$4
/ 100 GiB overage
On Pro, versus their $8. LAN caching is included on every plan: no TeamCache box to buy to keep it there.
Comparison
Swarmfile vs. LucidLink
LucidLink invented cloud-streamed creative storage. They do many things well, and we respect them. Here's where we differ, both ways. Last reviewed September 2026.
The three lines that change the math
SSO
included on Pro
SCIM and LDAP too. They reserve all three for Enterprise, and their Business plan stops at 25 seats.
LAN
on every plan
Every workstation seeds. No TeamCache box per site to buy, install, and maintain.
Where they’re stronger today: SOC 2 Type II, TPN Gold Shield, a mobile app, and a decade of major-studio logos. We don’t hide it. See the full side-by-side below.
Cheaper, and you include more.
Swarmfile ProLucidLink Business
Price / seat / month$25$32
Included storage / seat500 GiB400 GB
Storage overage$4 / 100 GiB$8 / 100 GB
SSO / SCIM / LDAPIncludedEnterprise only
LAN cachingEvery planTeamCache box (Enterprise add-on)
Lower price, more storage, cheaper overage, and the identity and LAN-caching features they reserve for Enterprise are included on Pro.
IncludedPartial or with conditionsNot offeredA highlighted row marks where one side clearly leads.
Architecture & performance
Capability
Swarmfile
LucidLink
Native drive mount (macOS / Windows / Linux)
✓
✓
Browse-without-download for huge files
✓Stream byte ranges from whichever holder is closest with zero files on disk - and a sparse mount can scope a drive down to just the folder a tool or agent needs.
✓
LAN performance for co-located teams
✓P2P mesh on every plan: every workstation seeds to its peers automatically, so read capacity grows with the team - the office gets faster as you add machines. No box to install.
◐TeamCache: install and manage a dedicated on-prem cache node. Enterprise add-on.
Multi-site / global teams
✓
✓A TeamCache per site (Enterprise).
Cloud backend
Zero-egress object storage + optional self-hosted seed (Pro+). New paid orgs get their own physically isolated storage bucket by default, reached through a bucket-scoped credential that's structurally unable to touch another org's bytes.
AWS S3; bring-your-own S3 on Enterprise.
File-type-aware chunking (Revit headers, IFC streams, etc.)
✓
-Generic.
We treat your office as part of the swarm. They treat it as a cache appliance you pay extra for.
Collaboration & locking
Capability
Swarmfile
LucidLink
Cooperative file locks
✓
✓
Revit / SolidWorks worksharing (file locking)
✓No plugin, Windows-native, like theirs: the mount reads the exclusive lock Revit or SolidWorks takes on open and turns it into a hub-enforced claim, so a second Windows machine, in this office or another, gets a sharing violation. Fails open if the hub is unreachable (fail-closed is opt-in). Cooperative Swarmfile locks (lock/unlock, checkout) also work on macOS and Linux.
✓Same OS-level approach: native Windows file locking, no Revit plugin.
Versioning + point-in-time rollback
✓1-3650-day retention per user. Large deletes, restores and purges (over 5,000 files) run as tracked background jobs with live progress and retry. History is append-only and never rewritten - restore and revert land as new commits.
✓30-day snapshots (Business); unlimited (Enterprise).
Disconnect-and-resync (Pack & Go)
✓Pin a folder, take a checkout lock (7-day default, renewed automatically while you're online), work offline. Saves queue locally; uploads resume on reconnect; explicit conflict resolution (keep-mine / keep-theirs / keep-both) if the world moved.
-Prefetch into local cache only. No checkout semantics, no offline-write workflow, no conflict-copy reconcile.
Zero-stall writes
✓Saves return immediately against a durable local queue that survives restarts and outages; uploads resume without re-saving. A rename, move or delete takes effect right away - the row shows “Waiting for the hub” until confirmed, and a refused change is put back.
◐Writes land in the local cache and upload asynchronously; a save isn't durable in the cloud until the sync completes.
