6 cloudHQ Alternatives (Free & Paid, 2026)

The right cloudHQ alternative depends on which cloudHQ you're replacing. cloudHQ is really two products under one name: a cloud-to-cloud sync and backup service, and a catalog of roughly 95 apps and browser extensions, most of them for Gmail (Save Emails to Google Drive, Save Emails as PDF, Email Tracker, and so on), each installed, authorized, and priced separately. People searching for an alternative are usually leaving one of three things — the per-extension pricing, the broad Gmail permissions every extension asks for, or a free tier that stops after a few dozen emails — and the best replacement is different for each use case.

Disclosure up front: InboxBucket is our product, and it's the first option below because it replaces the single most popular cloudHQ job — saving Gmail to Google Drive automatically. The other five aren't ours, and for some jobs they're the better pick.

Alternative	Replaces which cloudHQ job	Price (checked 30 Sep 2026)
InboxBucket	Save Emails to Google Drive / Dropbox / OneDrive / S3, email backup	Free (100 emails/month), then $79 one-time
Google Takeout	"Backup entire account"	Free
Thunderbird or MailStore Home	Email backup to a local archive	Free
rclone or MultCloud	Cloud-to-cloud sync and migration	Free / from $19.99 per month
Zapier or Make	Rule-based "when an email arrives, do X"	Free tier, then from $19.99 per month
Gmail's built-in Print and Add to Drive	Save Emails as PDF, attachment saving	Free

What cloudHQ actually is (and why it matters for choosing a replacement)

cloudHQ started as a cloud-to-cloud sync service and still sells that: connect two cloud accounts and it mirrors or backs one up to the other, including an email backup mode that copies a Gmail, Microsoft 365, Yahoo, iCloud, Outlook.com, or Fastmail mailbox into Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, or Amazon S3. The free plan covers free cloud accounts only, throttles transfers, and caps file size at 100 to 150 MB depending on the product. Premium costs $149 per year for one user; Business is $399 per year for three users plus $79 per additional user. (cloudHQ shows the same figures in euros to European visitors.)

The Gmail extensions are a separate business. Each one is its own browser install with its own Google authorization and its own price. The one most people mean when they say "cloudHQ" is Save Emails to Drive, which has around 50,000 users and a 4.4-star rating. Its free tier is a trial capped at a few dozen emails — cloudHQ's own pages say 25 per month in the plan comparison and 50 total on the pricing page — and unlimited saving costs $19.99 per month per user.

To be fair to cloudHQ, the extension is genuinely capable. It saves conversations as PDF, HTML, TXT, or .eml, can autosave everything that lands in a Gmail label in real time, deduplicates by message ID, and can back up an entire account including history. Trustpilot reviewers who like it describe exactly that: "set it and forget it."

Why people leave

Four themes show up consistently across Trustpilot (3.3 out of 5 from 88 reviews, nearly half of them one star), the Chrome Web Store reviews, and the Cloudwards review:

Price stacks up. Every feature is a separate subscription. Save to Drive alone is about $240 a year at $19.99 a month, more than most people expect to pay for a backup, and a tracker or templates means paying again.
The permissions. A Gmail extension that reads, converts, and files your mail needs full mailbox access. cloudHQ's Google Workspace Marketplace listing asks to "read, compose, send, and permanently delete all your email from Gmail" and to "see, edit, create, and delete all of your Google Drive files." One reviewer's reaction is typical: "It requested a lot of rights."
The free tier is a demo. Twenty-five to fifty emails is enough to see it work, not enough to use it.
Billing complaints. The single most repeated Trustpilot theme is being charged after cancelling and struggling to get refunds. Take that as an anecdote pattern, not a verdict, but it's what the reviews say.

If none of those bother you and you need PDF conversion of Gmail threads, cloudHQ may simply be the right tool. If they do, here's what to use instead.

1. InboxBucket: automatic email backup to storage you own

Replaces: Save Emails to Google Drive, Save Emails to Dropbox, Save Emails to OneDrive, Save Emails to S3, and cloudHQ's email backup mode.

InboxBucket does the same core job as cloudHQ's autosave — every new email lands in your own Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, or S3 as an original .eml file with headers and attachments intact — but it gets there differently. Instead of a browser extension reading your inbox, you get a private inbound address and auto-forward to it from Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, or whatever you use. That difference is the whole point:

No mailbox access. InboxBucket never asks for access to your mailbox. There's no OAuth grant to your inbox, no extension, nothing that can read, send, or delete mail. Only what you forward ever leaves your account.
Narrow storage permissions. On Google Drive, it asks for a single folder it creates and nothing else; on S3 or a compatible store like Backblaze B2, it needs no more than a write-only key to one bucket. Revoke it and the archive stays where it is.
A free tier you can actually use. 100 emails a month, free, with no trial expiry. Unlimited is a one-time $79 payment: no subscription, no renewal, so the "charged after cancelling" story can't happen.
Works with any mailbox that can forward. Gmail, Outlook.com, and iCloud forward for free; Yahoo requires its paid plan; Microsoft 365 tenants block external forwarding by default and need an admin to allow it. Selective backup is just a filter in your mail app.

The catch: forwarding starts today. cloudHQ's "backup entire account" reaches back into your history; InboxBucket can't. Pair it with a one-time export (option 2) for that. It also stores .eml only — if you specifically need searchable PDFs of threads, that's cloudHQ's strength, not ours. Setup for Gmail is four steps.

2. Google Takeout: a free one-time export of everything

Replaces: cloudHQ's "backup entire Gmail account" and paid migration jobs.

