Operations · Documents
VanVed vs Google Drive
for Documents
Why businesses choose VanVed over Google Drive
A document here is filed against the thing it is about — the employee's contract, the vehicle's insurance, the customer's agreement — and it appears on that record's own page, which a Drive folder can never do. Expiry dates and reminder lead times are first-class, search now matches a document's contents and it previews in the browser, and the full access audit trail is on for everyone rather than being a Business Plus upgrade.
Capability by capability
Every row below is what our 2026 research found — including the rows we lose.
| Capability | VanVed | Google Drive |
|---|---|---|
| Price and storage | Included in the platform; storage is the server's | $7/user/mo for 30 GB pooled, $14 for 2 TB, $22 for 5 TB annual |
| Folders and versioning | Nested folders, numbered versions with a change note, and a current-version pointer | Folders, shared drives and version history |
| Documents attached to a business record | A document links to the employee, customer, vehicle or asset it belongs to and shows on that record's page | No concept of a business record — a file lives in a folder |
| Expiry tracking | Expiry date and reminder lead time per document, with a dashboard of what is expiring | Not a Drive feature |
| Full-text search inside files | Yes now — text is extracted on upload and indexed, so search matches file contents as well as title, tags and description; no OCR, so a scanned image still won't match | Full-text search across documents and PDFs, including OCR of scanned images |
| In-browser preview | Yes now — a preview component renders the document in the browser without downloading it first | Previews dozens of formats without downloading |
| Sharing outside the organization | Yes now — a revocable, expirable public share token link, with a toggle for whether the recipient can download or only view | Link sharing with roles and expiring access |
| Access audit trail | Every view, download, upload, edit, delete, restore and signature is logged per document on every plan | Drive audit log on higher Workspace tiers; retention via Vault at Business Plus |
Where Google Drive is ahead of us today
As a place to find and read files, Drive is still ahead on depth. VanVed's search now covers file contents, but has no OCR, so a scanned PDF is still effectively invisible to it. Drive previews dozens of formats; VanVed's preview covers the common ones. And its external share link has no per-recipient roles — it's a single revocable, expirable token with a view/download toggle, not Drive's role-based sharing.
We publish this because a comparison that only flatters us is worth nothing to you. If one of these gaps is the thing you actually need, Google Drive may well be the better buy.
What VanVed's Documents module does
- Versioning
Keep every version of a document, not just the latest one.
- Confidentiality controls
Mark documents confidential so only the right people can see them.
- Expiry reminders
Get reminded before a document — a licence, an ID, a certificate — expires.
- Folders & trash
Organize documents into folders, with a trash for anything deleted by mistake.