G Suite or Microsoft 365: Why G Suite Outperforms Office 365

Gone are the days of worrying about not being able to save your memo draft after an outage. Manual backups using a flash drive and/or external hard drive is also on its way out. The latest and greatest productivity suites available to business owners right now are more accessible than ever — and supercharged with cloud capabilities.

Two products from the biggest providers come to mind: Google’s G Suite and Microsoft’s Office 365. While the Office brand’s reputation precedes it, with trailblazing programs like Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, G Suite may have more to offer.

Email Integration: G Suite vs Microsoft 365 (Formerly Office 365)

When talking about programs that enhance your business’s digital productivity, you can’t ignore email integration. If you’re still on the fence on whether to choose G Suite or Office 365, a comparison of their email functionality may help settle the debate.

While Microsoft Outlook has been a staple for emailing in Windows computers since 1992, Gmail, launched in 2004, has taken its seat as the essential email client. First, let’s talk about its interface. Since its inception, Gmail has always aimed to give a clutter-free experience.

It improved on the organization features that Outlook has, allowing users to move emails from specific people or categories to a single folder with just a few clicks. This is compared to the series of windows and wizards you have to go through just to organize your messages on Outlook.

Another feature that Gmail has that Outlook can’t seem to get quite right is the “conversation view” of email threads. When you open a message in Gmail, you see a clean timeline of your back and forth with other users, similar to what you’d see in your social media chatboxes. It has the subject at the top of the thread, with replies that you can open and collapse as you please.

Outlook’s email threads will take some getting used to, as it shows the full timeline without the option to collapse messages. It also unnecessarily repeats the subject with every reply, further adding to the visual clutter.

Gmail also has the edge when it comes to integration with its other productivity apps. When you look at your inbox, you immediately see the kind of files attached to each message at the bottom of its preview. You can even view an attachment using G Suite’s productivity tools (as long as it’s a word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, or PDF file) by clicking on them.

Outlook, on the other hand, only shows that there’s an attachment on the upper right hand of each preview. You can open files using Office 365’s online programs, but you still have to open each email to view them.

When Do You Need G Suite or Office 365?

When you’re using a web hosting service for your business’s site or emails, such as companies that host WordPress, you might wonder why you’ll even need G Suite or Office 365. But using one or the other offers considerable advantages.

First, these productivity suites offer you a way to manage your professional business emails. They provide access to a whole host of features such as video conferencing capabilities, gigabytes of files storage, and various accessories like calendars.

If you’re running a small business, using either of these suites will save money. Because their applications are all accessible online, you won’t have to pay for software installation and licensing. If your enterprise is especially small, their ease of use and comprehensive services make hiring or running an expensive IT department unnecessary.

They also give your business a secure data storage option by uploading your files to the cloud. This allows you to access your documents from any internet-capable device. Both suites make it easier for your employees to collaborate, whether they’re working from home or in the same office.

Although they seem evenly matched, G Suite is more suited for small enterprises than Office 365. The former offers much better versatility in pricing and storage.

Ease of Collaboration

G Suite sets the standard for document collaboration when it launched in 2009. Google Docs, Sheets, Forms, Sites and Slides all allowed commenting and real-time document tracking off the bat.  It also featured seamless integration with its Calendar and Gmail apps. Hangouts was added to the ecosystem in 2013 to provide instant messaging within the platform. It wasn’t much of a hot ticket for business owners at its time of release, as they still preferred offline programs like Microsoft Office’s Word, Excel, and Powerpoint to edit their files.

However, the rise of cloud storage around 2010, together with the steady; increase of internet speeds worldwide, made using online apps like Docs and Slides easier for those who want to have easy storage and collaboration for their output. This is because it eliminates the cumbersome back and forth of files through email. A writer can easily submit their output to their editors, and the latter can make comments and revisions all on the same document. In the event of a power or internet connection outage, they’ll be confident knowing that their files are backed up online.

Microsoft released its Office 365 platform in 2011, featuring a complete product line as before, but with collaboration and cloud storage capabilities. Its apps are also easy for longtime users to access, as they can be used offline. Stripped versions of its programs like Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and even Outlook can be accessed online as well. It uses Skype for instant messaging and Teams for collaboration.

While Office 365 enables collaboration between users, G Suites still trumps it because the latterwas created as a set of collaborative tools. G Suite is less feature-packed and was developed with a decisive slant towards digital collaboration. On the other hand, Office 365 began as desktop applications, which were then reconfigured to be collaborative tools. As such, G Suites are easier to use and master.

This is especially true if a business has remote teams. G Suite is designed to run online, and it’s easy to work with on different devices. It can run smoothly on Macs, PCs, Linux-based machines, and more.

Comparing the Pricing and Storage of G Suite vs Office 365

Both Google and Microsoft offer competent cloud storage solutions with their Google Drive and OneDrive platforms. The former has a much simpler approach when it comes to pricing and storage space — especially if you’re getting your plan from a G Suite reseller. G Suite basic is $6 per user monthly, with complete Google apps and 30 GB of cloud storage. For some small businesses, this is a cost-effective choice because it contains all the essentials for communication and digital collaboration, like instant messaging, a 25-participant limit for voice calls, and shared online calendars.