For offices
Office file sharing on a local network
Your team sits in one room, on one network, and a 4 GB file still goes up to a data centre and back down to the desk two metres away. Meanwhile the shared folder that was supposed to avoid that keeps asking for credentials nobody has, and half the office has quietly gone back to USB sticks.
Why the usual answers don't hold
The cloud round trip is the bottleneck, not your network
Office upload bandwidth is usually a fraction of download, and a sync client has to push the whole file up before anyone else can pull it down. Your local network is often 10 to 50 times faster than the path the file is actually taking.
Shared folders need an administrator you do not have
Permissions, network profiles, firewall rules and credential prompts are all somebody's job. In an office without IT staff, that somebody is whoever is least busy, and the setup degrades every time Windows updates.
Per-seat cloud storage is priced for storage you do not need
You are not trying to archive anything. You are trying to hand a file to a colleague. Paying per person per month for cloud capacity to solve a local problem is the wrong shape of tool.
How Oxolan handles it
Files move across your own network
Transfers run directly between the two machines at 60–115 MB/s on wired gigabit. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is waiting on your office broadband.
Every machine is simply there
Install it once per machine and the whole office appears in a sidebar and stays visible. No mapped drives, no IP addresses, no usernames or passwords.
Browse, not just send
You can look through and search what a colleague is sharing rather than asking them to send it — closer to how a shared drive feels, without the shared-drive failure modes.
One flat price for the office
Licensing is per office by machine count, not per person per month. Every plan is the full app; the bands differ by how many PCs and your support tier.
Your options, honestly
Including the free ones. If one of them fits you better, use it.
| Option | Honest read |
|---|---|
| Windows shared folders | Free and built in. Needs configuring and reconfiguring, and produces the 0x-error catalogue when it drifts. |
| USB sticks | Works, and everyone hates it. No record of who has which version, and the file is only ever on one desk. |
| OneDrive / SharePoint / Dropbox | Strong for archiving, versioning and remote collaboration. For handing a large file to the next desk, the round trip is pure overhead. |
| LocalSend (free, open source) | Excellent free option, and it covers Linux and mobile too. Send-to-device only — no persistent office-wide machine list and no file locking. |
| Oxolan | Paid, Windows and macOS. Persistent discovery across the office, file locking, remote browse and search, in-app chat, flat per-office pricing. |
Getting started, in 3 steps
- 1
Install Oxolan on every machine in the office.
- 2
Each machine appears in everyone's sidebar automatically.
- 3
Drag files across, or browse a colleague's shared folder directly.
One flat price for the whole office
From $149/yr for up to 5 machines — every plan is the full app. See pricing. Free 14-day trial, no card required.
Download Oxolan — free trialFrequently asked questions
How fast is it on a normal office network?
On wired gigabit, our verified range is 60–115 MB/s depending on the network and the disks at both ends. Wi‑Fi is slower and varies a great deal with the access point and interference — wired matters most when files are large.
Do we need a server or a NAS?
No. Machines talk to each other directly, so there is no server to buy, host or maintain.
Is it per user or per machine?
Per machine, priced per office in bands. Every plan includes the full app — the bands differ by how many PCs are covered and your support tier.
What if two people edit the same file?
File locking prevents a second person overwriting a file that is open elsewhere. It is not a substitute for a tool with real multi-user editing, but it stops the common office accident.
Does it replace our cloud storage?
Not necessarily, and we would not claim it should. Cloud storage is good at offsite backup, remote access and version history. Oxolan is for moving files fast between machines in the same building. Plenty of offices run both.