Per-mount branching + merge
✓Each mount works a branch independently (Perforce-streams model), then merges changed files back (whole-file, with conflict detection) into main or any parent branch. Merge straight to an unprotected branch, or gate it with a propose-review-approve Merge Request; protected branches can require a configurable number of approvals before anything lands.
-No branch/mount-isolation primitive.
Headless CI runner (per-commit / per-tag jobs)
✓A headless engine watches a branch and runs a job on every matching commit or tag from an in-place checkout - no git clone, and only changed blocks re-fetch after the first run. Pin a render by forking a branch at the commit or tag, then hydrating it. Hosted CI runs the same jobs in per-job managed containers (
.swarmfile/ci.yml, commit/tag/MR/schedule/manual triggers, sparse checkout, artifacts, cache, live logs, per-second billing), and every save on the drive is a versioned commit, so asset changes can trigger runs too.-No CI / runner concept.
Identity & access
Capability
Swarmfile
LucidLink
OIDC SSO
✓Included on Pro.
◐Enterprise only.
SAML SSO
✓On Enterprise, via an adapter.
◐Enterprise only.
SCIM 2.0 provisioning
✓Included on Pro.
◐Enterprise only.
Org-enforced MFA / verified email
✓Owners can require MFA and/or a verified email for every member (Starter and up).
-No equivalent org-level requirement published.
On-prem LDAP / AD sync agent
✓
-
Folder & file-level ACLs
✓Allow / deny / inherit, with recursive resolution. On Pro.
◐Group-based.
Windows DACL projection
✓On Pro.
-
Access revocation with purge
✓Revoking a grant, a member or a device key is enforced on the next request; affected machines evict the revoked files and purge cached blocks, and the organization gets an audit-visible purge receipt. A machine that never reaches the hub is bounded by the org's offline access lease, 7 days by default.
◐Removing access takes effect in the product; copies already on disk, in a working copy or in a local cache stay.
OIDC SSO, SCIM and LDAP ship on Pro; no Enterprise upgrade needed. SAML SSO is on Enterprise, via an adapter. An org can require MFA and a verified email for every member (Starter and up).
Security & compliance
Capability
Swarmfile
LucidLink
AES-256-GCM encryption (at rest + in flight)
✓AES-256-GCM on paid private projects; by default the hub holds the key and can decrypt for authorized previews. Free and public projects are plaintext by design, as are direct git-LFS uploads.
✓
End-to-end / customer-held keys
◐Managed-key by default (central rotation, project-scoped revocation, SCIM-driven decryption); opt-in end-to-end tier on Pro and above, where per-project keys never reach our servers in plaintext. Share links can be E2E too, multi-device key transfer is supported, and a key-granter service keeps offline members from getting locked out. Content-only (names/sizes stay server-visible); server-side previews off on E2E projects.
✓Customer holds the keys.
Block-level BLAKE3 integrity verification
✓
◐Block-level architecture (256 KiB); integrity/verification method not publicly specified.
Tamper-evident, verifiable history
✓Hash-chained commits plus hub-signed Ed25519 checkpoints, offline-verifiable with
swarmfile-verify-history against keys you pin.-
Erasure coding (Reed-Solomon 10+4)
✓With LAN shard placement enabled, shards are deliberately placed across your office's machines by rendezvous hash, not just opportunistically cached; losing any one workstation doesn't cost you a shard.
-
Ransomware detection (inline CID-overwrite quarantine)
✓
◐Snapshot recovery only.
SOC 2 Type II
-Type I not yet started.
✓
TPN Gold Shield (M&E)
-Planned.
✓
MPAA TPN, GDPR
◐GDPR-ready; not formally audited.
✓
EU/US data residency
✓Native jurisdiction pinning (infrastructure-enforced, EU or US), self-serve, at no extra cost on every paid plan including Starter: org-level at signup, plus a per-project pin at creation. FedRAMP-region storage is Enterprise, provisioned through sales (not a FedRAMP authorization).
◐Filespaces are backed by your own S3-compatible bucket, so you choose the region yourself: a DIY guarantee, not a managed one.