Takeout exports your complete Gmail history as an MBOX file, free, and can deliver it straight into Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, or Box. If what you wanted from cloudHQ was a full copy of years of mail, this is that, at no cost.

The catch: it's a snapshot. Nothing after the export is covered, repeating it is a chore, and MBOX is one giant file you'll need a viewer or a mail client to browse. Takeout is the history half of a backup, not the ongoing half. The Gmail backup guide walks through it.

3. Thunderbird or MailStore Home: a free local copy

Replaces: cloudHQ email backup, if "backup" means a copy on your own computer.

Point Thunderbird at any account over IMAP with offline storage turned on and you have a complete, searchable local copy of your mail that updates whenever the program runs. On Windows, MailStore Home does the same job as a dedicated archive: free for personal use, it pulls from Gmail, Outlook.com, Yahoo, or any IMAP or POP mailbox on a schedule into a compressed, searchable database.

The catch: the copy lives on one machine, in the client's own format, and only updates while that machine is on. You still have to back that up somewhere. It's a fine free third copy; it's a weak only copy.

4. rclone or MultCloud: cloud-to-cloud sync

Replaces: cloudHQ Backup & Sync, the original product — mirroring Dropbox to Drive, migrating one cloud to another.

If your cloudHQ use has nothing to do with email, the aggregator lists are right and this section is for you. rclone is free, open source, and speaks to over seventy storage backends; it syncs, copies, and mirrors between them from the command line or a small web GUI, with no file-size caps, no throttling, and no account with anyone. MultCloud is the hosted, point-and-click equivalent: a free plan with 5 GB of transfer per month, then $19.99 per month for 100 GB, $119 per year unlimited, or $249 one-time for lifetime unlimited.

The catch: rclone assumes you're comfortable with a terminal and running it yourself. MultCloud's free tier is small, and like cloudHQ it's a third party sitting between your clouds. Neither is an email tool: MultCloud's email migration converts messages to PDF and caps the free plan at 50 per month.

5. Zapier or Make: rule-based email automation

Replaces: the "when an email matching X arrives, save it to Drive / a spreadsheet / Slack" pattern that several cloudHQ extensions cover.

Zapier and Make connect Gmail to a few thousand other apps. A two-step Zap can watch a label and drop each new attachment into a Drive folder, or log every message to a Google Sheet, which replaces cloudHQ's Export Emails to Sheets. Zapier's free plan gives you 100 tasks a month and two-step Zaps; paid plans start at $19.99 per month billed annually.

The catch: each email is a task, so a real inbox burns through the free tier in days. And these tools save what you point them at, typically the attachment or a text body, not the original message, so they're automation, not backup. They also need an OAuth grant to your Gmail account, which InboxBucket doesn't.

6. Gmail's built-in print to PDF and Add to Drive

Replaces: Save Emails as PDF and Save Attachments to Drive, for occasional use.

Gmail already does both jobs by hand. Open a thread, choose Print all, and save it as a PDF; hover any attachment and click the Drive icon to save it straight into your Google Drive. No extension, no permissions, no cost.

The catch: it's manual, one message at a time, and a PDF is a picture of an email rather than the email itself (no headers, attachments handled separately). Fine for a receipt a month; useless as a system.

Side by side

	Automatic for new mail	Past mail	Access to your inbox	Price
cloudHQ Save to Drive	Yes	Yes (paid)	Full Gmail OAuth	Free for 25 to 50 emails, then $19.99/mo
InboxBucket	Yes	No	None	Free for 100 emails a month, then $79 one-time
Google Takeout	No	Yes	Google login	Free
Thunderbird / MailStore Home	While running	Yes	IMAP password	Free
rclone / MultCloud	Not an email tool	—	—	rclone free; MultCloud 5 GB a month free, then from $19.99/mo
Zapier / Make	Yes	No	Gmail OAuth	100 tasks a month free, then from $19.99/mo

Prices checked 30 September 2026 against each vendor's pricing page; they change, so verify before buying.

Switching away from cloudHQ: three things to do

Your files are already yours. cloudHQ writes into your own Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive, so cancelling doesn't delete anything it saved. Check the folder it created and keep it.
Revoke the access, not just the extension. Removing a Chrome extension doesn't revoke its Google permissions. Go to myaccount.google.com/permissions, find each cloudHQ app, and remove access.
Cancel in cloudHQ's billing page and keep the confirmation. Given how often Trustpilot reviews mention post-cancellation charges, a screenshot of the cancellation is cheap insurance.

The honest recommendation

For the job most people bought cloudHQ for, backing up email into cloud storage they control, use two free things and one cheap one: Takeout for your history, a forwarding archive like InboxBucket for everything from today on, and optionally Thunderbird as a third local copy. That combination covers past and future mail, keeps the originals as .eml files, and never hands a browser extension the keys to your inbox. If your cloudHQ use was cloud-to-cloud sync, skip all of that and go to rclone. If it was PDF conversion of Gmail threads at volume, cloudHQ is still good at that and nothing here beats it outright.

FAQ

Is cloudHQ free?

Partly. The sync service has a free plan limited to free cloud accounts, with throttled transfers and a 100 to 150 MB file cap. Most of the Gmail apps have a free tier that stops after a small number of uses; Save Emails to Google Drive allows 25 to 50 emails before asking for $19.99 per month.

Is cloudHQ safe to use?

cloudHQ authenticates through Google OAuth and its security page states that it does not permanently store your files, though it may cache content temporarily. The reasonable concern is scope, not intent: its Marketplace listing requests full Gmail permissions, including the ability to send and permanently delete mail, plus access to all your Drive files. If you'd rather not grant that to any third party, a forwarding-based archive like InboxBucket needs no access to your inbox at all.