See how Shade stacks up against configuring SMB share yourself with Azure AD.
Key takeaways
First-party permissions management
Shade offers first-party permission management from subfolders to drives to workspaces. This includes expiry guest and external collaborators, drive management, and virtual drive mounting. You no longer have to go to each file and change the permissions based on specific groups—you can do it all in Shade.
No more VPNs.
Shade does not require external VPN configurations or adding users to the network configuration. Shade port punches and provide fast, secure drive mounting to external collaborators for as long as you allow them.
AI Search v. File Explorer Search
We all know that finder and file explorer search don’t work. Shade wraps better permission management, AI search, and secure access all into one product so you never lose an asset again.
Ready to switch from SMB Share to Shade?
External collaborators are native to Shade.
SMB permissions are great if you know that you are going to work entirely internally and you are willing to go through all the time and effort to maintain them. However, an evergrowing remote team and a need to use multiple software BECAUSE SMB share doesn’t work outside of the internal network lead to frustrating uses of various software, multiple permission siloes, and multiple data siloes.
Shade provides a first-party solution that replaces your existing SMB share. By syncing with your SAML provider - we can easily maintain existing group relationships and reconfigure all SMB permissions via Shade drives and folders. Better yet - Shade provides full logs of who accessed and changed specific items, so you always have a consistent view of what has happened per file.
SMB is slow.
SMB has historically been slow when working with remote teams. Without a good internet connection and a direct connection via VPN, SMB is practically impossible to use in a remote context.
With Shade, this is all mitigated. Why? Because we don’t use the outdated SMB protocol. Instead, ShadeFS uses intelligent network chunking to send and transfer files, which makes it possible to mount Shade to any computer that needs access virtually
Multimodal AI Search
Traditional SMB share works at the underlying file system layer - it is thus restricted to any existing search that folder and file explorer offer - which is historically very poor. I mean, try searching for anything and see what pops up. Shade offers a fast, consistent search experience that provides various filtering options that help you find precisely the asset you need without spending excessive time combing through files and folders.
When to use SMB over Shade: small teams, small files
If you are working in a smaller team and don’t work with large amounts of media files - then it might make more sense to roll out an SMB share, especially if you do not care about explicitly permission things out - then connecting everyone up to the NAS might make the most amount of sense. However, if you need search or external collaboration, then Shade should be the tool you use over SMB.
