What Figshare is
Figshare is a research repository that issues DOIs for datasets, figures, posters, presentations, and other outputs. It is a commercial product from Digital Science, and its distinctive business is institutional portals: universities license a branded Figshare instance that becomes their official repository, feeding deposits into research information systems and reporting automatically.
That institutional angle is why it appears here alongside Zenodo rather than being redundant with it. The technical capability is broadly similar; the difference is organisational. If your university runs a Figshare portal, depositing there means your output is counted in institutional reporting, appears on your staff profile, and satisfies internal open-access requirements without a second step. Depositing elsewhere means doing that reconciliation by hand, or not at all.
Why researchers use it
- The institutional portal — deposits flow into university systems, staff profiles, and reporting without further effort.
- Usage metrics — views, downloads, citations, and altmetrics per item, which is genuinely useful evidence for a promotion case or a grant narrative.
- A polished interface — previewing datasets, figures, and documents in the browser, which is more than most repositories manage.
- Deliberate embargo and licensing controls — staged release of data alongside a paper, handled properly rather than by delaying deposit.
- It is what your librarian will recommend — which matters more than it sounds when you need help with metadata or a DOI at proof stage.
Where it fits in a research workflow
Figshare is a deposit endpoint, occupying the same slot as Zenodo: where a finished output goes to become citable. Upstream is the work; downstream is a data availability statement and, if your institution runs a portal, an internal reporting system.
The division with neighbouring tools follows the pattern of the whole category. Code and its releases are usually better on GitHub archived to Zenodo, whose GitHub integration is the smoothest in this space. Study records and preregistrations belong on OSF. Large data versioned during the project with DVC gets deposited here at the end. And where a curated disciplinary repository exists for your data type, it beats every generalist option on discoverability and metadata quality — deposit there first.
Getting started
Half an hour.
- Check for an institutional portal before creating a personal account. Depositing at your university’s instance is usually what your funder, your librarian, and your reporting system all expect.
- Reserve the DOI before publication so you can cite your own dataset in the manuscript rather than adding it at proof.
- Choose the licence deliberately. CC-BY is conventional for data and has real consequences; a restrictive licence on publicly funded data may conflict with your funder’s terms.
- The step people skip: write the description for someone who has not read your paper. A dataset whose only documentation is its filenames is technically deposited and practically unusable, and unusable deposits are the norm rather than the exception.
Figshare vs the alternatives
| Alternative | Does it better | Pick it if |
|---|---|---|
| Zenodo | Non-commercial stewardship, stronger preservation commitment, GitHub integration | Long-term guarantees matter more than metrics |
| OSF | Preregistration and project structure | You are recording a study, not depositing a file |
| A disciplinary repository | Curation, domain metadata, and community search | One exists for your data type |
| GitHub | Live, collaborative code with real version control | The output is software still being developed |
The honest summary: Figshare wins when your institution runs a portal, and Zenodo wins when it does not.
Cost, licensing, and your data
Free personal accounts with modest storage for public deposits; institutional portals are licensed centrally and are usually free at the point of use with far higher limits. Figshare is a Digital Science product — the same group behind Dimensions and Altmetric.
The consideration that separates it from Zenodo is stewardship. Preservation guarantees here rest on commercial contracts and a company’s continued existence rather than on an intergovernmental research organisation’s mandate. Digital Science is well established and Figshare participates in preservation schemes, so this is a difference in the kind of assurance rather than evidence of risk — but for a dataset that must remain citable in thirty years, it is a difference worth knowing you are accepting. The usual data caution applies unchanged: participant-derived data needs consent and de-identification before any open deposit, and the embargo and restricted-access options exist so that a record can be citable without the files being public.
The honest review
Strengths. Figshare is the most polished experience in this category, and the institutional integration solves a real administrative problem — deposits that count, automatically, in the systems your university actually uses. The metrics dashboard is more useful than it first appears: download and citation counts for a dataset are concrete evidence of impact in exactly the format promotion committees and funders ask for.
Limitations. It is a commercial product, so the long-term guarantee is contractual rather than institutional, which for archival purposes is a weaker claim than Zenodo’s. Free personal accounts have modest storage. Curation is minimal, so metadata quality is entirely yours and most deposits are poor. Discovery outside the institutional portal is limited, the same weakness every generalist repository shares. And a university portal ties your deposit to an institution you may leave, which raises questions about the record’s ownership that are rarely thought about in advance.
Verdict. Adopt it if your institution runs a portal — the reporting integration makes it the sensible default and the friction is lowest. Skip it in favour of Zenodo if you are choosing freely and long-term preservation matters most, and in favour of a disciplinary repository whenever one exists. The condition that flips the answer is institutional, not technical.
Common questions
Is Figshare free?
Personal accounts are free with modest storage for public deposits. Institutional portals are licensed centrally by universities and are typically free at the point of use with much higher limits — check whether yours has one before creating a personal account.
Figshare or Zenodo?
Figshare when your institution runs a portal, because deposits then feed university reporting automatically. Zenodo when you are choosing freely: it is non-commercial, CERN-operated, and has a stronger long-term preservation commitment plus better GitHub integration.
Can I embargo data on Figshare?
Yes. You can reserve a DOI, cite it in your manuscript, and release the files when the paper publishes — or apply restricted access where the data cannot be fully open. That is the correct pattern for staged release, rather than delaying deposit until after publication.