Ente

Ente is a private photo backup service with a separate app for documents, made by Ente Technologies, a small company that started in 2020 and is now registered in the US. Ente says your photos, videos and documents are encrypted on your device before upload, together with their names, dates and locations. The code of all its apps and of its server is open source.

This review covers two apps that share one Ente account. Ente Photos backs up photos and videos. Ente Locker keeps documents, notes and passwords. Neither works as a general cloud drive: Ente Photos accepts only image and video files, Locker holds at most 1,000 items in 10 GB, and no desktop app keeps a folder of your files in sync.

Cure53, a German security firm, reviewed Ente’s encryption design in 2023 and its server in 2025, both times at Ente’s request. Paid plans cost from $29.88 a year for 50 GB, and 1000 GB costs $119.88 a year.

Who Holds the Keys

When you sign up, the app creates a master key on your device. Your password is turned into a second key with Argon2id, a slow key derivation function, and that key locks the master key before it is stored on Ente’s server. Under this key custody model Ente holds only locked keys. Each photo or document gets its own key, which is locked with the key of its album or collection, which in turn is locked with the master key. Ente calls the result end-to-end encryption, and its Locker help pages call it zero-knowledge encryption; the 2023 Cure53 review, ordered by Ente, checked this design in the Photos apps.

The encryption covers more than the file itself. Ente says the file name, the date and place a photo was taken, captions, album and collection names, and the face groups and search index built on your phone are encrypted before upload. Face recognition and search run on your device, not on Ente’s servers. This metadata encryption means Ente’s servers do not learn what your photos show or where they were taken, according to Ente.

What Ente Can Still See

Ente’s privacy policy lists what it collects outside the encryption: your email address, the email addresses of people you share with, your IP address, device and browser details, server logs and anonymised crash reports. Ente also knows how much storage you use, and it receives payment invoices from its payment processors, without card details.

Crash reporting is on by default in the Ente Photos phone app and sends reports to a crash-tracking server that Ente runs itself; you can turn it off under Settings, Security. The build from F-Droid sends none. Ente says it collects no analytics about how you use the apps.

The web apps at photos.ente.com and locker.ente.com receive their encryption code from Ente every time they load, so a web user trusts that Ente serves unaltered code on each visit. The desktop and phone apps run code installed on your device and change only when you install an update.

Sharing

Sharing keeps the encryption in both of Ente’s modes. When you share an album or a Locker collection with another Ente user, its key is locked with that person’s public key. The app shows a Verification ID, a list of words, that the two of you can compare to make sure the key belongs to the right person. Shared Locker collections are view-only for the people you share with.

A public link carries the album’s or item’s key after the “#” in the address, a part that browsers do not send to the server, so anyone with the link can open it without an account. You can add an expiry date, a password and a limit on the number of devices. The password only makes Ente’s server refuse access without it; it does not add a second layer of encryption. People who open a photo link can see the photos’ metadata, including location, and Ente has no switch to hide it.

Cure53’s 2023 review pointed out that keys are not replaced in two situations: changing your password leaves the master key the same, and removing someone from a shared album leaves the album key the same, so, according to the review, a person who had the album key could still decrypt what had been shared. Ente called both known limitations it planned to address. Its help pages still say a password change does not re-encrypt your library.

Losing Your Password

Ente cannot reset access to your data. If you are still signed in on one device, you can set a new password there. When you sign up, you get a 24-word recovery key; if you forget your password, that key is the only account recovery Ente offers on its own. Lose both the password and the recovery key while logged out everywhere, and you lose every photo and document in the account. Save the recovery key outside Ente on the first day; this is the usual trade-off of private cloud storage, where nobody else holds a copy of your key.

Ente’s Legacy feature adds two optional ways back in, set up in advance. A trusted contact, another Ente user, can ask to recover your account; if you do not block the request within 7, 14 or 30 days, they can set a new password and take over the account. A Legacy Kit is three printed sheets, any two of which start a recovery with the same waiting period, and the person using them needs no Ente account. Both give full access to the account, not to chosen items. In July 2026 Ente published a security advisory about a flaw, fixed in a server update that month, that let an accepted trusted contact skip the waiting period.

