Microsoft 365 vs Google Workspace; Today's topic of debate is Microsoft 365 versus Google Workspace. Before we begin, I want to make it clear that if you're looking for an exact replacement for either of these applications, you won't find it here.
In other words, don't expect a perfect replacement for every application. There are some apps in 365 that have no alternatives in Google Workspace, and then there are some apps in Google Workspace that have no alternatives in 365.
Is Office 365 or G Suite better?
There are also applications that have similar use cases but differ in so many ways in both platforms, but if you're here to learn which platform is better suited for your needs and what each platform offers, you've come to the right place.
I believe that the problem with attempting to find an objective answer as to which platform is better is that the internet is usually filled with bias.
Even if you have hundreds of thousands of articles detailing the differences between Microsoft 365 and Google workspace, you'll find that the majority of these articles are simply trying to sell their product.
When it comes to microsoft 365 or google workspace, you must understand that there is no "one product fits all" or "one platform fits all," as certain factors such as the size of your business, employee preferences, and security requirements will all end up influencing your decision regardless of the feature sets that each one provides.
In the end, is there an objective answer to the question of which of these two platforms is superior?
If you write down your business requirements, there will be an objective answer based on those requirements. For example, if you are migrating from one platform to another, you must consider how much training overhead you will incur and whether it is significant.
Is the majority of your organization's users tech savvy enough to quickly adapt to new applications, or will it disrupt business continuity? and are the feature sets sufficient to justify switching from one platform to another? At the end of the day, you must consider all of these factors.
The difference between G Suite and Office 365?
Let's start with the most significant advantage that 365 has over workspace, and that advantage alone could potentially sway your decision.
That advantage stems from the fact that Microsoft Office packages have only been around for the shortest amount of time, so if you're looking to shift an entire organization - particularly large enterprises that have grown accustomed to using these office applications - you may have a difficult time.
Another consideration is that if you're dealing with clients or other businesses, the vast majority of them will be using office applications, and when you're sending or receiving documents - the formatting, the styling, all of this will be an issue when the files are converted, as it may start looking very wonky or simply not as intended.
However, you can have a local version of office without cloud capabilities, which is much cheaper and usually only requires one-time payments, and then use Google workspace as your mail and collaboration platform.
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Microsoft 365 vs Google Workspace in terms of pricing
Google workspace offers two pricing plans:
- flexible plan.
- fixed plan.
The flexible plan allows you to bill monthly, which makes temporary or short-term contract work very feasible, especially because it charges you only for the amount of time you used a subscription.
If you only use the plan for half a month, you will only be billed for half a month, so it is flexible, as the name implies.
If you go for the workspace business subscriptions, you will only be able to use the flexible plan unless you go through a reseller or contact the Google sales team and have them agree to put you on a fixed or annual plan. So, what exactly is a fixed or annual plan?
With a fixed plan, you commit to using the subscription for at least one year, and if you want to add a subscription in between that year, you can, and you will be billed based on when you purchased the new licenses.
If you start a new license in the middle of May, you will only pay for half of the month and then continue to pay the full monthly rate beginning the following month. You can learn more about how the pricing works on their support page, which has been broken down.
Microsoft also allows you to pay monthly or annually. Obviously, if you purchase the annual subscription, you will pay less than if you purchase the monthly subscription and use it for a full year.
However, if your temporary employment contracts will last less than a year, monthly pricing is the way to go. There is no half-month payment in microsoft subscriptions like the Google workspace plan, so Google definitely provides a much better scheme in that regard.
However, if you want to mix and match plans, such as giving half of your users business starter and the other half business plus for whatever reason, you will be unable to do so with Google plans.
There are some exceptions; if you contact the Google sales team, you may be able to work around this, but in general, both Google and Microsoft provide a 300 user limit in their business plans.
With Microsoft 365, if you reach 300 users in, say, the business basic plan, you can add the remaining five users to the business standard plan without having to convert the 300 users to another subscription.
I think this is fantastic, because many of the clients I used to work with would not reach the 300 user limit, but would still want to use enterprise plans. So the flexibility in those scenarios was extremely beneficial.
Again, as previously stated, Google may make exceptions depending on your circumstances, but you must contact them to find out if you are eligible. You may be given a discounted price for a limited time depending on which country you live in or if you purchase through a partner or a reseller.
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Google Workspace Enterprise plans
Today, we will only look at the business and enterprise plans. Regarding Google plans, you have several options that are customizable based on your needs.
- Business Starter.
- Business Standard.
- Business Plus.
- Enterprise Essentials.
- Enterprise Standard.
- Enterprise Plus.
When it comes to business plans, the pricing is very similar, but enterprise can't really be compared because the prices vary in the Google workspace plans and you'd have to contact their sales team or a reseller to find out what the prices are like.
As previously stated, both Google and Microsoft limit their business plans to 300 users for the enterprise editions. Simply keep that in mind. When it comes to email, the two most common concerns are storage and security.
To summarize, Google workspace shares Google Drive storage with email, whereas Microsoft 365 storage for email is separate from OneDrive storage. But, in this section, we'll concentrate on the sending and receiving limitations.
