Best cloud storage with end-to-end encryption

Proton Drive

Cloud storage from the Swiss company behind Proton Mail, started in 2014 by scientists who met at CERN. Everything you upload is end-to-end encrypted by default, including on the free 5 GB tier, and the cheapest paid plan gives 200 GB at a price in line with ordinary cloud storage rather than a privacy premium. It is the easiest pick if you want encryption you never have to think about, because there is no separate vault to remember to move files into. The catch is that the cheap tier is storage only: the plans that bundle Proton Mail, VPN and Pass cost several times more.

Sync.com

A Toronto company that has offered zero-knowledge storage for years, with end-to-end encryption covering the whole account rather than one special folder. Its cheapest paid plan is the smallest here at 150 GB, but it is also among the cheapest, and the free 5 GB account keeps the same encryption as the paid ones. Sync has tilted toward business use: its main pricing page now leads with Teams plans and you have to switch tabs to see personal ones. Its privacy commitments are written around Canada's PIPEDA rather than European or Swiss law, which is worth weighing if jurisdiction is why you are shopping.

MEGA

MEGA gives away the most storage of anything here: 20 GB free, with the same zero-knowledge encryption as its paid plans, so files are encrypted on your device before they upload. Paid plans start at 200 GB and also come with a monthly transfer allowance, which is unusual, since most rivals meter only storage. The wrinkle is jurisdiction: MEGA's head office is now in Csomád, Hungary alongside its long-standing Auckland operation, and its privacy policy says which country's law governs you depends on which MEGA entity your agreement is with.

Tresorit

The compliance-minded option, aimed at people and firms handling confidential documents, run by Tresorit AG in Zurich under Swiss law. Everything is end-to-end encrypted with zero knowledge, and the free 3 GB Basic account is a real ongoing plan rather than a trial with a clock on it. It is by some distance the most expensive storage per gigabyte in this table: the entry personal plan is 50 GB, a fraction of what MEGA or Proton hand over for less money. Pick it when Swiss jurisdiction, audits and business controls matter more than how much you get for the money.

Filen

A small German provider that built its entire product around zero-knowledge end-to-end encryption, with encrypted notes and chat sitting alongside file storage. It is the cheapest per gigabyte of anything here, at €1.99 a month for 200 GiB, and its free Starter tier hands over 10 GiB outright rather than as a trial. Two caveats. Filen publishes prices only in euros, so there is no dollar figure in the Price column for it. And it is a far smaller operation than Proton or MEGA, which is worth thinking about if you want the company holding your archive to still exist in ten years.

Internxt

A Valencia-based service governed by Spanish law, and the one here that markets post-quantum cryptography alongside conventional zero-knowledge AES-256, encrypting files on your device before they leave it. Its paid plans now start at 1 TB and bundle a VPN and antivirus rather than selling storage on its own, so it is priced as a privacy suite more than as a drive. The free tier is 1 GB, which is really only enough to try it. No price is listed in the table because at the time of writing Internxt's own pricing page renders its figures without a decimal point.

pCloud

Swiss-based and best known for lifetime plans, where you pay once instead of subscribing. It is also the row most likely to surprise someone searching for encrypted storage, because ordinary pCloud storage is not end-to-end encrypted. Client-side encryption comes from pCloud Encryption, which you switch on to activate a separate Crypto folder, and it is sold on top of a storage plan rather than included in it. The base 500 GB plan is priced competitively and the free account goes up to 10 GB, so pCloud makes sense if you want a large ordinary drive plus a vault for the handful of files that need one.

Icedrive

A Gibraltar company that stands out for using the Twofish cipher rather than AES for its client-side encryption. Like pCloud, the encryption is not account-wide: a separate Crypto space is what gets end-to-end encrypted, it is listed as included only on paid plans, and its own feature table marks camera auto-upload as sitting outside it. What Icedrive does give you is room. Its cheapest paid plan is 2 TB, roughly ten times the first tier at Proton or Sync, and the free account is 10 GB. The monthly price is correspondingly higher, so it suits people with a lot to store rather than a little.

Apple iCloud+

The service most people already have, and it belongs on this list only once you turn on Advanced Data Protection, an optional setting that raises the number of end-to-end encrypted iCloud categories to 25, covering iCloud Drive, Photos and device backups. At 99 cents a month for 50 GB it is the cheapest paid entry here, and the 5 GB free tier comes with any Apple account. Three things to weigh: Apple stores data in the United States, the protection is off unless you deliberately enable it, and it only really makes sense if your devices are all Apple.