Notes on Comparing SecureSAMBA with Major Online Storage — Where Capacity-Based Pricing Wins and Constraints to Check Before Signing

I’ve been through the online-storage selection loop a few times before, but with SecureSAMBA overhauling its flagship plan in March 2026 and DirectCloud launching a new per-user plan in September 2026, I wanted to redo the comparison from scratch. The seven services in scope are the two most frequently cited direct competitors (DirectCloud and Fileforce), the two standard global enterprise options (Box and Dropbox), and the two options that leverage existing enterprise contracts (Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace). I also touch on Fleekdrive, GigaCC ASP, Everidays, CryptoBin, and Biz Storage File Share.

Some background for readers outside Japan: SecureSAMBA is a Japan-specific business file server / online storage product with a strong footprint in mid-sized Japanese companies replacing aging on-premise NAS or Windows file servers. It sits alongside “cloud file server” products like DirectCloud and Fileforce, and the local market carves out this niche separately from the global collaboration platforms.

Filling in a feature-matrix comparison ends up looking similar wherever you look, so I’ve deliberately tilted this article toward what such tables tend to hide. Five topics: the breakeven point of the billing model, the 2026 price changes and easy-to-miss conditions, certifications and how to treat ISMAP, data residency and Japan-only storage conditions, and the constraints on the SecureSAMBA side that don’t show up in feature tables.

SecureSAMBA’s Position and Changes Through 2025-2026

The operating company, Kubell Storage Corp., became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Kubell Inc. (formerly Chatwork, listed on TSE Growth) on 2025-12-19. SecureSAMBA was originally provided by Startia Raise Corp. from 2007. In July 2021 it was spun off into a joint venture with Chatwork (now Kubell) and passed through “Chatwork Storage Technologies” before becoming “Kubell Storage Corp.” Alongside the December 2025 wholly-owned-subsidiary announcement, Kubell also announced a business partnership with the Startia Holdings group. As a result, older reviews that reference the former operating company or an installed-base figure like “2,500 companies” no longer match the current numbers. The Kubell official page lists “over 8,000 companies,” but always with a “as of May 2024” annotation, so this article keeps that annotation rather than treating it as a fresh 2026 number.

The market itself moved. In March 2026, SecureSAMBA’s Standard plan (now called the “Chatwork User Special Plan”) went from 100GB / 50 users / 15,000 yen/month to 300GB / unlimited users / 25,000 yen/month. On 2026-07-27, DirectCloud announced Team Business, a new per-user plan (980 yen/user/month, 10 users minimum, starting 2026-09-01). BOXIL’s second-half 2025 catalog-request ranking put SecureSAMBA first in the online storage category, so visibility has continued to rise.

How the Seven Services Line Up

After going through them, the honest way to characterize the seven is not by counting features but by billing model and the target-customer profile each vendor really plays in.

SecureSAMBA (Kubell Storage Corp.): domestic Japanese capacity-based / unlimited-user online storage. Optimized around treating a cloud drive as a Windows Explorer folder. The core segment is Japanese SMBs of roughly 20-150 people that lack a dedicated IT function. Certified to ISO/IEC 27001:2022, 27017:2015, 27701:2019, running on AWS Tokyo Region
DirectCloud (DirectCloud Corp.): a dual approach with capacity-based / unlimited-user pricing for the mainline plans, plus the new September 2026 Team Business (per-user, new customers only). Reaches into hot/warm tiered storage, approval workflows, and AI summarization (DirectCloud AI), aimed at mid-to-large companies fully retiring on-premise file servers
Fileforce (Fileforce Inc.): a dual approach with per-ID Small Business and capacity-based / unlimited-user Unlimited. Strong at Active Directory and Microsoft Entra ID integration, permission-inheritance fidelity, and Mac Finder support. Aimed at organizations that want to lift-and-shift existing NTFS ACLs
Box (Box, Inc. / Box Japan): per-user, unlimited storage. A content-management platform anchored by a 1,500-plus SaaS API ecosystem, Box Sign, Box Relay, Box AI, and Box Zones. ISMAP-registered since September 2021
Dropbox Business (Dropbox, Inc.): per-user with a team-wide storage pool. Strong on block-level differential sync speed and large-file transfer via Dropbox Transfer. Minimum three users
Microsoft 365 (Microsoft): OneDrive personal space plus SharePoint organization space. If you already have Microsoft 365 in place, the comparison becomes about incremental cost rather than total cost. Business Basic is 1,049 yen/user/month in Japan pricing, or 809 yen without Teams
Google Workspace (Google): personal My Drive plus shared drives, real-time browser co-editing, and integrated mail and meetings. Business Standard is 1,600 yen/user/month with a 2TB × user pool

