This is a question that many businesses, particularly startups, have trouble answering. 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. And finally remember that we now offer setup and migration services for both Office 365 and G Suite: do if you need help with either. Right, so what do Office and G Suite actually do. What do Office 365 and G Suite do. Office 365 also provides a comprehensive range of desktop applications programs that you install on your computer as opposed to using in a web browser. Both Office 365 and G Suite allow you to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations and collaborate with team members whilst doing so; they also provide video conferencing functionality and. As an aside, both these productivity suites have undergone name changes in recent years. Up until recently, G Suite was called Google Apps for Work, and many of its users still refer to it simply as as Google Apps. With regard to Microsoft's offering, before it evolved to offer cloud-based apps and became known as Office 365, people used to refer to it as 'Microsoft Office'. Pricing - how do G Suite and Office 365 compare. For many users, the most significant difference between these plans will involve file storage. Nor 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 office 365 personal vs business store an extensive communications history and dig up old emails sent to or from your team. If you have strong data loss prevention requirements — i. Microsoft Office 365 pricing The are more complicated, because there are home, business, enterprise and education versions available — and within that, a whole load of sub-versions. There are two ways to look at this plethora of pricing options: on the plus side, there's a lot of flexibility, but on the down side, it's rather confusing trawling through all the plans to work out which one is best suited to your requirements. By contrast, the G Suite plans can be bought on a per-month basis, which may suit some organisations — those with regular changes in the number of staff — slightly better. So if a key motivation behind choosing Office 365 is to avail of the desktop apps as well as the cloud features - a big advantage of using Office 365 over G Suite - make sure you avoid those particular plans. So which is cheaper, Office 365 or G Suite. So which works out cheaper in the vs fight. Let's drill down into these features. However, if you move up a notch to theyou'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 files in the cloud. One important thing to note is that the G Suite 'Business' plan only provides you with unlimited file storage if you buy more than 5 user accounts. Both Office 365 and G Suite give you the option to buy more storage on a per user basis. As the table below shows, depending on how much storage you need for particular users, you may find it works out cheaper to simply upgrade all your G Suites users to the 'Business' plan than buying a few users additional storage. Similarly, if you're on a G Suite 'Business' plan with less than 5 users and are hitting your storage limit, you might find it cheaper to buy a couple of new accounts than buying additional storage. Also, given the popularity of Gmail, there is office 365 personal vs business huge range of third-party apps available for it which add all manner of useful functionality to proceedings. As such you may find yourself wanting to use Gmail in conjunction with another email program - for example the excellent and freeor, 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. Desktop applications: the main argument for using Office 365. With most of the Office 365 plans you get all the desktop versions of their products as well as the cloud-based ones. In essence, you can install the full versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook etc. Despite this being the age of cloud computing, a office 365 personal vs business of businesses still send each other files created locally using these applications, so there is a strong argument for having desktop versions of all the above available; it allows your team to work more easily with these file formats. The other thing to remember about the Microsoft Office desktop applications is that as nice as they are, and as familiar with them as your team may be, they have to be installed locally. This 'hidden cost' issue becomes a bigger consideration the more users you have, which is perhaps why Microsoft offer a 'Fasttrack' deployment service for both its when you purchase 50+ licenses. Most people like to work with tools they're familiar with, and, given the long history of Microsoft Office products, your team is likely to plump for the locally installed versions of the Office 365 products over the cloud-based, collaborative tools it also provides. This will possibly encourage 'local' or offline working at the expense of the more collaborative cloud approach and working offline can throw up some security headaches too. Conversely, if you create a working environment where your organisation only uses browser-based applications that save documents to the cloud, then your data is arguably more secure so long as you have backup procedures in place and your team are more likely to make fuller use of collaboration features. You could argue that G Suite - due to its cloud-only nature - is likelier to nudge people in this direction. If you are tempted by the unlimited cloud storage provided by G Suite, but want to save Word documents in it, you could buy the offline versions of the Microsoft applications that you use regularly, and save files created in them to your Google Drive. However, you would be closing down a lot of real-time collaboration possibilities by working in this fashion. One app included in Office 365 for which there isn't really a G Suite equivalent is Yammer. Collaboration A huge advantage of working in the cloud is the collaboration possibilities it opens up. Both and make this sort of online collaboration straightforward using their online apps. All in all though, both product suites definitely allow you to collaborate with co-workers effectively - but to get the smoothest collaboration experience with the Microsoft apps, you might want to use the cloud-based versions. See below for a video highlighting some collaboration options in Google Docs. Video calls Both and provide video conferencing functionality: Hangouts and Skype respectively. But I have also found that more people are on Skype and are more comfortable with using it. However, Office 365 is much more generous when it comes to participant limits on video calls -you can have 250 participants in a business call, whereas the maximum number of participants in a Google Hangout is 25 on 'Basic' and 'Business' plans, or 50 if you use 'Meet by Google Hangouts' and are on an Enterprise plan more on that in a moment. One thing you should note about Hangouts is that there are, in fact, two versions: the 'classic' version of Hangouts and a second product, 'Meet by Google Hangouts. For a more detailed look at Hangout vs Meet features, you can check out Google's. Google Drive Stream vs One Drive - what are the syncing options in Office 365 and Google Apps like. Both and provide desktop apps for syncing local data with the cloud and vice versa. This is handy for when you want to work on documents offline, or want to back up or upload local files to your cloud storage the downside of this is that it makes your data less secure - if your laptop gets stolen for example, so does your data. You still see all your files and folders as if they were present on your computer - but they actually live in the cloud until you double click on a filename at which point it is downloaded and opened. The