[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":164},["ShallowReactive",2],{"vs-google-drive":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"competitor":106,"date":109,"description":110,"draft":111,"extension":112,"features":113,"meta":158,"navigation":116,"path":159,"seo":160,"stem":161,"verdict":162,"__hash__":163},"vs\u002Fvs\u002Fgoogle-drive.md","Hoodik vs Google Drive: A Private Google Drive Alternative",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":98},"minimark",[9,13,18,21,24,27,35,39,42,45,48,51,54,58,61,64,67,70,81,85,88,91],[10,11,12],"p",{},"Google Drive is the default. Fifteen gigabytes free, it is already attached to the account you use for email, and Docs is the best collaborative editor anyone has built. It is also a product from a company whose business is understanding data, running on servers that hold the keys to yours.",[14,15,17],"h2",{"id":16},"the-keys-question","The Keys Question",[10,19,20],{},"Google encrypts Drive. Files are encrypted at rest, connections use TLS, and Google's infrastructure security is genuinely excellent. None of that changes who can decrypt: Google can. The keys are Google's, held in Google's key management, usable by Google's systems.",[10,22,23],{},"That is not a hidden fact or an accusation. It is a requirement of the product. Google Docs could not exist without Google reading your document. Search inside PDFs, OCR on your photos, \"here are files related to this meeting\" in your Calendar, Gemini summarizing a folder: every one of those features needs plaintext, and every one of them is a reason people choose Drive.",[10,25,26],{},"Client-side encryption does exist in Google's world, but only on Workspace Enterprise Plus at roughly $25 per user per month. Consumer Drive and the ordinary business tiers have no option for it.",[10,28,29,30,34],{},"Hoodik takes the other branch. Files are encrypted in the browser or in the app with a key wrapped for your account, and the server stores ciphertext. File names are encrypted the same way, so the server sees a UUID rather than ",[31,32,33],"code",{},"layoff-plan-draft.docx",". Nothing on the server can read anything, which rules out the entire class of features above and rules out the entire class of risks with it.",[14,36,38],{"id":37},"where-google-drive-wins","Where Google Drive Wins",[10,40,41],{},"Collaborative editing. Multiple people in the same document, cursors visible, changes merging live, revision history going back years. This is genuinely hard to build and Google built it better than anyone. Hoodik has an encrypted notes editor with full-text search over your own notes, and that is not the same thing at all.",[10,43,44],{},"The free tier. Fifteen gigabytes at no cost, shared across Gmail, Drive, and Photos. Hoodik Cloud has a 14-day trial and then starts at €9\u002Fmonth. Self-hosting is free but requires a machine and about ten minutes of setup.",[10,46,47],{},"Price per gigabyte. Around $9.99\u002Fmonth for 2 TB is very hard to beat, because Google is selling storage on a shared system at enormous scale. A Hoodik Cloud subscription buys a dedicated instance with its own database and storage, which costs more per gigabyte and is a different product.",[10,49,50],{},"Search that reads your files. Google finds a phrase inside a scanned PDF or text in a photo. Hoodik's search matches hashed tokens from file names and note contents, which covers a lot, and does not cover OCR of an image the server cannot see.",[10,52,53],{},"Integration. If you live in Gmail, Calendar, Docs, and Android, Drive is already stitched into all of it.",[14,55,57],{"id":56},"where-hoodik-wins","Where Hoodik Wins",[10,59,60],{},"Nobody scans your files, because nobody can. Google's automated systems inspect Drive content for policy violations, and the failure mode is well documented: accounts flagged and locked by an automated classifier, with an appeals process that is hard to reach and slow to resolve. Losing access to a Google account often means losing email, photos, and years of documents at the same time. Hoodik's server holds ciphertext, so there is no classifier and no category of file that can trip one.",[10,62,63],{},"Your data is not adjacent to an advertising business. Google states it does not use Drive content for ad targeting, and there is no reason to think otherwise. The structural point stands anyway: the capability exists, the policy is what restrains it, and policies are written by the company that benefits from changing them. Hoodik removes the capability instead of promising restraint.",[10,65,66],{},"Search stays private. Hoodik runs a BERT tokenizer on the client, hashes each token with SHA256, and sends only hashes. You can search from any device and the server never learns the query