Open Source and Audits

Ente publishes the code of its phone, desktop, web and command-line apps and of its server in one repository on GitHub under the AGPL-3.0 open-source licence; the server code has been public since March 2024, and Ente says it is the code that runs its own service. You can run your own Ente server with it. Ente does not document reproducible builds, so you cannot confirm that an app from a store was built from the published code.

Ente has ordered and published these security audits. In March 2023 Cure53 reviewed the encryption design and the encryption code of the Ente Photos phone and web apps. It found one high-severity issue, weak passwords accepted in the web app, which was fixed, plus two medium-severity key-rotation limitations described above and one low-severity issue. Ente says the cryptography firm Symbolic Software took part.

In October 2025 Cure53 ran a penetration test and code review of the server, its login and access control, and the servers Ente runs on; Ente says CERN, the European physics laboratory and an Ente customer, paid for it. The test found fifteen issues, including a critical one in the desktop app outside the test’s scope, and twelve were fixed by the end of the test, among them every critical and high-severity issue. Cure53 found that the server’s access controls keep one user from reaching another user’s data. Three findings were left open: a medium-severity bypass of Cloudflare protection that weakens the guard against guessing two-factor codes, and two informational issues. In April 2026 winfunc, a startup that uses AI models for code review, checked the new encryption library behind the Locker web app and reported four medium and two low issues. The Locker phone apps are not named in the scope of any of these reviews.

No data breach at Ente is known.

Ownership and Jurisdiction

Ente Technologies, Inc. has been a US corporation since 2022, and its terms are governed by Delaware law. Ente says it keeps three encrypted copies of your files with three storage providers in the EU, in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Paris. Its privacy policy says Ente discloses personal information to comply with a court order or a government request, and that your information may be accessed from the US. Under the design Ente describes, such a request could reach account details, IP addresses and logs, but not readable photos or documents.

Ente calls itself bootstrapped and profitable, funded by subscriptions rather than venture capital. Since July 2026 it publishes its revenue and its number of paying customers on its website.

Photos and Locker, Not a Drive

Ente Photos accepts only image and video files, up to 10 GB each, and keeps the originals without compression. The phone apps back up chosen albums automatically, though Ente says background backup is not yet reliable on iOS and on some Android phones. On a computer, the desktop app can watch folders and upload new photos and videos from them; this is one-way, and Ente says it is a backup service, not two-way sync. The desktop app and the command-line tool can also export your whole library, with album folders and metadata, to a local disk.

Ente Locker stores four kinds of items: documents such as PDFs and scans, plain-text notes, usernames with passwords, and records of where a paper original is kept. The phone apps can scan paper pages into a PDF and keep chosen files available offline. The free plan allows 100 items and 1 GB; any paid Ente plan raises this to 1,000 items and 10 GB, separate from your photo storage. Locker has no desktop app and no export yet; its web version launched in beta in May 2026. Ente itself says Locker is not meant for large files and is not a replacement for a password manager, since it has no autofill. Ente Photos, Ente Locker and Ente Auth, Ente’s free two-factor code app, use one account, so deleting the account from any of them deletes the data in all three.

Ente keeps no file versioning: editing a photo saves a separate copy and leaves the original unchanged. Deleted photos and Locker items stay in the trash for 30 days. Shared albums let other users add photos and leave comments, but Ente has no document editor, so there is no collaborative editing.

Price

The free plan gives 10 GB for photos and videos, kept as one copy instead of the three copies on paid plans, plus the free Locker limit. A free account is deleted after 12 months without use, after several email notices.

Paid plans cost, per year: $29.88 for 50 GB, $59.88 for 200 GB, $119.88 for 1000 GB and $239.88 for 2000 GB. Paid monthly, the same plans cost $2.99, $5.99, $11.99 and $23.99 a month. Up to five family members can share one plan at no extra cost, each with a private library. Ente charges one price worldwide; students get 30% off, and PayPal works only for yearly plans.

Under Ente’s terms, purchases are non-refundable unless the law where you live says otherwise; Ente may refund at its own discretion. When a paid plan expires, you have 30 days to renew or download your files, after which Ente permanently deletes all your uploaded files.

Pros and Cons

Our Rating

Ente suits people who want their photo library and a small set of important documents encrypted on their own devices, with open-source apps and server and published audits. It does not suit anyone looking for a cloud drive for ordinary files: the photo app takes only photos and videos, and the document app is a small vault, not a synced folder.