Backblaze vs Hightail Comparison 2026
Both cover media storage & review. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
At a glance
- Backblaze starts cheaper, at $6.95.
- Only Hightail has a free tier.
Side by side
Backblaze | Hightail | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price (they differ) | From $6.95 | From $12 |
| Pricing model (they differ) | Paid subscription | Free plan, paid tiers |
| Free tier (they differ) | No | Yes |
| Billing | Usage-based | Not stated |
| Free trial | Not stated | Not stated |
| API | Yes | Not stated |
| Data export | Not stated | Not stated |
| Their cut | None | None |
| Runs on (they differ) |
Shaded rows are where the two answers disagree and both listings have answered. A row where one side has not stated a fact is left plain, because silence is not a difference.
Backblaze
Cloud storage at $6.95 a terabyte
Backblaze B2 is object storage priced at a fraction of what the big three charge, with an S3-compatible API so most tools already speak to it. For a video archive that has to exist somewhere and rarely gets read, the arithmetic is hard to argue with. Egress is free up to three times what you store, and above that it is billed by the gigabyte.
Our note
Egress decides this one, not the $6.95. Free retrieval up to three times average storage covers an archive that is written often and read rarely. A working library pulled back every week meets the penny a gigabyte, and that is a different bill.
Hightail
Send big files and collect notes on them
Hightail sends files far past what email allows and then keeps the feedback attached to the thing being reviewed, so comments on a cut land on the frame rather than in a thread somewhere. The free tier caps uploads at a hundred megabytes, which is a document rather than a video. Paying takes that to twenty-five gigabytes with storage uncapped. Teams are priced per user, so a solo editor sending to clients pays once rather than per seat.
Our note
Buy this for the review workflow rather than the transfer, because plain file sending is a solved problem with cheaper answers and comments pinned to a frame are not. The free tier's 100MB ceiling makes it useless for video, which is worth knowing before treating it as a trial.
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.