G Suite vs Office 365 is one of the most tumultuous business battles of the modern era. Over five million businesses use G Suite, while Office 365 has 155 million regular users. While the exact number of users G Suite has isn’t known, it’s likely to be a similar number.
But which is better? What are the advantages and disadvantages of G Suite and Office 365? Who comes out on top in this war of Google vs Microsoft?
We’ve got you covered. Join us, as we take a look at Office 365 and G suite and discuss which of these solutions is truly best for your business.
Ready to start being more efficient? Then read on!
G Suite vs Office 365: Price and Value
One of the most important things to consider when looking at G Suite vs Office 365 is pricing. You don’t want a productivity suite that ends up eating into your bottom line.
Fortunately, both of these suites are priced fairly similarly. G Suite offers three different tiers, these are:
- Basic: $6 per user per month
- Business: $12 per user per month
- Enterprise: $25 per user per month.
Office 365 offers a tiered service too, but it is a little more complex. The plans are split into small business and enterprise options. The small business tiers are:
- Business Essentials: $5 per user per month
- Business: $8.25 per user per month
- Business Premium: $12.50 per user per month.
But what do these different tiers offer?
G Suite Features
One of the most important distinctions between the different G Suite tiers is the amount of storage you have access to. On the Basic plan, you have just 30 GB, on the Business and Enterprise plans, you have unlimited storage.
Another chief difference that separates these tiers is found in voice and video calling. Basic lets you have 25 participants in a call, Business has 50, Enterprise has a limit of 100 users. This is one of the biggest disadvantages of G Suite.
Office 365 Features
One of the best features in Office 365 is its generous storage. Even the Essentials accounts get a whopping terabyte of storage and a 50 GB email inbox.
You also get access to the awesome and feature-rich offline version of Outlook. If you train your employees in Outlook, you’ll improve efficiency dramatically.
Skype also comes with Office 365 and has a higher participant limit than G Suite – you can have 250 people on one Skype call!
Office 365 offers better value.
Office 365 and G Suite Review: Usability and Design
The advertised features are just one part of deciding which suite you should opt for. You need to know how well each component works. Features aren’t worth a cent if they’re poorly designed.
G Suite is by far the better solution for webmail. It uses the same interface as ordinary Gmail while also allowing up to 30 email addresses per user. It also lets you take your existing domain name and use this for your email domain.
While Outlook’s webmail offering is a little disappointing, we can’t stress enough how good the offline version of Outlook is. Outlook offers a granular feature set letting you configure the program exactly as you like it.
Cloud Storage Apps
While in other areas, the battle of G Suite vs Office 365 is sharply delineated, they’re both similar in terms of cloud storage apps.
If you use G Suite, you will be using Google Drive to store and manage files. If you’re using Office 365, it will be OneDrive. If you are just going to be using these programs to upload files, there’s not much difference between them.
However, Google Drive is generally better supported by WordPress and other CMSs.
Web Apps – Microsoft Office vs Google Docs
In addition to Gmail, G Suite also gives you access to Hangouts, Calendar, Docs, Slides, and other Google Docs features.
If you sign up to Office 365, you get access to web app versions of the Microsoft Office suite. These are still the gold standard for office software around the world, and the web versions are superb.
If you’re already attached to the Microsoft ecosystem, you cannot go wrong with Office 365. Teach your employees to use these web apps and you’ll be golden.
Collaboration Tools
So far, Office 365 has a narrow lead. But how does it fare against G Suite in terms of employee collaboration?
Office 365 comes with an app called Microsoft Teams. If you’ve ever used Slack, you’ll find it very similar. It also offers videoconferencing capabilities, which is a huge boon for collaboration.
Google Hangouts offers instant messaging, but not the capability to create Slack-like channels for specific groups. You can make group chats, but you need someone to administrate these groups and add and remove participants. It’s a pain.
Another neat feature offered on higher-tier versions of Office 365 is Skype for Business. This program has been adopted by a far greater segment of the business world than Hangouts.
Both G Suite and Office 365 let multiple employees work on a document simultaneously. They can leave comments and annotations easily, too.
G Suite does have one tremendous advantage: its calendar is easier to use and Google Keep lets you make collaborative to-do lists with other employees.
While Office 365’s tools are a little more arcane than G Suite’s, they are pretty robust. The only issue is that they also tend to be more hidden. This shouldn’t be an issue unless you have a lot of remote employees, however.
G Suite vs Office 365: The Verdict
We’ve looked at what each suite has to offer. If you’re caught in the middle of the G Suite vs Office 365 fray, which should you opt for?
Ultimately, we’ve got to hand it to Office 365. While G Suite is a tremendous productivity suite, it lags behind Office 365 where it matters. If you want to use the gold standard web apps, you need Office 365.
Now that’s settled, it’s time you considered getting your employees up to speed in using these apps. If you’ve got a question about employee training or would like a quote, get in touch with us!
