I have iCloud+ on a family plan. Gives me Apple TV, Music, Fitness and 2TB of storage. I use it to back up all my photos (with a process to back them up to my local NAS as well as additional cloud storage - AWS Glacier)

I’m on a Mac all day and have an iPhone and iPad, so it works for me.

Some alternatives might be cheaper, but the integrations are too good to pass up.

Right now I use Google One (G-Drive, Photos, etc) on a 200 GB plan because I share this with a really good friend of mine who needs Google Drive storage, and with this I get a VPN on my phone as included with the plan. I also would use iCloud+ on a 50 GB plan merely for backup and the other really useful features such as Hide My Email and Private Relay. Also I would store pretty important data on my iCloud as I do have Advanced Data Protection on which essentially end to end encrypts my iCloud data which is really useful.

For personal use, I would definitely recommend iCloud for its simplicity and ease of use. Overall, I think cloud services like Dropbox, OneDrive, Azure, AWS S3, Google Drive are very convenient tools for storing data - whether for personal use or for a business.

I use iCloud for photos, shared albums and device backups. It just works, configure and forget. I am on a 200 Gb plan, for four devices.

Just use iCloud with the encryption enabled