Office 365 comes with Microsoft apps like Word, PowerPoint, Excel, One Drive and Outlook, while Google for Work contains Google apps like Gmail, Hangout, Calendar and Google Drive. Both have their own strengths and weaknesses and each is suited for specific kinds of users and businesses.
Pricing and Storage
Both tools start with $5 per month. While, Microsoft requires a full year commitment for its enterprise plane, Google’s complete package is available on monthly basis. Google, however, offer their suite for $50 per year discounted price.
Each Office 365 user gets a 1TB storage space, while Google’s entry level plan comes with only 30GB online storage for each user. However, Google do provide unlimited storage space on its $10 per user per month or $120 per year (excluding tax), plans.
Google has a rather simple pricing structure with only two plans. Microsoft, on the other hand, has a total of seven packages, for small and medium-size businesses to large enterprises. These plane range in prices form $5 per month to $35 per month, with yearly commitment.
Pricing is a very important factor but, for IT managers, other factors like security safeguards, features sets and user experience are equally important. The ideal cloud based platform should be secure, stable and easy to use for employees. When it comes to selecting a cloud platform, price is only one of many factors IT managers and executives have to consider.
For many managers it depends on what kind of apps their employees are already used to as many of them are reluctant to change the way they work. If your employees are heavily dependent on Microsoft Outlook, Word and Excel etc., it better to go with Office 365.
Where is Google for Work Falling Behind?
In many large organizations, it is common that their IT departments use Google for Work while rest of the staff use Office 365. Google for Works seems more like low-cost equivalent of Office 365 and best suited for startups and very small companies that want to limit costs while maintaining “good-enough” productivity. However, cost savings results in some down sides for large enterprises. Like calendar issues, compatibility issues and inability to transfer formulas directly into Google spreadsheets.
Google apps have been around for over six years now and this platform is becoming more and more enterprise every day. Google apps is used some of the largest organizations in the world. Its strengths includes a very simple licensing structure and a deeply integrated infrastructure.
On the other hand, Office 365 offers a continuity with legacy solutions that makes it easier to keep everyone happy with the apps they’ve been using for a long time, but it’s also evolving. Office 365 is built on Microsoft’s legacy products and is becoming more ‘cloud-enabled’ and easy to manage and use.
Both, Office 365 and Google for Work, have their own fans and evangelists. A person like me would be devastated if I’m forced to use Google sheets instead of MS Excel, which I’ve been using for so long. The same goes for Google users, they would prefer Google apps over Office 365.
It’s All About Preparation
Before deciding on any of these platforms, it’s imperative to gain deep understanding users’ needs and company goals. After all, adopting any cloud-based productivity tool is not just for the IT department, it’s for the entire organization. So, getting insights from users can really help in making that decision. More importantly, IT managers should try to make the decision about cloud tools as quickly as possible.
Whether an organization chooses Google Apps or Office 365, it’s getting a cloud office platform that’s going to fundamentally change the way business operates if it’s correctly implemented and thoroughly adopted.
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