Most organizations these days rely heavily on cloud-based productivity services like Google’s G Suite and Microsoft’s Office 365. Subscriptions to these ‘productivity suites’ offer features such as business emails, shared calendars, online storage, and collaborative applications—all essential to the successful business in the 21st century.
G Suite and Office 365 dominate the market when it comes to business productivity software, and their customer base continues to grow. Computer World discusses how Office 365 now has 155 million individual users, a big leap from 135 million one year ago. Based on recent findings, G Suite has been growing rapidly as well, making headway to compete with Microsoft Office in terms of cloud technology.
In this article, we’ll look at the different features of each cloud platform to help businesses in determining which of the two would work best for them.
Price
CMS Wire argues that the G Suite and Office 365 rivalry is determined by their price. The price difference is one of the reasons that many opted to choose G Suite over Office 365. However, Google was recently forced to increase the price of G Suite Basic from $5 per month to $6 and G Suite Business from $10 to $12 per month. Google justified the change in price through improvements in functionality and security. In the end, G Suite is still cheaper for regular enterprises than Office 365. However, many businesses still opt for Office 365 so it’s safe to say that price isn’t the only determining factor.
Familiarity
Office 365 is still popular because many people are very familiar with MS Office. Tech Republic discusses how MS Office is the default productivity software for companies, with 83% of polled enterprises using the service for their business. Their dominance isn’t just in the corporate industry, everyone from startups to law firms uses Office 365 and Microsoft. Special Counsel details how the Advanced eDiscovery tool on Office 365 is used by law firms to reduce data management costs. The universality of Microsoft attracts people to the software, even if G Suite has the same data management tools as well. This applies even more so for businesses outside the tech world who are looking for features they’re accustomed to.
It needs to be said, however, that younger businesses prefer G Suite because of their familiarity with Gmail and Google’s web-based productivity applications. This makes familiarity a plus for both productivity suites depending on who you’re targeting.
Offline support vs. remote access
The strength of each competing cloud platform is determined by where their software originated from. Microsoft builds on its MS Office franchise, making it a much better service for offline support. Office 365 is more convenient for employees who work offline but who’d like to migrate their MS Office documents to the cloud via on-premises servers, or vice-versa.
On the other hand, ZDNet describes G Suite’s approach as being ‘cloud-native and browser-centric.’ While Google does offer offline support, it’s not true offline support like Office 365. Since G Suite is built on their web-based tools like Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs and Google Sheets, the cloud platform supports online collaboration the best. It works better for businesses with remote workers or offices spread out in various locations. With one software working better offline and another that’s more suited for remote online access, it really boils down to which of the two better fits your organizational structure.
Note: Written by guest freelancer Robert Andrews.
