dimension you need to access something and aren't at a computer, except that the mobile apps don't include files stored in your Spaces. All this adds up to a jumble of apps and programs, rather than a streamlined feel. Did I mention there's an Outlook plugin, too?

The first desktop app, which is just called Hightail, installs hooks to the service in a manner that makes it look like a part of your operating system. It creates a binder on your estimator called Hightail; from here you can access what you've sent and received. If you've used Dropbox or Box before, information technology looks and works similarly to those two services. Y'all cannot right-click on any Hightail file, withal, nor tin yous interact with it directly from the OS the style yous can with Dropbox or Box.

The second desktop app is called Hightail Express. This program looks more like an old-school email program, and it lets you lot send files. The interface is useable simply not especially pretty. Hightail gives you a lot of options for what happens when yous transport the file, such as whether information technology's countersign-protected, when the link expires, and so along. Alternatively, sending a file could just bump you into the Web app. Dropbox does that sometimes. Anytime there's a function Dropbox can't practise locally on your machine, it pushes you to the Web. The same thing happens with Hightail.

With Hightail, you could become past without any of the apps, relying solely on the Spider web interface. In many ways this is the simplest solution. The problem is that it doesn't provide offline access to your files. If you do use the desktop apps, you still demand the Spider web app to go to files you keep in your Spaces, because they don't sync to the desktop. Syncing and storage programs generally consolidate your files into one place and so they're available on whichever device y'all accept at the moment, merely that'south not at all the instance with Hightail.

I do like that you lot tin see your history of files sent and track how many times they've been downloaded. An inbox shows you incoming messages and files, while an outbox shows anything pending to ship. If you send a lot of documents past email, Hightail is probably a much amend tool for tracking those documents. You'd think it might generate less electronic mail, too, except that Hightail alerts you via e-mail (rather than, say, a desktop notification or mobile alert) when there'due south activity in your account. Then it doesn't actually assistance you cut downward on e-mail.

The Hightail Limited app lets you generate an email bulletin, decide which files to ship, and apply security and privacy settings. No matter what level of business relationship yous have, Hightail by default sends yous electronic mail notifications when you lot receive a file and when someone to whom y'all've sent one receives it.

Hightail used to offer simple due east-signature features, such as beingness able to sign a document you receive or request a signature on a certificate you lot send. Those tools are gone now, which is a shame.

Spaces for Working Together
While e-signatures are gone, Hightail recently added features for collaboration, so that part of the service now works a little like a low-cal version of Basecamp. The new characteristic, called Spaces, lets y'all create areas (which are sort of like projects) to store visual files, such as images and videos, and comment on them. Before you add a annotate, y'all have to mark an area of the image that you're referencing. Other people tin can comment, too, and yous tin flag comments that require follow upward.

Spaces is only bachelor in the Web app, and so you tin can't access the virtually recent version of your visual documents with all the comments from your desktop or mobile app. Besides, the collaboration features are lightweight. They tin't come up close to replacing a project direction service, even i as basic as Basecamp, nor are they actually full-blown collaboration features, really. If you need to piece of work together on visual files, you probably as well need to track their progress, assign deadlines for when piece of work on them should exist completed, and and then forth, and for that y'all'd want a full-blown project management tool. Even if yous don't have a lot of projects to manage, the free versions of Zoho Projects and Teamwork Projects can give y'all most of the features you need to get piece of work done effectively, and far more than you get with a paid version of Hightail.

Additional Features and Mobile App

The Android and iPhone apps for Hightail used to be more than valuable when they offered e-signature services. With that characteristic gone, they really just replicate the other functions in the Hightail Express desktop app, which is to say y'all can send files, add protections to them, and rails files.

The mobile app is frustrating because Hightail doesn't back up a lot of file types. On a desktop, information technology'southward like shooting fish in a barrel enough to open whatsoever file with the awarding of your choosing. When you're on a telephone, however, y'all want things to just open quickly so you tin can run into them. Hightail doesn't support PDFs, Word documents, and many other common file types. Information technology's really annoying and inefficient to take to open these files with other apps simply to run into them.

Most other mobile apps for file-syncing programs at least permit you view a file in the app, fifty-fifty if you can't always edit them in that app. Even Google Drive, which doesn't open files natively, can automatically open them in the correct mobile app.

Master of None
Hightail offers a few unique options for file commitment, just the service is trying to be too many things at once. In trying to offer a lilliputian bit of everything, Hightail isn't at the top of its game in anything. It might withal be a adept tool for some teams, only when compared head to head with other cloud storage providers, it's quite a bit behind Google Drive and OneDrive for collaboration and ease of use. Stick to those apps for online storage, and consider a project management service if the Hightail'south Spaces functionality seems a chip light for your needs.