An encrypted drive and a client portal are not the same purchase

What Proton Drive is genuinely better at

Putting this first, because if it decides the question for you the rest of the page is noise.

Proton Drive encrypts files on your device before they leave it. Proton holds no key that can read your content, the client apps are open source, and the implementations have been put through published third-party audits. That is a different security model from "the provider encrypts your files for you," and the difference shows up in what a breach of the provider actually costs you.

Droplana does not work that way. Files are encrypted at rest with AES-256, using a key derived per client with HKDF-SHA256 from a master key and the client's ID, never stored. Traffic is TLS. The database, application configuration and logs sit on LUKS-encrypted volumes. That is real protection against a storage-platform breach. It is not protection against a compromise of the application host, because the master key lives there next to the storage credentials, and our security page says so rather than rounding it up into something that reads better.

So: if a client contract, a regulator, or your own position requires that the vendor cannot read the files, Proton Drive satisfies that and we do not. The rest of this page is for people whose deciding factor is somewhere else.

The other difference, which decides more purchases

Proton Drive is a drive. Droplana is not.

Proton Drive is organised around files and folders. Sync a folder, share a link, set a password and an expiry on it, keep versions. The mental model is storage, encrypted end to end, with sharing bolted on where you need it. It is also usually bought as part of the wider Proton suite, so Drive often arrives alongside Mail, Calendar, VPN and Pass rather than being chosen on its own.

Droplana is organised around the client. There is no folder tree at all. There is a list of clients, and each one has a single portal holding everything to do with them: what you sent, what they sent back, the checklist of what is still outstanding, the comment thread on each individual file, the status of each one. The organising layer is the relationship, not the directory.

It sounds like a small distinction until you have three hundred of them. "Which folder was the March statement in" and "open that client's portal" are different amounts of work, and the gap widens every year the engagement runs.

Side-by-side

Proton's plans, storage and features change. Check proton.me rather than trusting any comparison page, this one included.

What the client actually has to do

This is where the two feel least alike, and it is the part that quietly costs money.

A Proton share link works fine. The trouble is that a link is an event. Send one per document, per client, for four years, and every request to re-send something is a search through your own sent mail. Encrypted sharing solves the security problem well and hands the retrieval problem to whoever is on the other end, who is usually the least technical person in the exchange.

A Droplana client has one link. It is the same link in month one and month forty. Opening it shows them everything relevant to them, a checklist of what you are still waiting on, and somewhere to put it. No account, no password, nothing to install. You pick the portal security level: new accounts default to Strict, which means email verification on each new device; Controlled allows one-time or email magic links only; Relaxed additionally allows permanent links, for work where that is proportionate. After verifying, the browser is remembered for 90 days.

One more detail that matters more than it should. Clients can photograph a paper document with their phone straight into the portal. The number of engagements that stall because someone does not own a scanner is much higher than anyone plans for.

The pricing axis

Proton prices per user per month, with a free tier and business plans that generally bundle Drive with the rest of the suite. That is a coherent model for a product your staff live in every day, where cost tracking headcount is the right shape.

Droplana prices per business. Free covers 3 clients and 2 GB, with a 90-day file retention limit. Solo is 19 EUR per month plus tax, unlimited clients, 50 GB, 1 GB maximum file size. Practice is 49 EUR, 250 GB, 2 GB files, 5 seats including the owner. Studio is 99 EUR, 1 TB, 5 GB files, 15 seats. Annual billing costs ten months. Each Storage add-on is 15 EUR and adds 500 GB while raising the maximum file size to 5 GB. There is no per-client fee and no overage billing: when storage runs out new uploads stop and existing files stay accessible.

Which model is kinder depends entirely on the shape of your firm. Twelve staff and forty clients, headcount pricing is fine. Two staff and four hundred clients, and per-user pricing is measuring the wrong axis of your business.

Jurisdiction, stated carefully

Both are European answers, and they are not the same answer.

Proton is Swiss, and a lot of buyers choose it precisely for Swiss privacy law. Switzerland is not in the European Union, so EU data transfers there rest on the European Commission's adequacy decision. That is a settled arrangement and for most firms it is a non-issue.

Droplana is operated by an EU company and stores everything on Hetzner infrastructure in Germany, with a Data Processing Agreement available on every plan. If your own policy or a client's contract is worded as "data remains within the EU" rather than "data is adequately protected," it is worth reading that wording again before you decide. If it is not worded that way, this section does not matter.

What Droplana does not do

Because a comparison listing only strengths is not a comparison.

• No end-to-end encryption. The first section, and the big one.
• No desktop or mobile sync. Nothing mirrors to a folder on your laptop.
• No public API and no integrations. Documents stay in the portal; nothing flows out automatically.
• Not general storage. Storage is capped per plan and this is not meant to be your firm's drive.
• Not a qualified e-signature provider. In-browser signing records who signed, when, from what IP and with which login, saves the signed PDF as a new item with the original preserved, and gives every signature a public verification page including a file-hash check. It is not certificate-based or qualified, and we do not call it tamper-proof.
• Not for internal team collaboration. The portal faces the client. Your team keeps working in your own tools.

Who should pick which

Pick Proton Drive if: zero-knowledge encryption is a stated requirement rather than a preference; you want an encrypted drive your team syncs to daily; you are already buying Proton Mail or the business suite and Drive comes with it; or Swiss jurisdiction is specifically what you want.

Pick Droplana if: the bottleneck is the client rather than the cryptography; you run many ongoing client relationships and want one permanent place per client; the least technical client sets the pace and every account creation costs you a round of emails; you want documents to arrive against a checklist instead of as a surprise; or you want the price to stop moving when the client list grows.

Use both if: you want an encrypted internal store and a clean client-facing surface. There is very little overlap to reconcile.

If encryption architecture is the axis you are shopping on, the Tresorit comparison covers the other well-known zero-knowledge option, and Nextcloud covers the self-hosted route. For what the per-client structure looks like in daily practice, see the accounting practices page and the legal page, or the client portal guide for how to evaluate this category generally.

Check our simple pricing (or start free)

Storage levels and team seats scale with your plan.
Security, per-client encryption, isolation, in-browser PDF signing, and data export are the same on every plan.
No per-client fees. Tax calculated by Creem at checkout.

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