Three cloud apps open at once. That was my normal for almost a year.
Dropbox in one tab, Google Drive syncing quietly in the background eating my fan noise, and an S3 bucket I had to log into through the browser every single time a client needed a file moved. I run a small design setup, just me and one part-time editor, and we push files between three cloud accounts more or less daily. It got old fast.
A guy in a small business Slack group I’m part of mentioned CloudMounter almost as a throwaway line, something like “just mount your clouds as drives, why are you even downloading things.” I hadn’t thought about it that way before. So I looked it up, installed it on my Mac that same evening, and figured I’d give it a proper run before writing anything about it.
This is that write-up. Six weeks in, across a Mac and a Windows laptop, here’s what actually happened, including the one setup mistake that cost me twenty minutes and the gap between the two platforms nobody mentions upfront.
Is CloudMounter Worth It? My Short Answer
Yes, if you’re already juggling two or more cloud accounts and getting tired of downloading a file from one just to reupload it to another. CloudMounter mounts Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, S3, pCloud, Box, Backblaze B2, MEGA, and a few others as regular drives in Finder or File Explorer, and you drag files between them directly.
No, if you only use one cloud service.
The whole value sits in the word “multiple.” A single Dropbox account with nothing else to juggle doesn’t need this app, no matter how clean the interface is. That’s the short version. The rest of this is what actually happened when I used it daily for six weeks, not just what the pricing page promises.
Setting Up CloudMounter on Mac and Windows
CloudMounter is made by a company called Electronic Team, and on Mac it’s currently sitting at version 4.18, released in June this year. Installing it was simple. Open the app, click to add a cloud account, and a browser window pops open for you to log in and grant access. I connected Dropbox first and it took maybe 40 seconds. Google Drive was the same story.
Both accounts showed up in Finder looking exactly like an external hard drive would, sitting right there in the sidebar next to my actual SSD.
The part that tripped me up was Amazon S3. I’ve got a bucket I use for client deliverables, and CloudMounter asks for an access key and a secret key instead of the simple login flow the bigger consumer clouds use. I typed the wrong region on my first attempt and just got a blank, unresponsive drive that wouldn’t open. Took me a good twenty minutes of poking around before I realized the region field mattered. Not the app’s fault exactly, more that I assumed it would auto-detect, and it didn’t. Once I fixed the region, it mounted fine and has been solid since.
If you’re only connecting Dropbox, Drive, or OneDrive, setup is actually painless. If you’re bringing in S3, WebDAV, or an SFTP server, budget ten extra minutes and have your credentials ready.
I used to run a much older cloud sync tool years back, one that shall stay nameless because I honestly don’t remember what it was called anymore. It had this habit of duplicating folders every time it lost connection for more than a minute, and I’d end up with “Project X,” “Project X (1),” “Project X (2)” scattered everywhere. That memory is basically why I was suspicious of any tool promising to “just mount your clouds” without checking it myself first. CloudMounter hasn’t done that duplication thing once in six weeks, for what that’s worth.
Once all four accounts, Dropbox, Google Drive, the S3 bucket, and a WebDAV folder I use for one older client, were connected, my Finder sidebar looked like I had four extra hard drives plugged in. That visual alone changed how I think about my files. I stopped thinking “I need to open the Dropbox app” and started thinking “I need to check the Dropbox drive.” Small distinction. I’ve opened the actual Dropbox app maybe twice since, mostly out of habit itself.
What Does Daily Use With CloudMounter Actually Look Like?
Here’s the thing that sold me.
I had a project folder that needed to move from Dropbox into the S3 bucket for archiving, about 40 files, mostly PSDs and a couple of video exports. With CloudMounter, I just dragged the folder from the Dropbox drive to the S3 drive in Finder. No download to my desktop, no separate reupload, it moved cloud to cloud directly. My laptop has 512GB of storage and I was constantly clearing space before this, mostly because I’d download big files “just to move them” and forget to delete the local copy after.
The app also supports pCloud, Box, Backblaze B2, MEGA, and OpenStack Swift, and it does regular FTP and SFTP too, which I use once in a while for an older client who still runs their own server. I haven’t touched half of those services personally. But having them all sit as drives in one place instead of ten different login pages is the actual value here. It’s not that any one connection is revolutionary. It’s that they’re all in the same window.
Speed depends on the file, not magic.
Anything under maybe 200MB moves close to instant in my testing, but a 1.2GB video export I moved last week took close to four minutes, which lines up roughly with my upload speed anyway. The upload itself still has to happen somewhere, CloudMounter just skips the download-then-reupload round trip in between, that’s the difference only. Saves real time on a slow connection, less on a fast office one. Worth knowing before you assume every transfer is instant.
My editor uses the app mostly for pulling reference files off a shared Drive folder without cluttering her own desktop, and she mentioned the search inside the mounted drive is slower than searching in the native Dropbox or Drive app. That tracks, since CloudMounter is essentially asking the cloud service for a file listing each time rather than keeping its own fast local index the way the official apps do. For big folders with hundreds of files, expect a short pause before results show up.
Does CloudMounter Work the Same on Windows as on Mac?
No.
This is the one gap I wish someone had told me before I bought a license. On Mac, once a file’s been opened it stays available offline even if your wifi drops. I lost internet for about twenty minutes during a storm two weeks back and kept editing a doc I’d opened from the Drive mount without even noticing until I tried to open a second file.
Windows doesn’t have that yet. Windows is currently on version 3.8, released September 16th, literally today as I’m writing this, and offline mode is listed as “coming soon” with no date attached. My editor runs Windows and doesn’t get the same offline safety net I do on Mac. So if your team is split across the two platforms, plan around that gap rather than assuming feature parity.
The pricing structure follows the same split. A Team license covering five Macs runs $249 lifetime or $99 a year, and it’s entirely separate from the Windows Team license, you can’t share one across both platforms. For a two-person shop like mine that’s fine. A mixed Mac-and-Windows office of ten ends up buying two separate business plans, not one.
What Does CloudMounter Cost, and Is the Lifetime License Worth It?
A personal lifetime license is $74, marked down from $99, or $29 a year if you’d rather subscribe. I went lifetime because I already knew I’d use it past a year, and the math works out in your favor after roughly two and a half years compared to paying yearly. There’s a 7-day trial on the yearly plan if you want to test before committing.
That’s what I’d actually recommend doing first, rather than jumping straight to lifetime like I did.
For what it’s worth, the company claims 4.8 out of 5 across 255 reviews and says they’re past a million downloads, been around more than ten years under the Electronic Team name. I can’t verify the download number myself, obviously, but the app not feeling half-baked lines up with something that’s had a decade to get sanded down.
Who Is CloudMounter Actually For?
Freelancers and small teams juggling two or three cloud accounts across clients, that’s who this is actually built for. I also noticed CloudMounter doesn’t have a mobile app, everything about it is strictly desktop, so don’t expect to mount a cloud drive on your phone. If you’re the kind of person who forgets which client’s files live in which service, this fixes that specific headache and not much else.
Six weeks in, I’m still using it every day, mostly for the drag-and-drop between Dropbox and S3, and that one habit alone has probably saved me two or three hours a month I used to spend downloading and reuploading files manually by hand. The S3 region hiccup on day one was annoying but a one-time thing, and the Windows offline gap is the item I’m actually watching since Electronic Team hasn’t given a timeline for when that lands.
If your cloud setup is one account, skip it.
If it’s a handful of accounts and a server whose password you keep forgetting, you’ll probably feel the same relief I did, somewhere around the second or third file, when you drag it between drives instead of downloading it first.