Unified activity feed
✓Cross-source activity feed for every member (role-filtered), with owner CSV export on Pro. SIEM export on roadmap.
✓Enterprise.
If your contract requires SOC 2 Type II or TPN Gold Shield today, LucidLink is the answer. If you're not under that gate, we close the encryption gap and add things they don't: erasure coding and inline ransomware detection.
Migration & openness
Capability
Swarmfile
LucidLink
Migration CLI (local / NAS / file-list sources, with verify + resume)
✓
◐move-s3 bucket-relocation CLI + documented Rclone bulk migration; no turnkey first-party migration tool with verify/resume.
Self-hosted seed / cache
✓Pro and above; bring your own NAS.
◐Enterprise TeamCache; BYO S3 on Enterprise.
git clone + fast-forward push
✓A per-project git view clones with the swarmfile:// helper (shallow clones work) and accepts fast-forward pushes, merges included, or brings a whole repository in with
swarmfile git import; pushes over 5,000 paths run as resumable sessions and executable bits round-trip. Force push, annotated tags and E2E projects are refused, each with its reason.-No git remote; the filespace isn't a git source.
git-LFS backend
✓Point stock git-lfs at the project: ~5 GiB per PUT through stock clients, up to 256 GiB per object through the bundled agent, with locks shared with the drive. Direct LFS uploads are stored unencrypted, and LFS is refused on E2E projects.
-
Open architecture / data portability
✓Object-storage bucket + content-addressed blocks; used as a git-LFS server, every object exports with stock git-lfs (git lfs fetch --all; a very large object's first stock pull may need the bundled agent). You can walk away with your data.
◐AWS-managed by default. Portability via BYO S3 on Enterprise.
Outbound webhooks (Slack / Zapier / SIEM)
✓Signed (HMAC-SHA256), SSRF-guarded notifications for file, branch, merge, ACL, and membership events, plus a personal channel, so you can wire events into Slack, Zapier, or a SIEM.
-
Reach & track record
Capability
Swarmfile
LucidLink
Major studio customers
◐Onboarding our first studios now.
✓A+E Networks and many more.
Verticals served
✓Software · Games · M&E · Geospatial · AEC (Revit worksharing, no plugin needed).
✓M&E (primary), some adjacent.
Mobile app
-
✓
Support with an SLA
✓Enterprise: dedicated support and an SLA.
✓Enterprise.
They have logos and a mobile app. We don't yet. If a mobile app is a hard requirement today, that's a gap we won't paper over. If you want a drive that branches, reviews and runs CI on the same bytes - with SOC 2 and TPN planned - talk to us.
Pricing
Capability
Swarmfile
LucidLink
Entry tier
$5/seat/mo Starter, 100 GiB/seat, no seat minimum or maximum. A no-card Free plan covers public projects.
$7/seat/mo Starter, 100 GB/seat, capped at 10 seats / 1 TB.
Team tier price / seat / month
$25 Pro
$32 Business (monthly list price), capped at 25 seats
Machine access (render nodes, CI)
✓Headless machines use an API-key allowance, not seats: 2/seat included on Starter (min 5) and 5/seat on Pro (min 10), then $2/key/mo. A render farm isn't billed as people.
No separately priced machine credential in their published pricing.
Included storage per seat
500 GiB
400 GB
Storage overage
$4 / 100 GiB
$8 / 100 GB
Committed storage packs
$3 / 100 GiB per month, committed, below the $4 metered rate
Prepaid capacity exists; rates are contract-dependent.
Org-level spend cap
✓Owners set a monthly dollar ceiling on metered overage (storage, collaborators and hosted-CI compute); at the cap, billable growth pauses while reads keep working.
No published org-level cap.
Egress (bandwidth) allowance per seat
✓Unlimited: no allowance, no overage, free on every plan.
Advertised as included on every plan; no numeric allowance or overage rate is published.
SSO / SCIM / LDAP included at this tier
✓
-Enterprise only.
Trial
7-day trial on every paid plan, Starter and Pro alike. Card on file, nothing charged until day 7. A trial covers up to 2 seats; add more once it converts.
