Management Tools for Amazon S3: Head To Head Comparison

It’s widely believed that Amazon S3 offers the best storage on the internet amongst all cloud platforms. It’s a great web service which works like a charm with high volumes of data and allows developers to develop highly scalable solutions.

As with any web service, when the volume of data increases, the complexity increases as well. There arises a strong need to manage the data effectively on you Amazon S3 account. Many vendors have developed third-party S3 management tools to simplify S3 account administration and usage for users.

Amongst the most popular S3 management tools are CloudBerry Explorer Pro (developed by CloudBerry Lab, free version available as well), S3Fox (developed by Suchi Software Solutions) and S3Hub. In this article, we do a head-to-head comparison between the mentioned S3 management tools.

CloudBerry Explorer

CloudBerry Explorer lets you manage your Amazon S3 and CloudFront accounts. The tool has two versions – Free and Pro. With the Pro version, you get access to CloudBerry Lab’s professional support and all your queries are answered within 48 hours. For a detailed listing of features of CloudBerry explorer, refer the Head-to-Head Comparison Table below.

S3Fox

S3Fox is a Mozilla FireFox extension for Amazon S3 developed by, a company specializing in developing FireFox Extensions. S3Fox runs in a FireFox browser tab and looks very similar to most FTP clients which follow the dual-pane layout.

S3Hub

S3Hub is Mac OS X only client for Amazon S3. Even if you do not have an S3 account, you can use S3Hub to view other users’ public buckets. It offers limited functionality thorough a neat and easy to use single pane interface.

Head-To-Head Comparison

We compare CloudBerry Explorer, S3Fox and S3Hub in terms of ease of use, features, security and the overall value they offer to users.

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Conclusion

Cloudberry Explorer offers several features that the other two programs do not offer. It is on the other hand a commercial program. Users should take a look at the additional options offered by the pro version. Especially the premium support could be worth the money. But that's on the other hand only valid if Windows is the operating system of choice.

Are you using other tools to manage Amazon S3 data? Let us know in the comments.

This article is a guest contribution by Pavel Bondarchuck. Entrepreneur, founder CloudBerry Lab, developer of CloudBerry Explorer freeware for Amazon S3 and CloudBerry Online Backup