Which Office Suite Is Best for Your Business? Google Workspace vs Microsoft 365

Introduction

Are you confused about which office suite is best for your business? The two market leaders at the moment are Google’s Google workspace and Microsoft Corporation’s Microsoft 365. Microsoft and Google are the two leading tech giants in the entire world. So it will be intriguing to perceive how the leading tech organizations are innovating their products in the age of cloud computing. In this blog, we will do a nitty-gritty comparison of the above two and get to a conclusion about which office suite and its package is the best fit for your work-related needs.

What Are the Use cases?

Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 offer an assortment of productivity tools that are useful for common business tasks using cloud technology and a web browser. Both the suites offer a range of productivity tools like Word processing software, budget software, presentation tool, email box, cloud storage option, file sharing, security, services and support, and many more.

      Additionally, they offer premium and professional email addresses, and collaboration among the knowledge workers is an integral part of them. Businesses use this bundle of software to increase their productivity, and efficiency as well as simplify the work process of their employees.

Google Workspace

This is a collection of productivity applications offered by Google. Google Workspace was previously branded as GSuite, preceding that as Google Apps. They offer products like google sheets, google docs, google meet, Gmail, google drive, etc. They likewise provide proficient help and support, as well as their services, are also fast and secure.

     The service and product offerings as well as the number of users and data storage space will vary depending on the Google Workspace plan you have selected. For various business, sizes google offer different plans like business starter, business standard, business plus, and enterprise. Here is a list of detailed business packages offered by Google.

Microsoft 365

This is a bundle of office applications offered by Microsoft. Microsoft 365 was previously branded as Office 365. Their product line incorporates MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint, teams, outlook, one drive, etc. Their product line is great for offline use and not very reliable in online mode or a remote work environment. The number of product offerings and the number of users in a team as well as the cloud storage provided also depends on the plan you have selected. Here is a list of the business packages offered by Microsoft 365. 

     Both Microsoft and Google offer various plans for various purposes like for personal use, for non-profits (which Google offers free of cost), for small businesses, and many more. We are going to do a comparison between Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, taking into consideration small and medium-sized businesses. Between Google workspace and Microsoft teams, some tools are better on one platform than the other. Alongside tools, we will compare the pricing and productivity. So let's dive into the comparison and get to the final result regarding which office suite is an overall champ.

Google Workspace vs Microsoft 365

Pricing

Pricing is an important factor when it comes to the office suite needs of small or medium-sized businesses. So first let's compare what are the prices of the two. Both of them are accompanied by a range of plans subscription-based and change per person every month. While picking a plan consider it and choose the one that suits your needs as well as feature requirements.

    Here the better bet is the google workspace plans as they provide an INR 672 per month ‘Business Standard’ and INR 1260 per month ‘Business Plus’ plans giving you file storage of 2TB and 5TB respectively. On the other hand, to get more than 1TB with Microsoft 365, you’ll need to pay at least INR 1,655 per month for an Enterprise E3 plan.   

Collaboration

Collaboration is also a very important aspect in the covid and post-covid scenario. Many companies are opting for online work, some for offline work, and others for mixed. So it is really important to have a collaboration tool that is fast, easy, secure, and gets the work done faster and effectively. Between google workspace and Microsoft 360, workspace is a clear winner as it provides faster and easy real-time collaboration tools built on the cloud. Microsoft additionally offers collaboration features, but it comes no near that of Google workspace. Alongside the collaboration features google workspace is also a better tool when it comes to cross-platform and cross-device compatibility.

Number of Users and Storage Space

This depends on the plan you have chosen. This is also an important factor when choosing an office suite for your company. As many startups choose the wrong plan and later in the future they might have to change that. So choose a plan keeping in mind the future expansion of your company. From an expansion point of view, google workspace is a clear winner as it offers affordable cloud storage extension options. Alongside the file storage option, you also have to consider email hosting storage as emails are likewise a significant part of a business to function properly. Google workspace also provides 3rd party archival solutions for mission-critical emails but the opponent doesn’t.

Ease of Use

The ease of use and a better learning curve is also go-to requirement when you are choosing an office suite for your business. As it will be easy for your employees to learn, use and adapt the applications. With regards to ease of use, Google workspace is a clear winner, as it has an easy learning curve that helps employees effortlessly get on to work. It also offers intelligent features like smart compose, smart reply, grammar suggestions, etc. The apps have a nice and clean environment that helps to perform the work with more efficiency. When it comes to IT support, the resource and the cost implication for supporting, maintaining, and deploying Google Workspace is lower than that for Microsoft 365.

Functionality and Features

When it comes to the features and functionality Microsoft is a clear winner as it offers loads of features and functionality built into it, but you are not going to use the all features offered by the Microsoft apps. Google workspace on the other hand is not far behind, it is also giving tough competition to Microsoft 365. Day by day Google is offering more features to its product lines.

    Another thing to notice is that you can use both the google and Microsoft file formats in the google apps as Google claims. But there will be times when some complex files will not open in the google workspace environment. So if you have clients who are using both Google and Microsoft apps then you can go for Google Workspace.

Conclusion

Keeping all the above considerations in mind, we can conclude that Google workspace is the clear winner. We are not the only one who is saying this, but a survey on this tells that use of Google workspace leads to innovative teams, better collaboration, better teamwork, and faster as well as easier adaptation. We at Aarav infotech are an official google cloud partner providing superior quality and consistent Google workspace services, support, and experiences. Get our services today by mailing us at sales@aaravinfotech.com or calling us at +91 7506506672 / +91 9372419217.

Key Takeaways

• The two best office suites at the moment are Google workspace and Microsoft 365.
• Both of these offer an assortment of productivity tools that are useful for common business tasks using cloud technology and a web browser.
• Google workspace offers products like google sheets, google docs, google meet, Gmail, google drive, etc. and Microsoft teams offers products like MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint, teams, outlook, one drive, etc.
• Both of them offer packages that suit various business sizes. But, Google Workspace offers better pricing and package structure along with better cloud storage options.
• Between Google workspace and Microsoft 365, the former offers better collaboration features as well as apps with cross-platform and cross-device compatibility.
• The number of users and the storage space available depends on the plan you have selected. If expansion is the factor then google workspace is a clear winner.
• Google workspace has a better learning curve and ease of use as compared to that Microsoft 365.
• Microsoft offers a greater number of features than that Google workspace.
• From the above comparison, it is clear that Google workspace is the winner among the two.