G Suite vs. Office 365 – Which is the best platform for you?

Work. With everybody constantly on the move with something busy to do, you really wonder what is the best way to do things in the most speedy and efficient manner? As many organisations and businesses move towards a more paperless environment, the use of productivity platforms are essential and can be seen as a form of investment for anyone constantly working online. 

So, in this post, we’ll be looking at 2 major productivity platform providers, Google and Office with the innovation of G Suite and Office 365. Making the decision may be hard for you less technical folks out there. But don’t worry, we’ll be discussing briefly the key highlights and differences between the two so you can decide which can fulfill your work needs better.

But before we get into the details, let’s have a rough overview of the two: 

What is G Suite? 

G Suite which was formerly known as Google Apps for Work is a collection of enterprise-based products that includes cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools developed by Google for businesses, institutes, and organisations to utilise. To use the apps, users are to pay a monthly subscription for each user or per organisation. With the subscription, users can access tools like Docs, Sheets, Slides and Drive. To learn more about G Suite check out our article here ….

What is Office 365?

“Office 365″ is the Microsoft Office subscription service we all are quite familiar with. It includes basic productivity apps, email and many more. Just like G Suite, Office 365 is obtainable by paying a subscription fee to keep on using its apps. With that, you’re able to access Microsoft Office applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on Windows PCs, Macs, iPads, and every other platform Office supports.

As we’ve seen above, the two are quite similar and even their apps have somewhat the same functions. In the table below we can see their equivalents:

G Suite	Category	Office 365
Gmail	Email	Outlook
Drive	File storage	Onedrive
Meet	Video Conferencing	Teams
Docs	Document creation	Word
Sheets	Spreadsheet creation	Excel
Slides	Presentation creation	Powerpoint
Forms	Survey creation	Office Forms
Sites	Website creation	SharePoint
Keep	Notes creation	Onenote
Calendar	Calendar	Outlook Calendar

To those keen on learning more about the details on the comparison of apps in both platforms, we’ll be writing more in depth articles on that so do stay tuned!

All in all, the question still remains, which one is best for you? 

Team G Suite!

Jump on the bandwagon if: 

1. Collaborating is the go-to for your team.

With a majority of G Suite’s platforms online, they provide you an avenue to collaborate with your colleagues in a seamless manner where all changes to a slide, document or spreadsheet is done in real time effectively. 

2. You enjoy the simple things in life.

Apps like Slides or Docs may not have all the functions in the world in comparison to Office’s Word or Powerpoint, but to some, that may be a good thing. If you’re not too tech savvy and prefer getting things done nice and simple, then the features in Slides and Docs are more than enough to get you through your workload. They’re easy to use as well! Not only that, most of G Suite’s apps are so easy to use and require virtually no set up whatsoever. So by going for G Suite, you really get to bypass all the complications when handling tech. 

3. You value organisation.

When preparing work, there are so many elements that come into play, be it random documents, charts, presentations, so finding all these relevant things and compiling them can take ages and induce unwanted panic attacks. With G Suite’s Google Cloud Search, just type in the relevant keywords to your work and all the related documents, slides, emails and spreadsheets are at your fingertips, just ready to be utilised. 

4. You prefer working on multiple devices.

The normal working person has at least a mobile phone or a laptop. But sometimes you want to use or bring one or the other. With most of G Suite’s applications online, you can easily access, view and edit any files you want from any device as long as you log in. Your progress is automatically saved in Google’s servers so your work is always updated.

Team Office 365!

Try Office 365 if this sounds like you: 

1. Collaborating is not essential

As online applications aren’t so much the highlight of Office 365, seamlessly collaborating may come as quite a challenge. Unless, your organization does not depend too heavily on working remotely then you’re good to go! If you want to send documents to a fro just send any necessary files to your team via Outlook or third party apps like Whatsapp or Telegram. 

2. Enjoy a vast amount of functions

Office is well known for their wide range of functionalities available on Word, Excel or Powerpoint which may not be available for G Suite applications. If you know how to use these complex functionalities or they’re essential to your work then by all means Office 365 is for you. 

3. Prefer working offline.

Some people may prefer working on desktop applications that are downloadable such as most of Office 365’s applications. These come in handy to reduce your dependency on Internet Connectivity. This also eliminates the clutterdness when it comes to working online with all your tabs open at the same time. 

All in all, the decision is on what you prefer? Do you dislike the hassle of overcomplicated tech mambo jumbo and want to opt for something simpler? Then G Suite is the one for you. But if you prefer sophisticated and detailed features and functions, Office 365 is a better fit for your needs. Whatever the choice may be, you can still open Microsoft Office files in the G Suite platform and vice versa. 

We hoped this helped in guiding your choice. As we’ve mentioned, check out our next articles on more detailed comparisons between G Suite Apps and Microsoft Office 365 equivalents. If you’re interested to learn more about G Suite, do leave us a message at marketing@matrixc.com!