As secondary options: GigaCC ASP and Biz Storage File Share specialize in inter-company large-file transfer, Fleekdrive leans into co-editing and workflow, Everidays is a low-price domestic Japanese product with an Explorer-like UI, and CryptoBin (from NRI SecureTechnologies) is a specialized confidential-file exchange product. CryptoBin has been ISMAP-registered since 2023-12-25 and holds a strong position for government procurement and financial-sector confidential exchange.

Topic 1: The Billing-Model Breakeven Is Around 28-30 Users

Before comparing rate cards, the first thing to look at is billing-model choice. Per-user and per-capacity behave completely differently as headcount changes.

At 50 people, Box Business runs 1,800 × 50 = 90,000 yen/month, Dropbox Standard 1,500 × 50 = 75,000 yen, and Fileforce Small Business 990 × 50 = 49,500 yen. The same 50 people on SecureSAMBA Business (500GB) is fixed at 35,000 yen/month, and DirectCloud Standard (500GB) at 44,000 yen. Doubling to 100 users roughly doubles the per-user models but leaves the capacity-based bills untouched unless you also add capacity.

Using Fileforce’s 990 yen/ID as the reference rate, the breakeven point against SecureSAMBA Business at 35,000 yen sits around 35 users, and against the Chatwork Special Plan at 25,000 yen it sits around 25 users. Add the fact that external partners, subcontractors, and outside CPAs can be given accounts at zero incremental cost, and the practical breakeven for real usage lands around 28-30 users.

That said, this is only “same usage pattern, base fee only.” It ignores co-editing, audit, API, and data-residency requirements. Once the other topics below are folded in, you need to re-price the specific plan combinations that actually meet your requirements.

One easy trap: some comparison articles write as if capacity-based / unlimited-user pricing were unique to SecureSAMBA. DirectCloud and Fileforce Unlimited share the same billing model. “Unlimited users so pick SecureSAMBA” is a shortcut worth avoiding.

Topic 2: 2026 Price Changes and Easy-to-Miss Conditions

Multiple plan revisions happened concurrently in 2026, and older comparison articles no longer describe the current market correctly.

SecureSAMBA overhauled its Standard plan on 2026-03-02 from 100GB / 50 users / 15,000 yen to 300GB / unlimited users / 25,000 yen. The plan was renamed the “Chatwork User Special Plan,” and a Chatwork account is now a prerequisite. Existing contracts may still be on old pricing, so numbers like “100GB for 15,000 yen” that appear in older BOXIL SaaS or ITreview reviews should not be applied to a new signing. The initial-setup fee for Business and Enterprise plans, previously about one month’s fee (25,000-35,000 yen), is now “contact us” on the current official page.

DirectCloud’s Team Business (980 yen/user, 10-user minimum) launched on 2026-09-01. A migration campaign runs through 2026-12-25, with first-year pricing effectively at 735 yen/user/month. However, Team Business is new-customers-only (companies with any paid-plan history in the past five years are ineligible), and it explicitly cannot be migrated to any of the unlimited-user plans. It’s not a fit if you’re planning for later capacity growth. DirectCloud Standard’s current price is 44,000 yen, while some third-party sites still list the old 36,000 yen figure.

Fileforce revised its pricing on 2024-10-01. Old prices linger on third-party comparison sites, so check the official pricing page instead. Box and Dropbox have both tweaked capacity limits and single-file caps between 2024 and 2026, so verify tax-inclusive versus tax-exclusive presentation on the vendor’s current official page before signing.