30 days, no card.
Enterprise
Custom.
Custom.
We beat their storage allowance AND their price: $25 against their $32 monthly list price, more GiB per seat, a cheaper overage rate (with committed packs cheaper still), and unlimited free egress on every plan, where theirs is included but publishes no allowance or overage rate. SSO, SCIM, and LDAP are included; they reserve those for Enterprise.
Where Swarmfile is stronger today
- LAN-first on every plan. Every workstation participates in the P2P swarm automatically. No TeamCache box to buy, install, and maintain per site.
- SSO, SCIM, and LDAP on Pro. Their equivalent identity stack lives behind Enterprise pricing, and their Business plan stops at 25 seats. Past that, the gap is the real story.
- Guest reviewers without a seat. Give a client or a sub read-or-comment access to one folder, audit-trailed and revoked in a click. Starter includes one guest per seat and Pro five on private projects; public-project guests are free and uncapped. LucidLink offers guest links too; the difference is that a Swarmfile guest works against the real project folder, with the same ACLs and audit trail as a member.
- 500 GiB/seat included: more than theirs, and we're cheaper. We beat their storage allowance (500 GiB vs 400 GB/seat), undercut their seat price ($25 against their $32 monthly list price), and undercut their overage rate ($4 vs $8 per 100 GB), with committed packs at $3/100 GiB below that, on top of SSO/SCIM/LDAP and LAN caching, both included on Pro, both an Enterprise-only add-on or a box you buy on theirs.
- Revit / SolidWorks worksharing, no plugin required. Both of us build on the native Windows lock Revit and SolidWorks already take, with no add-in. Our extra: the Windows mount turns that lock into a hub-enforced claim, so a second Windows machine's open is refused across offices, with the hub as the referee. Separately, cooperative Swarmfile locks (lock/unlock, checkout for Pack & Go) work across macOS, Windows and Linux, and a hub-enforced byte-range lock API is there for teams building finer-grained integrations.
- Block-level integrity, erasure coding, inline ransomware detection. Three things they don't currently advertise. Each one is the kind of thing you only notice you didn't have after an incident.
- Opt-in end-to-end encryption on your terms. Opt-in customer-managed keys, E2E share links, multi-device key transfer, and a key-granter service so offline members don't get locked out, all with an org recovery key you hold. LucidLink's customer-held-key model is always-on; ours is opt-in per project so teams can choose the tradeoff.
- Per-mount branching with a Merge Request review gate. Per-mount branching lets a look-dev variant or design option diverge on its own mount, then merge back into main with conflict detection. No copying the project, no manual reconciliation. Merge straight to an unprotected branch, or gate it with a propose-review-approve Merge Request; protected branches can require a configurable number of approvals before anything lands. LucidLink has no equivalent mount-isolation model.
- Documents, source and large assets in one project. One history and one per-folder permission tree (allow/deny/inherit, guests without seats) over everything a project holds, with one CI trigger surface - instead of splitting documents, code and renders across a file platform, a repo and a separate asset store.
- Headless CI runner for render farms. A headless engine watches a branch and runs a job on every matching commit or tag from an in-place checkout - no git clone, and only changed blocks re-fetch after the first run. Pin a render by forking a branch at the commit or tag, then hydrating it. Hosted CI runs the same jobs in per-job managed containers, and every save is a versioned commit, so asset changes can trigger runs too. LucidLink has no CI or runner concept.
- Signed outbound webhooks. HMAC-SHA256-signed, SSRF-guarded notifications for file, branch, merge, ACL, and membership events, plus a personal channel, so Slack, Zapier, or your SIEM can react to what happens in the swarm. LucidLink has nothing equivalent.
- Multi-vertical from day one. Software, games, M&E, geospatial and AEC. If your firm spans more than one, you don't need a separate tool stack per practice.
- Migration CLI. Move from a NAS, a local file tree, or a file list with verify + resume + JSON reporting. No manual upload week.
Decide on your timeline, not ours.
Start free in two minutes, or talk to us first if you'd rather interrogate the architecture before signing anything up.