OFFICE 365 VS G SUITE

Office 365 vs G Suite (or, as it used to be known, Google Apps)…which is better? This is a question that many businesses, particularly startups, have trouble answering.

In this post I’m going to try to help you decide which is best for your business, by putting the two product suites head to head in a detailed comparison review.

Read on to see how G Suite and Office 365 fare against each other in the key areas of pricing, features and ease-of use. We’ll explore all the pros and cons of each product in depth and explain why, and when, you might want to use one over the other. Let’s start by taking a look at what these products actually let you do.

Pricing – how do G Suite and Office 365 compare?

G Suite

Choosing a G Suite plan is relatively straightforward, as there are only three plans available:

Basic: $5 per user per month
Business: $10 per user per month
Enterprise: $25 per user per month

On the ‘Basic’ $5 plan, you get

Business email addresses (yourname@yourcompany.com)
Video and voice calls (via Google Hangouts)
Shared online calendars
Online documents, spreadsheets and presentations
30 GB of online storage for file syncing and sharing
Google sites (a tool for building simple websites or intranets)
Security and admin controls
24/7 phone and email support.

On the ‘Business’ $10 plan, in addition to the above you get

Unlimited file storage (or 1 TB if your organisation has less than 5 users)
Advanced search functionality using Google’s new Cloud Search technology (this functionality makes it easier to locate files within G Suite and also provides a Google Now-style experience which makes suggestions regarding what your team need to do next)
Audit and reporting insights for Drive content and sharing
eDiscovery covering emails, chats, docs and files
Email archives / message-retention policies

On the ‘Enterprise’ $25 plan, you get all the features of the ‘Basic’ and ‘Business’ plans plus

data loss prevention for files and email
integration with third-party archiving tools
S/MIME for Gmail (improved encryption for emails)
advanced admin controls and security
additional reporting on email usage via analytics tool BigQuery

Unlike the free version of G Suite, none of the above plans involve display of advertising content while you work.

For many users, the most significant difference between these plans will involve file storage. With the G Suite ‘Basic’ plan, users are restricted to 30GB of file storage; but – as long as there are 5 or more G Suite users in your organisation – there are no limits on the ‘Business’ plan (if you have a ‘Business’ plan but have less than 5 users on it, file storage is restricted to 1TB per user).

It’s important to note that Google Docs, Sheets, Slides and Drawings – i.e. documents created using Google’s set of apps rather than third party applications – don’t count toward your G Suite file storage limit. Neither do files shared with you by other Google Drive users.

Power users and big organisations are likely to find the e-Discovery features that the ‘Business’ and ‘Enterprise’ plans come with handy – these lets you archive all communications in your organisation according to rules you define. This may be useful if for legal reasons you need to store an extensive communications history and dig up old emails sent to or from your team.

Microsoft Office 365 pricing

The pricing options for Office 365 are more complicated, because there are home, business, enterprise and education versions available.

For the purposes of this review, I’m going to focus on the ‘Business’ and ‘Enterprise’ plans, which are:

Business Essentials – $6 per user per month *
Business – $10 per user per month *
Business Premium – $15 per user per month *
Enterprise E1 – $8 per user per month (requires annual commitment)
Enterprise ProPlus – $12 per user per month (requires annual commitment)
Enterprise E3 – $20 per user per month (requires annual commitment)
Enterprise E5 – $35 per user per month (requires annual commitment).

* These plans work out at $5, $8.25 and $12.50 per month respectively if you commit to a year’s service upfront.

As you might expect, there are a lot of different options to get your head around with the above 7 plans, but a few important things to note are as follows:

The ‘Business’ plans let you pay on a rolling per-month basis; the ‘Enterprise’ ones do not – you have to pay upfront for a year. This means that if your workforce tends to shrink or grow throughout the year, the ‘Business’ plans might be more suitable for your organisation.
The ‘Business’ plans all limit the maximum number of users to 300.
All plans provide you with with the desktop versions of the Microsoft Office product suite (Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc.) except for the ‘Business Essentials’ and ‘Enterprise E1’ plans, which only provide the online ones. So if a key motivation behind choosing Office 365 is to avail of the desktop apps as well as the cloud features – a key advantage of using Office 365 over G Suite – make sure you avoid those particular plans.
Not all of the Office 365 plans provide users with an email account – if you want to use Office 365 as your email service provider, you’ll need to steer clear of the ‘Business’ and the ‘Enterprise Pro Plus’ plans.
Similarly, the ‘Business’ and ‘Enterprise ProPlus’ plans don’t feature calendar functionality.
The three ‘Business’ plans listed above come in a bit cheaper if you commit to paying upfront for a year.

So which works out cheaper in the Office 365 vs G Suite fight?

The most directly comparable G Suite and Office 365 plans are arguably

the G Suite ‘Basic’ ($5 per user per month) and Office 365 ‘Business Essentials’ ($6 per user per month) plans

and

the G Suite ‘Business’ ($10 per user per month) and Office 365 ‘Enterprise E3’ ($20 per user per month) plans.