latter 'streaming' approach provides two key benefits over the 'save everything locally' one: first, a minimal amount of local disk space is required to store your files. Second, you don't have to sit around waiting for all of your files to sync - just the one you're working on and anyway, with Drive Stream and Files on Demand, there's an option to do make files permanently available offline simply by right-clicking on a file and choosing an option to do so. If office 365 personal vs business want to share a file on Google Drive Stream you have to go into the browser version of Google Drive to do so, which can interrupt workflow. My experience with both has been fairly positive; it's certainly possible to access the information quickly on both office 365 personal vs business of apps easily, but I'm not sure how inclined I'd be to do a lot of editing of spreadsheets, for example, on a mobile device particularly a phone: far too fiddly. The good thing about both sets of mobile apps is that they make editing your work on-the-go in areas where you don't have Internet access very straightforward - so long as you save the files you want to work onto your mobile device before you go offline see the section below on working offline for more details. Realistically, a majority of users will end up using the mail applications the most - and these are the apps I've had the most experience with. The good news is that conversation view can now be switched off, which makes the app behave much more like a conventional email client. And the app is undeniably brilliant when it comes to searching for old messages as you'd expect from a company specialising in search engine functionality. There is a 'focused inbox' available office 365 personal vs business which some might find handy — this looks at your interactions with other senders over time to automatically create a list of messages that Outlook believes need your attention more urgently than others. Email support is also offered for both products; and there are various support forums available for both products too. Interface and ease of use So which is easier to use, or. Which product comes with the steeper learning curve. As with much else in this comparison, the fairest answer unfortunately. You could also argue however that the simpler, more stripped-back productivity tools bundled with G Suite generate a less steep learning curve for users who are new to online collaboration. In terms of user interfaces, the Google apps feel less cluttered than those bundled with Microsoft Office, simply because they are not as feature packed. My Google document is always saved to the cloud and I can pick up where I left off on it at any point, on any device. On a desktop computer, you'll need to do two things: 1 ensure that you've installed and 2. This will allow you to access and edit Google documents, sheets and slides offline; any changes you make to them will be synced to the cloud when you reconnect to the Internet. With regard to Gmail, you can use it offline so long as you are using Chrome and have. Again you'll need to ensure you download all your mail before going offline. You can also work offline using Google's mobile apps - however, you have to first by checking an option that downloads it to your mobile device. Withthe best way to work offline on a desktop computer is by using the standard desktop applications in conjunction with the desktop version of OneDrive. As with G Suite, ensure you've synced everything to your desktop before going offline - you can then work on any file in Word, Excel etc. Office 365's mobile apps also let you work offline, but as with Google's mobile apps, you'll need to. Extending the functionality of G Suite and Office 365 If you are not happy with the functionality provided by the G Suite apps and Office 365, there are two ways you can extend the functionality of both suites of products. The first, and simplest, is by installing an 'add on' to the products. Both Microsoft and Google have online stores that provide a wide range of apps to beef up their productivity tools - the 'Office Store' and the 'G Suite Marketplace' respectively. Both free and paid-for apps are available for both systems. The other way to enhance the functionality of both products is to code something yourself. If you have the know-how, you can use the Microsoft or Google application program interfaces to add a bespoke piece of functionality to your chosen set of productivity tools. The idea behind this is that it's a 'low-code' way to office 365 personal vs business bespoke apps that perform functions or automate processes that are specific to your business or organisation. The below video gives a brief overview of the sort of things you can do with App Maker. G Suite vs Office 365: the conclusions After reading our vs comparison, I hope you have a clearer idea of why or when you might pick one of these products over the other. So if you have a client base that works with both Office and G Suite files, there may be an advantage in going for G Suite so long as your needs are relatively simple on the Office formatting front. Cloud storage If having a serious quantity of cloud storage available is your overriding concern, then the G Suite 'Business' plan is hard to argue with. Email If your organisation sends and receives a large amount of mail, then might find yourself drawn towards a 'Business' G Suite plan, as these come with unlimited email storage with no need to archive. Working environment The working environment that you are hoping to deploy G Suite and Office 365 in should also be factored into your final decision. This is especially true if you intend to use Access and Publisher - these Office 365 apps are exclusively available to Windows-based users. That's possibly why Microsoft offer a free Fasttrack deployment service if you buy 50+ accounts - something that is potentially very useful for medium to large-sized businesses. Scalability With regard to scalability, you'll need to remember that the more affordable Office 365 plans the 'Business' ones currently cap the numbers of users at 300 - no such limit applies to G Suite plans. So after all that, you're probably thinking that choosing between these two products is still a tough decision. But hopefully this review has helped resolve the Office 365 vs G Suite debate a bit for you. Do leave a comment below if you have any thoughts of your own in the two products, and feel free to share this comparison with others. And make sure you contact us if you are thinking of using G Suite or Office 365 in your organisation — we can help arrange a successful setup or migration. This is in my view by far the strongest argument for choosing Office 365. And the inbox archive functionality ultimately gives unlimited storage space across all plans. As with both Office and G Suite, you can use iWorks in a browser on any device and collaborate in real time with other users; desktop apps Pages, Numbers and Keynote are also available, but these work with Apple products only. In terms of costs, the browser edition of iWorks is free, but you will need to potentially pay for iCloud storage. The good news is that it's completely free - the less good news is that there isn't an official 'cloud' version of the software. If you are particularly keen on using Open Office though, some cloud functionality will be available to you usingan 'online application virtualization platform', which - in theory at least - allows you to run any application on any device in a web browser. Do feel free to leave a comment below. Also, if you want more tips on productivity tools, or advice on how to run a business online, please do. 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