A Comparison between Microsoft Office 365 and Google Suite

Google Cloud’s G Suite and Microsoft Corporation’s Office 365 are two of the most widely used enterprise productivity tool suites for emails, document management, file storage, notes, calendar, video conferencing, and more. While MS Office dominated the segment for long, making Office 365 migration a common practice among enterprises, of late, G Suite has emerged as a feature-rich and powerful alternative.

Both the products are subscription-based and charge organizations on a per-person monthly basis depending on the capabilities and features that they go for. While G Suite comprises reliable and user-friendly applications such as Gmail, Google Docs, Google Drive, Sheets, Slides, Calendar, and others, Office 365 migration is popular due to the time-tested applications of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneDrive, and the like.

Document Productivity:

Microsoft Word is the industry-standard word processing tool with features and tools that add to user convenience and save time. For the rapid creation of documents, the application offers a world of pre-built templates, auto-correction features, a bunch of design elements, and virtually everything that one needs when creating documents.

On the other hand, Google Docs has the upper hand when it comes to collaboration. Its cloud-enabled features facilitate collaboration more efficiently then Word. However, besides that, it’s MS Word all the way – be it editing, marking up, or versioning of documents while reviewing them.

Verdict: If the employees depend heavily on sharing documents over the cloud, Google Docs is the ideal option. For all other needs, MS Word is the unchallenged winner.

Spreadsheets

Like MS Word, MS Excel is the most popular spreadsheet tool among individuals who work on the desktop, particularly dealing with calculations and numbers. The charts, templates, and other options it offers for creating business budgets, financial forecasting, data entry, and marketing plans are genuinely impressive.

Over the years, Google has worked hard to offer similar features and capabilities but the tool simply can’t match up to Excel. It does, however, facilitate better collaboration like Google Docs which is a handy feature considering today’s collaborative business environments. This feature is a natural integration of the app and accessing sheets, editing data, and commenting are seamlessly easy.

Verdict: Google Sheets is better for synchronous sharing of data, else, MS Excel is a natural choice.

Cloud Storage

Microsoft’s OneDrive for Business gives users 1TB of personal cloud storage, for Enterprise accounts with at least five users, that limit is further stretched. The subscribing business gets additional storage in SharePoint.

In Google Drive, the storage allocation is capped at 30GB on Basic accounts. For Business and Enterprises subscription plans with at least 5 users, there’s no storage capacity limit. Administrators get better control of the stored data and get access to features for managing access.

Verdict: Both suites offer enough storage options and the user may choose one based on the pricing and the other requirements.

Business Emails

Microsoft Outlook offers a storage capacity of 50GB (excluding the space occupied by email attachments) on Business Premium and Business Essentials plans. With Outlook, users can send emails to up to 500 recipients at once with a file size of up to 150 MB.

Google’s Gmail is the most popular email service in the world; G Suite offers email 30GB storage space on the Basic plan and unlimited storage for the Business and Enterprise plans. Using Gmail, users can send emails to 500 recipients outside their organization at a time. While it allows attachments of up to 25MB, larger files can be shared through Google Drive.

Verdict: Both email services are impressive but the business plan of G Suite has an upper hand since Office 365 caps email storage at 50GB.

Slideshows

PowerPoint from Microsoft has existed for quite some time now and the product has been refined by the company to meet the needs of modern businesses. The user-friendly features of graphics, transitions, animations, and multimedia and the bunch of templates and customizable slide effects make the creation of presentations effortlessly easy.

Google Slides also does a wonderful job with similar features with the biggest USP being the ease of collaboration. But compared to PowerPoint, the functionalities, basic animations and transitions offered by Google Slides are drastically less.

Verdict: Innovative features such as Rehearse Timings (times how long the user takes on each slide while presenting) and QuickStarter (presentation assistance) push PowerPoint ahead of Google Slides.

G Suite vs. Office 365 Primary Features

Pricing

Since it’s one of the strongest decision-influencing factors when it comes to making a purchase, here’s a quick summary of the pricing structures of the two suites.

G Suite is offered in 3 plans – Basic ($6 USD / user / month), Business ($12 USD / user / month), and Enterprise ($25 USD / user / month).

● The Basic plan comes with Google’s flagship email client and some of the productivity apps and is best suited for small businesses. The cloud storage space is capped at 30GB for every user.

● For the Business plan, the subscriber gets enhanced security and control features. Cloud storage is unlimited but if the number of users is fewer than 5, its 1TB per user.

● The Enterprise plan packs all the features of the Business version and has additional options for greater security and control.

Office 365 for business is also offered in 3 versions - Office 365 Business Premium ($12.50 user/month), Office 365 Business Essentials ($5.00 user/month), and Office 365 Business ($8.25 user/month).

● Office 365 Business is preferred by businesses that want Office apps and cloud storage but it doesn’t include business emails.

● In addition to the apps of the Business plan, Office 365 Business Premium offers business emails, better security features, Exchange, SharePoint, and Teams for better workplace collaboration.

●       Office 365 Business Essentials offers business emails and all business apps in web and mobile versions but the Desktop versions of the apps are not available.

Both G Suite and Office 365 offer amazing productive tools that are super-convenient and boost work efficiency for the smooth conduct of business. G Suite has handy mobile apps that are known for their ease of use and collaboration. Also, considering the pricing plans, G Suite is the better option for small businesses. Office 365 too offers everything that one needs for working on desktops or smartphones. The suite is known for its first-rate desktop apps and that is why businesses go for Office 365 migration to deliver an unmatched experience to their employees. And hence, more enterprise-level businesses prefer Office 365.