Office 365 vs Google Apps: Which Is Best for Your Business?

Table of Content

• Microsoft Office 365 vs Google Workspace: An Overview
• Which is Best for Business – Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace?
• Now you can join a Microsoft Teams call from a HoloLens 2 headset
• Any thoughts on Google Workspace vs Microsoft 365?
• Google Workspace vs. Microsoft 365: What’s the best office suite for business?

It’s also worth noting that Gmail is much friendlier to individual user customizability and third-party Gmail apps and add-ons. If you’re looking to modify your email platform to suit specific needs or improve its functionality, Gmail is the better bet. Google Workspace’s plans are more flexible (since they can be purchased month-to-month), and are generally simpler to understand. The Enterprise plan includes everything above, plus higher participant limits, advanced security controls, and additional reporting tools.

This plan lets you install Word, Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint, Microsoft Teams, and other school tools for free. Also, if you opt for the Family subscription plan, you can share the account with up to five additional users for six people using the same plan in total. Since this is a subscription-based service, you will be making monthly or yearly payments to use the apps on all your devices . However, the service is limited to only five connections at one time. Microsoft 365 is the name for the subscription version of the service that offers the same apps available with Office 2021, but you will also get some extras.

Microsoft Office 365 vs Google Workspace: An Overview

Yes, some of this comes down to poor choices of the organisation, but it need not be that way. In any case, moving from one platform to another can take months to settle, which for NFP/NGO is again almost make or break. Create and store Docs, Sheets and Slides in Dropbox alongside other traditional files. Technically, Google Workspace allows you to create both Google Workspace and MS Office documents — Microsoft 365 will only let you create the latter. The free trial is more generous — you can use Microsoft 365 for one month for free, whereas Google Workspace offers a shorter, 14-day trial.

Microsoft’s approach to mobile apps is slightly different to Google’s — in addition to providing separate mobile versions of their products, the company has created an app that combines quite a few of them into one product. Additionally, you can now use Microsoft’s desktop apps to work on documents in real time with other team members . With most of the 365 plans you get all the desktop versions of the Microsoft products as well as the cloud-based ones. Searching features — all plans except the ‘Business Starter’ plan give you access to a ‘smart search’ tool called ‘Google Cloud Search’. This functionality makes it easier to locate files within an organisation’s Google Workspace storage.

Which is Best for Business – Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace?

The issues that always push me back to the Microsoft product are –1. This combined with the security and compliance features in Admin portal means that personal and confidential data are much easier to manage.2. SharePoint lists delivers a tremendous DB experience which need little IT knowledge to configure.

However, you should note that if you’re using Google Workspace and one of your users needs more storage, the whole team will have to upgrade to a plan that provides it — it’s no longer possible to buy individual storage licenses. Google Workspace users can also avail of a ‘low-code’ option for adding bespoke functionality to Google’s apps. Called “Apps Script,” you can use it to build add-ons or automate processes that are specific to your business or organisation. The first, and simplest, is by installing an ‘add-on’ to the products. Both Microsoft and Google have online stores that provide a wide range of apps to beef up their productivity tools — the ‘Microsoft Appsource’ store and the ‘Google Workspace Marketplace‘ respectively.

Now you can join a Microsoft Teams call from a HoloLens 2 headset

The old adage of “you get what you pay for” is something that most lawyers understand, and it applies when comparing cloud productivity software. There are, however, many reasons why one program may suit your office better than the other. Each of these is a suite of apps and tools designed for professional productivity, most of which are hosted in the cloud.

Microsoft 365 Enterprise editions provide advanced threat protection features such as identity and access management, data loss prevention for email and files, and Microsoft Security and Compliance Center. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace offer software to create documents, spreadsheets, or presentations. Both provide browser-based versions as well as Android and iOS apps. These office productivity suites are almost identical in terms of features and cost. The main difference is that Google’s cloud-based ecosystem is designed for collaboration.

We’re based in the UK but provide these services worldwide. (That said, you would be closing down a lot of real-time collaboration possibilities by working in this way — and making life more expensive). So you could argue that the Google apps — due to their cloud-only nature — are likelier to nudge people in this direction.

This ‘local install’ aspect of using the Microsoft desktop apps may therefore bring with it some hidden IT costs. At the very least, there’s a time implication — your team will need to devote some hours to downloading, installing and periodically updating the applications correctly. Having the desktop versions installed also allows your team to work more easily with these file formats. However — and rather frustratingly — Gmail really doesn’t allow you to sort or group mail, something most users will often require from an email client.

Thanks for feeding back Stu – I have now clarified the annual / monthly pricing differential for Office 365 plans. You can’t change your theme or even insert a table of contents. Hope you like blue and grey or manually selecting colors over and over again. The spacing between headings and paragraphs seems wrong and some stuff is just glitchy (e.g. bulleted lists will sometimes indent when you click in them). Love this article – it highlights the madness of Microsoft’s pricing plans, for sure. I’ll be honest and say that I’m not an expert when it comes to legal issues around data storage, but my understanding is that both products take security and data protection issues very seriously .

When you click ‘Open in PowerPoint’, you gain access to the more robust editing tools of the full desktop application. The Internet continues to host the document, however, and changes save straight back to the Web version of the presentation. Some formatting moves around, and some elements may not stay lined up exactly as they are on the desktop, when you open a document in the Office Hub on Windows Phone 7; nevertheless, editing is easy. My top title didn’t remain right-aligned in the mobile view, but it reappeared there when I reopened the file in the desktop program or in the Web interface. The top title stayed where it belonged in the Google Docs document.