Same monthly fee does not mean same service. You have to align on initial-setup fee, contract term, external-collaborator billing, single-file upload cap, monthly download bandwidth, audit-log retention, backup generations, and whether Office licenses are required, or the realized total won’t match your rate-card projection.

Topic 3: Separate ISMAP from the Rest When Evaluating Certifications

To keep the security discussion from short-circuiting, the most practical filter is asking whether ISMAP is a hard requirement, before anything else.

Certifications across the seven main services plus two of the secondary options:

Service	ISO/IEC 27001	27017	27701	P-Mark	ISMAP
SecureSAMBA	✅	✅	✅	❌	❌
DirectCloud	✅	✅	❌	✅	❌
Fileforce	✅	✅ (new in 2023)	❌	❌	❌
Box	✅	✅	✅	❌	✅
Dropbox Business	✅	✅	❌	❌	❌
Microsoft 365	✅	✅	✅	❌	✅
Google Workspace	✅	✅	✅	❌	✅
CryptoBin	✅	✅	✅ (+ 27018)	❌	✅
Everidays	✅	✅	✅	❌	❌

For use cases where ISMAP is required (Japanese government procurement, financial-sector confidential data, sensitive personal data), the shortlist collapses to Box, CryptoBin, Microsoft 365, and Google Workspace. As of September 2026, “domestic Japanese, capacity-based, Explorer-native experience, plus ISMAP” is not a combination any single product delivers.

When ISMAP isn’t required and ISO 27001 / 27017 plus domestic data centers and Japanese-language support are enough (which covers many SMBs and non-regulated industries), SecureSAMBA, DirectCloud, and Fileforce are all reasonable candidates. Ranking “SecureSAMBA is worse than Box” purely on the certifications table without a defined requirement is a discussion that isn’t grounded in what your compliance program actually needs.

SecureSAMBA holds 27701:2019 (privacy information management), which is a talking point in scenarios involving employee or customer personal-data governance. DirectCloud and Fileforce don’t hold 27701, so they can’t make the same claim.

Topic 4: Data Residency and Japan-Only Storage Conditions

The “keep the data in Japan” policy requirement often gets discussed alongside ISMAP, but the motivations differ. ISMAP is primarily the on-ramp for Japanese government procurement, while data residency is driven by industry regulation, internal governance, or supply-chain accountability. Bundling them together in a single argument risks dropping services that don’t need ISMAP but can still pin storage to Japan.

Default behavior across the seven main services and the secondary options:

SecureSAMBA, DirectCloud, Fileforce, CryptoBin, Everidays: domestic Japanese data centers by default; rarely a negotiation topic at contract time
Box: global by default. Pinning to Japan requires a paid Box Zones contract; eligible plans and pricing are quote-only
Dropbox Business: global by default. Data-residency feature eligibility and pricing are quote-only
Microsoft 365: for a Japan-tenant deployment, most content is generally stored in Japan by default. Covering all workloads requires the additional Advanced Data Residency (ADR) license
Google Workspace: no region pinning on Business plans by default. Pinning to Japan requires an Enterprise plan with Data Regions (Assured Controls) enabled

Domestic-Japanese services default to in-country storage and rarely need to be negotiated. Global platforms follow the opposite pattern: pinning to Japan comes with additional cost and plan constraints. ISO 27017 / 27018 certifications and where data physically lives are separate layers — holding those certifications does not by itself tell you the default region.

Four items worth nailing down on the quote before signing:

Default storage region, and the Japan-pinning option’s availability, eligible plans, additional cost, and whether it requires an annual contract
Whether backup, replica, and audit-log storage share the same region as primary data
Storage location for “non-business data” — metadata, search indexes, AI-processing intermediates
Subprocessor list and their locations

Topic 5: SecureSAMBA-Side Constraints That Don’t Show Up in Feature Tables

Several SecureSAMBA constraints don’t get emphasized in vendor collateral or comparison articles. These five points are worth checking against your actual requirements before signing.