or what it matched. On Drive, every search is a query against your plaintext, executed by Google.",[10,68,69],{},"The cryptography is post-quantum where it counts. File keys are wrapped with a hybrid of X25519 and ML-KEM-768, the key exchange NIST standardized for the post-quantum era. Login uses OPAQUE, so your password never leaves your device. Both matter most for data with a long secrecy lifetime, which describes most of what people put in cloud storage.",[10,71,72,73,80],{},"You can read the code and you can leave. Hoodik's server is source-available Rust. Run it on your own hardware, or let us run it on ",[74,75,79],"a",{"href":76,"rel":77},"https:\u002F\u002Fhoodik.cloud",[78],"nofollow","Hoodik Cloud"," and export the whole instance to your own server whenever you want. Google Drive has Takeout, which gives you the files, and no way to run the service yourself.",[14,82,84],{"id":83},"who-should-use-which","Who Should Use Which",[10,86,87],{},"If your work is collaborative documents, Google Drive is the right answer and the encryption argument does not change that. Nothing self-hosted or zero-knowledge is going to replace Docs for a team writing together.",[10,89,90],{},"Hoodik fits the other half of what people keep in Drive: the archive. Scans of identity documents, tax records, contracts, medical results, photos of your family, the folder you would not want reviewed by an automated system or handed to anyone on request. That material does not need collaborative editing. It needs a server that cannot open it.",[10,92,93,94,97],{},"Plenty of people end up running both, and that is a reasonable outcome. If you want the managed convenience without the plaintext, ",[74,95,79],{"href":76,"rel":96},[78]," is €9\u002Fmonth for 100 GB or €19\u002Fmonth for 500 GB, in the EU or US, on the same code you can read on GitHub.",{"title":99,"searchDepth":100,"depth":100,"links":101},"",2,[102,103,104,105],{"id":16,"depth":100,"text":17},{"id":37,"depth":100,"text":38},{"id":56,"depth":100,"text":57},{"id":83,"depth":100,"text":84},{"name":107,"website":108},"Google Drive","https:\u002F\u002Fdrive.google.com","2026-07-29","A private alternative to Google Drive: Drive is free, fast, and readable by Google. Hoodik encrypts in your browser, so the server never holds a key.",false,"md",[114,118,121,123,126,129,131,133,136,140,144,146,150,154],{"name":115,"hoodik":116,"competitor":111,"note":117},"E2E Encryption",true,"Google encrypts Drive at rest and in transit but holds the keys. Client-side encryption exists only on Workspace Enterprise Plus, not on consumer or standard business accounts.",{"name":119,"hoodik":116,"competitor":111,"note":120},"Post-Quantum Key Exchange","Hoodik wraps every file key with a hybrid of X25519 and ML-KEM-768, the post-quantum KEM standardized by NIST.",{"name":122,"hoodik":116,"competitor":111},"Encrypted File Names",{"name":124,"hoodik":116,"competitor":111,"note":125},"Password Never Sent to Server","Hoodik authenticates with OPAQUE, so the password never leaves your device in any form.",{"name":127,"hoodik":128,"competitor":116},"Managed Hosting","Hoodik Cloud, from €9\u002Fmo",{"name":130,"hoodik":116,"competitor":111},"Self-Hosted Option",{"name":132,"hoodik":116,"competitor":111},"Server & Web Client Source Available",{"name":134,"hoodik":111,"competitor":116,"note":135},"Real-Time Collaborative Editing","Docs, Sheets, and Slides with simultaneous multi-user editing is Google Drive's strongest feature and Hoodik has no equivalent.",{"name":137,"hoodik":138,"competitor":116,"note":139},"Content Scanning","Not possible","Google scans Drive content for policy enforcement, which has locked users out of accounts over false positives. Hoodik's server holds ciphertext it cannot decrypt.",{"name":141,"hoodik":116,"competitor":142,"note":143},"Privacy-Preserving Search","partial","Google's search reads inside your documents and even OCRs your images, which is powerful and requires plaintext access. Hoodik matches SHA256 token hashes computed on the client.",{"name":145,"hoodik":111,"competitor":116},"Desktop Sync Client",{"name":147,"hoodik":148,"competitor":149},"Free Tier","Unlimited self-hosted","15 GB shared with Gmail and Photos",{"name":151,"hoodik":152,"competitor":153},"Pricing","Free self-hosted · Cloud from €9\u002Fmo","~$1.99\u002Fmo for 100 GB, ~$9.99\u002Fmo for 2 TB",{"name":155,"hoodik":156,"competitor":157},"Jurisdiction","Your choice","United States",{},"\u002Fvs\u002Fgoogle-drive",{"title":5,"description":110},"vs\u002Fgoogle-drive","Pick Google Drive for collaborative documents and a generous free tier. Pick Hoodik when the provider being able to read, scan, and act on your files is the thing you need to eliminate.","jdLIIm_1NZ-tknROuFidhAS5AVE5e8GddxzrludOHQU",1785479168253]