In essence there is a $1 per user per month saving to be made at the lower end of the pricing bands by plumping for the G Suite ‘Basic’ plan over Microsoft’s ‘‘Business Essentials’; but at the more ‘enterprise’ level, the Office 365 ‘Enterprise E1’ plan comes in at $10 higher per month than the G Suite ‘Business’ plan (and you’ll have to pay upfront for the year for the Microsoft product too).

This doesn’t really tell the full story however, because there are so many variables and potential tradeoffs at play here. Although the above plans are broadly comparable, there are still big differences in important areas such as email storage, file storage and archiving to consider; so coming up with an answer to the ‘which is cheaper, Google Apps vs Office 365’ question is probably best answered by taking a more in-depth look at the features of each product and seeing how well they fulfil your business needs.

Office 365 vs G Suite: the features

File storage

If we’re talking entry-level plans, then Office 365 is a clear winner here: you get 1TB of storage with the ‘Business Essentials’ plan compared to Google’s rather paltry 30GB on its ‘Basic’ plan (to add insult to injury, Google also counts emails as taking up space in this 30GB limit).

However, if you move up a notch to the G Suite ‘Business’ plan, you’ll find that the Google plans beat all but the most expensive Microsoft plans in the file storage department (so long as you have 5 or more users – more on that in a moment).

With the G Suite Business plan you get unlimited storage, which is extremely useful to any business that has a need to store large multimedia files in the cloud. Although Microsoft Office 365’s 1TB limit (which applies to most of its plans) sounds very generous, you’d be surprised how quickly you can burn through 1TB of storage if working with video or audio.

That said, if you’re just talking about working with standard documents and spreadsheets, a 1 TB limit per user should be perfectly adequate for most small to medium sized businesses. Ultimately however, if having acres of cloud storage is your primary concern, then it’s mostly a win here for G Suite, so long as you are prepared to live with the more expensive $10 per user per month plan.

Email

The entry level $6 per month Office 365 plan is considerably more generous than G Suite’s entry level offering when it comes to email storage – a dedicated 50GB inbox is available on top of the 1TB file storage provided. By comparison, the $5 per user per month ‘G Suite Basic’ plan caps total storage at 30GB, emails and files included.

However, if you’re on the $10 G Suite ‘Business’ plan (and have 5+ users in your team) there isn’t a cap on your inbox size; this contrasts positively with all the Office 365 plans, (the best you’ll get is a 100GB mailbox on the $20 and $35 Microsoft plans – still a lot of storage space, to be fair).

In terms of the email apps that are available to you, Gmail is robust, fast and very easy to find messages with, thanks to its powerful search functionality (you’d expect that side of things to be good, given that it’s Google we’re talking about here). Also, given its popularity there are a huge range of third-party apps available for it which add all manner of useful functionality to proceedings.

However – and incredibly frustratingly – Gmail doesn’t allow you to sort or group mail, something most users will routinely require from an email client. As such you may find yourself wanting to use Gmail in conjunction with another email program – for example the excellent (and free) Thunderbird, or, whisper it, Outlook.

And speaking of which, getting your hands on Outlook is a key attraction of Office 365. On most Office 365 plans you get access to two versions of Outlook: an online version, which is okay, but – mail sorting functionality aside – Gmail probably betters in most respects; and an offline version, which is feature rich and provides a lot of flexibility when it comes to how you sort, group, label and generally manage your email.

Web applications in Office 365 and G Suite

Office 365 and G Suite both offer a set of web applications which have equivalents in both product suites, namely:

Word > Google Docs
Excel > Google Sheets
Powerpoint > Google Slides
Outlook Online > Gmail
One Note Online > Google Keep
Sharepoint > Google Sites
Skype for Web > Google Hangouts
Microsoft Teams > Google Keep (sort of)

These are broad equivalents, in that their feature set is not exactly going to match the corresponding app.

One app included in Office 365 for which there isn’t really a G Suite equivalent is Yammer. This allows you to set up a sort of social network for your business – similar in some ways to an intranet, but much more dynamic / social in nature.

Collaboration

A huge advantage of working in the cloud is the collaboration possibilities it opens up. Instead of faffing about with markup and ‘tracking changes’, people who want to work on the same file can simply open up a document in a browser and see, in real time, the edits that everybody looking at the file is making.

Both G Suite and Microsoft Office 365 make this sort of online collaboration straightforward using their online apps. Additionally, you can now use Microsoft’s desktop apps to work on documents in real time with other team members – but some users, including the Wall Street Journal’s Personal Tech columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler, have found that to be a bit of a clunky experience, as his video review demonstrates (note that it’s now a little out of date – Mac users can now collaborate in the desktop versions of the Microsoft apps too):

Read full article: OFFICE 365 VS G SUITE – WHICH IS BEST FOR YOUR BUSINESS?