The first is no browser real-time co-editing. Direct editing from the drive app works fine for Office files, but you can’t have multiple people open the same spreadsheet in a browser and edit simultaneously the way you can in Box or Google Drive. That’s not a problem if your team is used to the traditional “open the file exclusively, close it, next person opens it” file-server pattern. But if your organization has already normalized on Office 365 real-time co-editing or Google Sheets concurrent editing, this is a hard ceiling on productivity.

The second is weak Mac support. The current specifications page lists Windows 11 as the supported OS; Mac is only listed under supported browsers. If your workflow depends on treating a cloud drive as a Finder mount, Fileforce Drive or DirectCloud’s drive app is a more natural fit. Test on real hardware, and the answer flips for Mac-heavy organizations.

The third is that the full-text search option was discontinued on 2025-10-31. Search on the current feature page is limited to filename, tag name, and folder name. Older reviews that mention “full-text search supported” should not be carried forward into the current feature set. Whether there’s a successor feature is a vendor-question-list item.

The fourth is that unlimited users is separate from capped monthly download bandwidth and concurrent sessions. The Help pages describe a monthly download-bandwidth ceiling, download suspension on overage, and a manual reset request procedure for paid plans. Concurrent browser sessions are also capped, but no specific numbers appear on the current pricing page. Unlimited users gets top billing while the bandwidth and session ceilings are quieter, so ask the vendor to include the applied numbers, the overage behavior, and the reset lead time on the quote.

The fifth is that the web UI cannot download a folder tree in one shot while preserving hierarchy. For teams that receive folders full of drawings or photos from clients, or that need to archive project directories locally, someone has to rebuild the hierarchy by hand. The drive app’s local sync sidesteps this in many cases, but if the workflow needs to be completable from the web alone, verify the behavior.

Where Each Service Fits Best

Combining these five topics, here’s how the first-pick tends to break out by scenario. This is fit by condition, not a quality ranking.

Primary condition	First pick	Note
20-150 people, no dedicated IT, Windows-centric, NAS replacement	SecureSAMBA	Confirm Chatwork account availability and the Business-plan initial fee
Full retirement of on-prem file server, large capacity, tiered storage, approval workflow	DirectCloud	Team Business’s new-customers-only / no-migration constraint matters
Lift-and-shift existing Active Directory / Entra ID permissions, Mac mixed in	Fileforce	Evaluate NTFS-permission-inheritance fidelity and Fileforce Drive on real hardware
External collaboration, global, API ecosystem, ISMAP	Box	Check Business Plus and external-collaborator billing conditions
CAD, video, large binary sync, small team	Dropbox Business	Evaluate Standard vs Advanced pool size and restore window
Microsoft 365 already in place, Office co-editing, existing SharePoint assets	OneDrive / SharePoint	Design personal vs organizational spaces separately and compare on incremental cost
Google Workspace already in place, browser co-editing, integrated mail	Google Drive / shared drives	Pinning the data region to Japan requires an Enterprise plan (Assured Controls)
Government procurement, financial sector, sensitive data, misdelivery prevention, ISMAP required	CryptoBin	Send/receive plus share, not primarily a storage substitute
Inter-company large-file transfer, approval workflow, domestic-only	GigaCC ASP / Biz Storage	Price with the upper-tier plan and options included

SecureSAMBA fits best in organizations of roughly 20-150 people without a dedicated IT function, moving from on-premise NAS or file server to cloud on a 25,000-35,000 yen/month fixed budget. Accounts for external partners, subcontractors, and outside CPAs cost zero incrementally, so it also serves as a shared foundation across the supply chain.

What to Actually Measure During the Trial

Comparison tables and vendor decks can’t answer what you actually need to know. The fastest path is putting the same test data into every candidate and measuring yourself. SecureSAMBA’s 14-day free trial (100GB, full features), DirectCloud Team Business’s 14-day trial, Fileforce’s 30-day trial, Box and Dropbox Business trials, and the Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace free trials can all run in parallel.

