Google Suite versus Microsoft 365

It seems that either/or choices must be made in all walks of life. And even in those circumstances where the ideal solution is a bit of both, you probably have a personal preference for one option or the other.

It’s no different with office – or productivity – suites. The top two contenders are Google Suite (GSuite) and Microsoft 365. Both are popular and both offer a wide range of functionality. But how do you choose the best one for your business? Does it just come down to personal preference, or are there winning factors on both sides?

In this article, we’ll look at some of the key features of Google Suite and Microsoft 365 and share some tips and tricks that can help your digital marketing agency work smarter, but not harder.

The six key features of GSuite and Microsoft 365

E-mail

Gmail is fast becoming the most popular email system in the world. Of the 4.66 billion owners of email accounts worldwide, 1.8 billion use Gmail.

From a business perspective, both Google and Microsoft allow you to set up business-related email addresses, i.e., with your business domain. This can make customer interaction and email marketing look much more professional.

Depending on the version of Google Suite or Microsoft 365 you have, you can also create as many users as you want, each with their own email address. You can also group users to make it easier to manage permissions, such as those related to group messaging and file sharing.

With Microsoft, you can access your email offline using a wide range of browsers, including Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari and Firefox. You can also access your email offline through Google, but only in the Google Chrome browser.

In both Google Suite and Microsoft, 365 emails can be recalled within a certain period of time. They can also be organized by labels or folders, and you can set up filters to sort emails as soon as they arrive in your inbox.

Software/apps

Both Google Suite and Microsoft 365 offer easy-to-use online software such as word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. They are generally compatible with each other, or at least can be stored in the other platform’s version of the software.

Microsoft 365 has downloadable full desktop versions of its popular software such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Both Google Suite and Microsoft 365 also have apps for their software. You could argue that Microsoft offers the best – and most used – desktop software, but that Google’s software apps are better.

In addition to the standard office products you would expect, both Google Suite and Microsoft 365 can be enhanced by a wide range of add-ons, especially Google. G Suite Marketplace is an app store where you can find thousands of apps that integrate with Google Suite. There is also a Microsoft Commercial Marketplace divided into two stores – Azure Marketplace and Microsoft AppSource – that offer cloud applications to IT developers and enterprises, respectively.

Saving and sharing documents

Both Google Suite and Microsoft 365 allow users to store folders and documents online, in Google Drive and OneDrive respectively. With Google Drive or Microsoft Sharepoint, documents can be shared between users and, depending on their permissions, they can also edit or respond to these documents. This can be an invaluable way to work together.

Agenda Management

Both Google Suite and Microsoft 365 offer personal and shared calendars. Microsoft Outlook’s personal calendar can also be run on your desktop without an Internet connection, but Google is run only in your browser.

Google is especially strong in multiple calendars, which can be a big help if your company has multiple departments or branches that need different calendars to plan their day.

With both calendars, you can schedule meetings and events and invite guests.

Online meetings

Both Google Suite and Microsoft 365 also offer a video conferencing facility – Google Meet and Teams, respectively. These can be automatically added to meeting invitations in your calendar.

cloud storage

Everything you do in Google Suite or Microsoft 365 is automatically stored in the cloud, including emails, files and conversations.

You can also download email attachments directly to your Google or OneDrive instead of storing them on your device. This not only saves time and storage space, but it also makes the attachment accessible from any device you use anywhere.

So as we have seen, there are many similarities between Google Suite and Microsoft. But let’s look at five specific features of each that are slightly different and that you may not yet be aware of.

Tips and tricks with GSuite and Microsoft 365

• Task lists for teams

You can create team task lists and assign tasks to team members. Tasks can then be easily seen and tracked.

• Workspaces

Workspaces allow you to group folders and documents that you are likely to want to use in conjunction with each other.

• Expired files

You can assign expiration dates to folders and documents that you want to be visible only to someone for a certain period of time.

• Email analytics

Google’s email analytics feature allows you to analyze the email activity of you and your team to gain insight into the number of emails sent and received and your average email response time.

• Forms

Google Forms is a great way to quickly create quizzes, surveys and polls for both internal and external use, and sets up a spreadsheet to collect the answers.

• Tell us about it

Microsoft’s Tell Me feature provides a text field where you can enter words or phrases about what you need help with and it will direct you to the relevant features that will help you.

• Expired clutches

Sensitive files can be password protected and have expired links that allow access only for a limited time.

• Attach documents directly from OneDrive

When you add a document to an email, you can do so directly from OneDrive using the Share feature in Sharepoint.

• Creating groups and sites

Microsoft 365 lets you set up groups of users and then share features such as chat, calendars, documents, sites and pages.

• List

The @mention feature allows you to refer to people in an email message and they will see from their inbox that they are in the conversation.

Which to choose: GSuite or Microsoft 365?

The billion dollar question! As we’ve seen, both office suites offer a wide range of features and facilities, and both are well positioned to do most of the things your digital marketing agency probably wants to do.

Opinions are divided. It’s hard to find precise “like for like” numbers, but according to Statistica, Office 365 is currently used by more than a million companies worldwide, and about 212000 in the UK. While Google revealed that by the end of 2020 there were over 2 billion individual users worldwide on G-Suite.

Some experts say that while both productivity suites are excellent business tools, Microsoft 365 may be stronger on product features – such as office software – but Google Suite may be more flexible and intuitive to make collaboration easy.

In the end, it can all come down to cost. Although there are currently free versions of both office suites, you will need to pay for enhanced versions depending on the amount of storage space and the specific types of features you want.

So the best thing you can do is first conduct a careful analysis of the storage and features you need, and we hope this article has helped you in the right direction. Then you are in an informed position to find out from both Google and Microsoft the relative cost of what you are looking for.

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