Google Drive vs a brand portal
A shared folder is how most creators deliver their first dozen projects, and there's a reason it sticks: everyone already has an account, there's nothing to install, and pasting a link takes ten seconds. For a single file going to a brand you'll likely never work with twice, that's genuinely hard to beat.
What a folder was never built to do is hold a state. It can't tell you whether the brand actually looked at the file, whether they approved it or want changes, or which of six similarly-named exports is the current one — because a folder is storage, not a workflow, and UGC delivery is a workflow with a status.
Keep the shared folder for a one-off project or a brand that explicitly wants files that way; move to a brand portal once you're re-sharing the same link because you've lost track of who has access, or once a brand's silence on a file could mean approved, ignored, or lost in their inbox and you have no way to tell which.
What Google Drive genuinely does better
It's free, universally trusted, and requires zero onboarding — a brand contact who has never heard of your business already knows how to use it. Storage is generous, version history exists if you use it consistently, and for a brand whose own internal review process runs through Drive, meeting them there is the path of least friction. A shared folder is a good tool; it's simply a storage tool being asked to do an approval tool's job.
Where the two actually differ
| With a shared Google Drive or Dropbox folder | With sproutUGC | |
|---|---|---|
| What the brand sees | Every file in the folder, in upload order, with no indication of which are drafts and which are final. | Only the deliverables you've opted in, each carrying a status — in progress, submitted, revisions, approved. |
| Approval | A reply in an email or DM thread, easy to lose and with no record it happened. | An explicit approve-or-request-changes action attached to the deliverable itself, with the brand's note captured against it. |
| What happens after approval | Nothing structural — you have to remember to go invoice. | Once every deliverable on a deal is approved, the deal reminds you to bill it. |
| Who has access | Whoever has the link, until you remember to change the sharing settings. | Named contacts per brand with their own magic-link sign-in, revocable at any time — no account for them to create. |
| Multiple people at the same brand | Share the folder with each new contact and lose track of who has it. | Each contact gets their own access to the same brand's projects, on Scale. |
| Where it lives relative to the deal | A separate system with no link back to the deal, the invoice, or the licence you agreed. | Attached to the deal directly, alongside its deliverables, its invoice, and the usage rights you sold. |
Stay where you are if…
- You're sending one or two files to a brand for a single project you don't expect to repeat.
- The brand has explicitly asked for a shared Drive folder because that's how their internal review runs.
- You have no other deliverables, deals, or invoices to connect it to — a portal has nothing yet to organise.
Time to move if…
- You're re-sharing the same folder link because you can no longer remember who has access.
- A brand asks "is this the final version?" and you have to go check rather than already knowing.
- You want an approval to actually do something — trigger an invoice reminder — rather than just end a conversation.
- You work with more than one contact at the same brand and want to control what each of them sees.
Questions
Does the brand portal replace Google Drive entirely?
It replaces Drive for the part of the job Drive was never built for: giving a brand a scoped, status-aware view of exactly their deliverables with a real approve or request-changes action. Deliverable files live and are shared from inside sproutUGC — the portal isn't a link back out to a folder.
Does the brand need to create an account to use the portal?
No. Access is a magic link sent to their email — no password, no signup — which is the same amount of friction as opening a shared folder link, with a scoped, status-aware view on the other end of it.
Which plan includes the brand portal?
A single-contact portal is included from Grow. Scale adds multiple contacts per brand and a named studio link.
Run both for a month
The free plan doesn't expire and imports your existing contacts from CSV. Keep whichever one you actually open.
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