Top 7 Reasons to Select Kiteworks Over ShareFile
Strongest Content Risk Management and Compliance
Whether your sensitive data lives in the cloud or on-premises, Kiteworks combines the strongest protection from breach and noncompliance risk with the productivity your teams need—even when collaborating with third parties.
1. No Vendor Access to Data or Metadata, Ever
Kiteworks hosted and on-premises systems layer protections so that neither Kiteworks staff nor external attackers can access your data or metadata.
SHAREFILE—the vendor can access metadata describing your files, policies, and users—even with on-premises StorageZones—and can access data hosted in its cloud.
2. Built-In Hardening That Keeps Insiders and Attackers Out
Kiteworks delivers unmatched virtual appliance hardening with a built-in network firewall, WAF, and intrusion detection—backed by an ongoing bounty program, regular pen testing, and one-click appliance updates.
SHAREFILE—on-premises StorageZone Controllers ship with no hardening, leaving admins with direct access to files, OS, and application code, and updates must be applied manually per component.
3. Comprehensive Audit Log Feed to SecOps and Compliance Teams
Kiteworks unifies every component log into a single, continuous stream to your SIEM for threat detection and mitigation, plus domain-specific and custom reporting—helping you pass compliance audits with minimum effort.
SHAREFILE—only scattered, topical reports are available, which admins must schedule, run, and export by hand, with no live feed to Splunk, Datadog, ArcSight, or other SIEMs.
4. CMMC- and Agency-Ready U.S. Federal Compliance
Kiteworks encryption has passed the rigorous NIST FIPS 140-3 validation process, and the cloud-hosted product undergoes yearly FedRAMP audits plus continuous monitoring by a certified third-party assessor (3PAO).
SHAREFILE—lacks FedRAMP authorization and NIST validation for FIPS 140-3.
5. Possessionless Editing to Manage Collaboration Risk
Kiteworks SafeEDIT next-generation DRM lets internal and external parties edit shared files of any type in a browser virtual UI, with no agents or plugins needed, while the file itself stays protected in the Kiteworks server cluster.
SHAREFILE—you must hand third parties possession of your sensitive data to edit it, whether via Microsoft 365 cloud or by download.
6. Absolute Privacy With Single-Tenant Cloud Hosting
Every Kiteworks customer runs on an independent private cloud, with no intermingling of data, metadata, or shared application resources.
SHAREFILE—a multi-tenant cloud intermingles your data and metadata with other customers’, risking cross-tenant breaches from software bugs or configuration errors.
7. Secure Large File Sharing for Compliant Productivity
Reliably encrypt, send, share, receive, scan, view, and save data-intensive, imaging, CAD, and other files up to 16 terabytes—with transfers that resume where they left off after a network failure.
SHAREFILE—a 100 GB size cap pushes users toward less secure workarounds whenever a business process needs larger files.