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Microsoft 365 vs g suite in terms of user interface
I wanted to discuss user interface, or UI, but let's face it, that's a very subjective topic. Both the gmail and outlook web applications are beautiful and simple to use, but I prefer the gmail UI. You can use Gmail on the Outlook desktop application as well, but it is better optimized for handling exchange server or online mails.
In terms of email sending and receiving limits, Gmail for Business allows you to send up to 25 megabytes and receive up to 50 megabytes. If you want to attach and send files larger than 25 MB, send them as a Google Drive link and have your recipient download the file so that even if you remove it from the drive, they will still have the file locally.
With Microsoft's Exchange Online, you can send up to 150 megabytes of email using the desktop application, and 112 megabytes of email using the outlook web application (OWA). However, depending on the encoding, the file may increase in size by an additional 33%, but this only applies if the email is routed outside the Microsoft datacenters.
If your company has a marketing or sales team that sends email in bulk, you'll need the ability to send large amounts of email. Gmail allows you to send 2 000 emails to up to 10 000 recipients in 24 hours in workspace, but only 3 000 recipients outside your organization's domain.
If you exceed any of these limits, you will be temporarily suspended and unable to send any emails for 24 hours, beginning the moment you send the first email of the day. When it comes to email, Gmail allows you to receive 60 emails per minute, 360 emails per hour, and 86 400 emails per day.
You can send emails to up to 10,000 people per day using Microsoft 365. You will be blocked from receiving emails if you reach the limit.
Any email received during the suspension is permanently lost. You can only send 30 emails per minute, and any additional emails will be sent automatically in the following minutes.
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Microsoft 365 vs g suite in terms of Storage
Storage is one of those things that can make or break your decision, and it's probably one of the reasons you'd like to switch to workspace. Microsoft offers one terabyte of onedrive storage with each of their four business subscriptions, regardless of whether you get business basic, standard, or premium.
It's not terrible; you still get a separate 100 GB for email, separate storage for SharePoint, and separate storage for Microsoft Stream, but not everyone is going to use email, SharePoint, or Stream that much, especially if your organization focuses on media and stores a lot of heavy files; -1 terabyte isn't going to cut it.
You can pay extra per month for storage or choose the enterprise subscription for unlimited storage, but why would you want to pay so much for the enterprise edition if storage is your only concern?
Workspace, on the other hand, has a terrible starter package that gives you only 30 GB for business starter, but with business standard you get 2 terabytes.
With business plus you get 5 terabytes, and even though email storage is shared with drive, workspace still annihilates onedrive's measly 1TB. The enterprise plans in both workspace and 365 provide unlimited storage.
Microsoft gives you 5TB of storage and requires you to contact support to convert it to unlimited storage. To take advantage of Microsoft's unlimited storage, you must have five or more users. Google workspace offers business starter, which costs $6 per user per month.
That's a huge difference, so unless you're only really comfortable with the Google ecosystem or have a very strong reason to stay with Google as a business on a very tight budget, I just highly recommend you go for microsoft 365 business basic, provided you're okay with how the email, security, and other things work in microsoft when compared to google, which we'll discuss in a moment.
Also, don't consider desktop application access in Microsoft 365 when choosing the cheapest plan, because with business basic, you can only work online; you cannot download and work with the applications offline, and this includes the Outlook desktop app.
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Microsoft 365 vs g suite in terms of Collaboration
Collaboration is an intriguing topic, and it is likely one of the most significant benefits of using either of these platforms.
Especially since many organizations are being forced into a remote workforce situation these days, and without collaborative features, remote working isn't going to be very effective.
Both Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace offer live collaboration, which means you can see all changes made to documents, sheets, and slides in real time.
Keep in mind that Google Workspace was designed specifically for the cloud, and as a result, I believe real-time collaboration has always been excellent with a workspace or G-Suite.
However, Microsoft has caught up to Google, and there is almost no difference in terms of real-time updates. When it comes to shared calendars, Google Calendar and Outlook both perform admirably.
Meetings can also be scheduled using Google Meet or Microsoft Teams, and they update almost instantly on your calendar as well as the calendars of those you've invited.
So, when it comes to ease of collaboration, I believe workspace and 365 are neck and neck, but I believe there are a few tie-breakers that push 365 to the next level, and depending on your business requirements, that may or may not make a difference. Absolutely.
The ability to have desktop apps with built-in collaboration eliminates the need to open apps in a browser every time you want to collaborate on a file with someone.
This can make a significant difference because desktop apps have more features than browser-based versions of office apps. Keep in mind that you will require a license that is higher than the basic business license.
The second is SharePoint Online, a team collaboration platform that serves as a central location for file access. Essentially, a file server with extensive document management capabilities.
Now, there is an alternative to SharePoint on Workspace called Google Sites, and aside from shared drives, you could imitate something similar to SharePoint Online, but calling it an alternative would be a stretch because the only significant differences are in the functionality they provide.
You can find this support article on the Google workspace learning center that explains how to replace SharePoint Online with Google workspace.
Even so, there is a disclaimer that "Some features do not correspond directly in Google workspace and are not covered in this guide," but the guide is a good place to start, especially if you're looking for some of the basic features that SharePoint Online has to offer.
