Air Live Drive vs filex

Air Live Drive mounts cloud storage as local drives, so files can be opened, edited, and saved through Explorer or Finder without full synchronization. It connects to personal, business, and infrastructure storage, including Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, iCloud, SharePoint Online, S3, FTP, FTPS, SFTP, and WebDAV. Optional local caching can speed repeated access, while the product streams files rather than duplicating large amounts of data locally. Depending on the provider, supported cloud audio and video can play without a full local copy. Windows users can enable background uploads and view progress in a transfer list. Pro adds startup and administrator passwords, drive export and import, and unlimited drives; the Windows version also supports command-line mount, unmount, refresh, and cache operations for scripts. Basic allows one drive per cloud provider and three drives total. The 1 Year plan costs $17 a year, and Pro Lifetime costs $25, paid once; both are licensed per device. Air Live Drive is available for Windows and macOS.

Filex is an open-source, MIT-licensed self-hosted file manager distributed as a single Go binary or container. It can mount local disks and storage such as S3, SFTP, FTP, WebDAV, and SMB/CIFS, with plugins for other backends. The same files can be served through S3, SFTP, FTPS, NFSv3, WebDAV, and HTTPS. Search covers filenames and file contents; trash retention and version history are also included. Access controls include roles, inherited item-level grants, and public links with optional PINs, expiration, and download caps. Sign-in options include local passwords, OIDC, LDAP or Active Directory, and proxy headers. Filex has web access and desktop apps for Windows, Linux, and macOS; desktop and CLI clients support two-way folder sync. Office files have a read-only browser preview unless an optional self-hosted OnlyOffice Document Server is used for editing and co-authoring. SQLite is the default database, with PostgreSQL supported for team deployments. Filex is free and open source.