Five test-case types to feed in:

Everyday Office files and PDFs used from both Windows and Mac: Explorer / Finder display, direct editing, save-in-place, version rollback
A deeply nested folder tree with tens of thousands of files: initial sync time, permission inheritance, name resolution, path-length limits, search response time
Several-GB to several-tens-of-GB binary files (CAD, video): upload / download time, single-file caps, impact on monthly bandwidth
Sharing to external partners: expiry, password, download-count limit, preview-only mode, download-forbidden mode, and what the receiving side actually has to do
Audit scenarios: what activity logs record and for how long, CSV / PDF export, revoking a departing user’s access, and the process for bulk data return at contract end

Measure these three with the same operator following the same procedure:

Time from mounting the drive through edit and save
Click counts and screen transitions for admin tasks like changing permissions, issuing a share link, and exporting audit logs
Notification path, auto-lock behavior, and restore unit when a failure or ransomware detection fires

Don’t confuse “does it have a checkbox for this feature” with fitness. The point is measuring real workflow times and confirming the workarounds available when unexpected behavior shows up.

Line Items to Nail Down on the Quote Before Signing

Once the trial confirms the product works, the quote should call out at least the following. I’ve been burned before by rate-card projections that came in tens of percent off actual invoices, and these are the items that tend to hide the difference.

Base fee, capacity, user count, and minimum term (annual vs monthly, whether mid-term downsizing is allowed)
Initial-setup fee (per plan, campaign eligibility, differences via reseller)
Optional fees for virus scanning, backup, capacity expansion, extended audit-log retention, SSO integration
Backup: region, generations, retention, restore cost, restore lead time
Monthly download bandwidth and concurrent session caps, overage behavior, reset lead time
API: scope, eligible plans, authentication, rate limits, additional fees
SLA, incident-notification conditions, off-hours contact path, compensation cap
Bulk data return procedure at contract end, and retention of deletion / backup residuals

SecureSAMBA’s Business and Enterprise plans in particular now list initial-setup fees as “contact us” on the current official page, so comparing on monthly fee alone can produce a surprise on the initial-setup line. For DirectCloud Team Business, ask for the migration campaign conditions (application deadline, first-year vs subsequent-year monthly-fee delta) to be spelled out on the quote itself.

Wrap-Up

SecureSAMBA became a wholly-owned Kubell subsidiary on 2025-12-19 and overhauled its flagship plan on 2026-03-02 from 100GB / 50 users / 15,000 yen to 300GB / unlimited users / 25,000 yen. Assumptions from older reviews no longer apply
The breakeven point between per-user and per-capacity billing is around 28-30 users, but capacity-based / unlimited-user pricing is not unique to SecureSAMBA. DirectCloud and Fileforce Unlimited share the same model
DirectCloud Team Business launched 2026-09-01, new-customers-only, and explicitly cannot be migrated to any unlimited-user plan. Not a fit when future capacity growth is expected
If ISMAP is a hard requirement, the shortlist collapses to Box, CryptoBin, Microsoft 365, and Google Workspace. “Domestic Japanese, capacity-based, Explorer-native, plus ISMAP” is not a combination anyone delivered as of September 2026
Data residency and ISMAP have different motivations. Domestic-Japanese services default to Japan-only storage; global platforms (Box, Dropbox, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace) require additional cost and plan constraints to pin to Japan
SecureSAMBA’s constraints: no browser real-time co-editing, weak Mac support, full-text search option retired on 2025-10-31, caps on monthly bandwidth and concurrent sessions, and no folder-tree bulk download from the web UI. Match these against your requirements before signing
Trials should feed in the same five test-case types (Office direct editing, deep folder trees, large binaries, external sharing, audit scenarios) and measure workflow time, click counts, and failure-time behavior
The quote should call out not just base fee but initial-setup fee, options, backup spec, bandwidth and session caps, API terms, SLA, and end-of-contract handling

That’s all from comparing SecureSAMBA against seven major online storage services on billing model, price changes, certifications, data residency, and functional constraints, from the Gemba.