Microsoft Teams combines chat, video, and audio into a single platform. You must use Google Chat for chatting and Google Meet for audio and video conferencing with Google workspace.
It's a little tedious, so I'm hoping they'll integrate chat and meet in the future. Starting with their most basic plans, Microsoft provides a limit of 300 participants.
Microsoft is raising the limit to 20,000 until June, after which it may be extended or made permanent. Google workspace only allows 150 participants, with a maximum of 250 if you upgrade to their enterprise plan.
They also claim that you can get up to 100,000 attendees by using the Microsoft 365 assistance program. Google Meet and Microsoft Teams both support recording of meetings and live events, as well as screen sharing.
Teams allows you to control the device of the person sharing their screen if you grant them permission, and I believe you can do the same with meet if you go through a few hoops, such as downloading the chrome remote desktop extension.
They both have mobile apps, but only Teams has a desktop app, which is my biggest complaint about Teams. The Teams desktop app is fantastic, but it is memory-intensive, so it takes a long time to get anything done if you have a device with 4GB of RAM or less.
So, if you have a laptop or PC with 4GB of RAM or less, I recommend using the different browser version. This will disable some features, but thankfully none of the major ones will be disabled.
There has been much speculation about how Google handles customer data and how people should choose between 365 and Workspace. One of the most common criticisms leveled at Google is that it uses customer data to deliver targeted advertisements. However, if you look at Google's workspace security white papers, you'll notice that they explicitly state that this is not the case.
If your employees are logged in and visit non-core services, their data will most likely be harvested. If this is a problem, you can always disable access via the admin panel. If they do use customer data, it is for the benefit of the customer, such as spam filtering and search indexing.
Going through the office 365 security and compliance white papers, you'll notice that their privacy policies are very similar, so when it comes to sharing data without the customer's permission, I don't think either platform will have a problem. The most serious concern is human error; what features does each platform offer to reduce these errors?
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What security features should your company have?
The first topic we must discuss is Data Loss Prevention (DLP). For those of you who are unfamiliar with DLP, it is essentially the measure taken to ensure that organizational data does not fall into the hands of unauthorized individuals. Parties, because this occurs frequently, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
DLP features are only available in Google Workspace's enterprise editions, so if you opt for a business subscription, you won't be able to use them. However, if you choose the enterprise versions, you will be able to use pre-set content detectors to detect sensitive information such as social security numbers, credit card numbers, or other personally identifiable information.
Microsoft's DLP solution works quite the same way, but it's a little more fleshed out. Microsoft provides protection on teams as well, like information sent in chat and team channels. You can also create custom dlp rules as well if you need to.
I'm not sure if Google protects sensitive information on Google Meet; nothing mentions it. Microsoft DLP is included with the Microsoft 365 Enterprise E3 and E5 packages. If you want it for your company, you can buy it as an add-on for around $3 per user.
Some of the criticism leveled at Microsoft's mail system has centered on their spam filter, but I never experienced spam while using the online exchange, and neither did many of the clients I've worked with.
Security Comparison of G Suite and Office 365:
What about phishing and impersonation as security precautions? You can set up your own DKIM and DMARC records when it comes to impersonation on both platforms and all of their plans.
They don't force you to use an A setting, but believe me when I say it goes a long way toward preventing impersonation attacks. It's free, so it's a waste of time not to. Google provides anti-phishing measures for all plans, without exception, to protect against phishing.
Does Microsoft 365 include ATP?
Microsoft provides phishing capabilities in Online Exchange Protection, which is included with all plans.
If you want more granular controls and better protection for both impersonation and phishing, you must either get Microsoft Defender for Office 365, which is known as Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), or purchase a commercial or higher license, which includes advanced threat protection.
There are two plans for this, and I believe Plan 2 will include features such as the Attack Simulator, which allows you to launch campaigns on employees by sending fake phishing emails and other attack simulations to determine who is weak in your organization.
Does Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 have better security?
I think, in general, that without the add-ons when it comes to cheaper business packages, Google certainly provides better control over phishing and impersonation security.
But, if you purchase Microsoft Defender for Office 365, or a plan that includes Defender for Office 365, this gives you more control when compared to what you get from google workspace (g suite).
Two-factor authentication (2FA), single-user sign-on (SSO), and encryption at rest and in transit are among the standard security features. If you want enhanced security, go for the enterprise edition.
However, if you want to keep your business subscription and target specific security measures, you can do so by purchasing add-ons.
I think you usually get more with Microsoft, especially with add-ons; there's just more in terms of features, most of which we can't even discuss, but just because you get more doesn't mean it's any better. Workspace is pretty cool, and the fact that it competes with 365 is significant because it makes sense for Microsoft to dominate this market given how popular and comfortable people are with office apps.
However, depending on your business objectives, I believe that a workspace may be the best option for your organization. Don't be misled by articles claiming that Microsoft is a sure winner or that Workspace is a sure winner.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on it Microsoft 365 vs Google Workspace, and if you think anything I said was incorrect, please correct me. Comment in the section below, and I'll pin your comment so we can discuss it.
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