6 Reasons Office 365 Beats Google Apps for Work

So you are looking for an office suite for your business. Your only question is, should you go with GoogleApps for Work or with Microsoft’s Office 365?

While each has its pros and cons, here are six reasons why Office 365 is probably the better bet for your business needs.

You Get Offline Access

Both Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365 provide you with cloud-based online access. However, only Office 365 can be installed on a local device. If you are traveling on a plane or anywhere else without Wi-Fi, having full offline access is a big plus. A single Office 365 license allows you to install its apps on five separate devices, whether that be a Windows PC, a Mac, a tablet, or a smartphone.

There is More Familiarity With the Tools

Many of your co-workers, workers, employees, and even yourself will probably be more familiar with the applications in Office 365, such as PowerPoint, Excel, Word, Skype, and Outlook than with Google's Apps. These have been around for a much longer time than Google’s applications, so most people are more comfortable with them. Most people are more comfortable with working on a word document on Microsoft Word than on a doc on Google Docs.

You Have More Flexibility

With Google Apps for Work, you have only two basic plans: Google Apps for Work ($5 per month, or $50 annually) and Google Apps Unlimited ($10 per month, or $120 annually). With Office 365, however, you have many plans to choose from, and here are the most popular ones for businesses: Business Essentials ($6 per month), Business ($10 per month), Business Premium ($15 per month), Enterprise E1 ($8 per month), Enterprise Pro Plus ($12 per month), Enterprise E3 ($20 per month), and Enterprise E5 ($35 per month). There are many differences between the plans, such as if the apps will be available offline as well, how many users you can add, calendar features, whether you can pay monthly, and more. This gives you much more flexibility in choosing a plan that works best to fit your needs, as opposed to just the two options that you can get with Google Apps.

You Have More Storage With the Lowest Plan

If you are looking to go with the cheapest plan available, then Office 365 wins by a large margin. Google Apps for Work, at $5 a month, gives you only 30GB of storage, and that includes both files and email. However, Office 365’s Business Essentials Plan, at just a dollar more ($6 per month), gives you 1TB of storage for your files, plus 50GB of storage for your emails.

More Video Conference Calls Participators

Google’s counterpart to Skype is Google Hangouts. It’s not a bad application, but video conference calls are limited to just 25 participants. At Skype for Business, however, you can have video calls with up to ten times that amount of people; the limit in Skype is 250 people. If you have more than 25 employees that you need to conference with, Office 365 is definitely the place to go.

Email Sorting Capabilities

One of the downsides of using Gmail is that it lacks the type of sorting and grouping capabilities that Outlook has. For example, with Outlook, you can lump emails that are sent by one or more senders into one group. This helps you keep your projects organized. Gmail lacks this very useful feature, and although you can search for conversations in Gmail based on sender, you can not create groups of several senders together.

Office 365’s apps are also a little more advanced and have more features than Google Apps, which tend to be more simple and with fewer features.

Ready to learn more about how to leverage Office 365 in your business?