Adobe Acrobat vs. Google Workspace

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Adobe Acrobat
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Adobe Acrobat DC is the current version of the well-established document / PDF management solution, part of the Adobe Document Cloud (the other part being Adobe's eSign services based on technology acquired with EchoSign in 2011).
$29.99
per month per seat
Google Workspace
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Google Workspace enables teams of all sizes to connect, create and collaborate. It includes productivity and collaboration tools for work: Gmail for custom business email, Drive for cloud storage, Docs for word processing, Meet for video and voice conferencing, Chat for team messaging, Slides for presentation building, and shared Calendars.
$6
per month per user
Pricing
Adobe AcrobatGoogle Workspace
Editions & Modules
Acrobat Pro for Individuals
$19.99
per month
Acrobat Pro for Teams
$23.99
per month per user
Acrobat Studio for Individuals
$24.99
per month
Business Starter
$6
per user/per month
Business Standard
$12
per user/per month
Business Plus
$18
per user/per month
Enterprise
Contact sales team
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe AcrobatGoogle Workspace
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Adobe AcrobatGoogle Workspace
Considered Both Products
Adobe Acrobat
Chose Adobe Acrobat
I selected Adobe Acrobat because of the following reasons..

1. It provides the Ai powered features and straight forward cloud integration which is not available with other providers. 2.Adobe Acrobat has global certifications of market standards for security and compliance areas.
Chose Adobe Acrobat
Adobe Acrobat is the only player I know. In my experience, Adobe Acrobat is easily accessible.
Chose Adobe Acrobat
The great thing about Adobe is the functionality it offers users, something that Word through Microsoft apparently does, but the vulnerability of information in Word is something complex that organizations are still improving, and it's something that Adobe has been able to …
Chose Adobe Acrobat
Because of its manyfeatures, intuitive interface, sophisticated functionalities, and wellestablished industry standing, Adobe Acrobat is the program of choice for managingdocuments in our company when compared to other programs.
Chose Adobe Acrobat
I think Adobe Acrobat is better designed, has better and more robust options and is more secure than the cloud services that those sites provide. Acrobat also is already integrated in the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite, so is cheaper to use it, because in those tools above you have …
Chose Adobe Acrobat
The user awareness of the product stands out always and the fact that all the users are already aware of its usage.
Chose Adobe Acrobat
DocuSign has more features than Adobe Acrobat DC but it costs more and we don't need those features. HelloSign is not as robust as Adobe Acrobat DC. We have yet to use a program that we were as satisfied with the results of converting documents into PDF files as we are with …
Google Workspace
Chose Google Workspace
Google Drive [(formerly G Suite)] is so much better for collaboration than Microsoft Office. But Office is still used by so much of the world, it's necessary as well. Having Azure Active Directory for Windows is a nice addition to an onsite active directory, and offers many …
Chose Google Workspace
Overall, Google has been my go-to for all online office files and for sharing and collaborative projects: from meeting notes to shared documents. This has been easy to use and managed by admin.
Chose Google Workspace
G-suite has been the preferred solution, particularly compared to Microsoft, particularly because of cost, ease of administration and users general familiarity with Google applications since so many of our folks use the same apps and services personally as well as …
Chose Google Workspace
For ease of use, collaboration, and reduced expense.
Best Alternatives
Adobe AcrobatGoogle Workspace
Small Businesses
Square 9 Softworks
Square 9 Softworks
Score 9.3 out of 10
Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
MSB Docs
MSB Docs
Score 9.4 out of 10
Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
M‑Files
M‑Files
Score 8.9 out of 10
Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Adobe AcrobatGoogle Workspace
Likelihood to Recommend
8.9
(916 ratings)
8.3
(121 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.9
(46 ratings)
10.0
(5 ratings)
Usability
8.8
(331 ratings)
8.5
(12 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
5.3
(10 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.5
(64 ratings)
2.2
(12 ratings)
Online Training
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.9
(16 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Configurability
7.9
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
4.5
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
8.0
(8 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
7.1
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
1.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
1.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Adobe AcrobatGoogle Workspace
Likelihood to Recommend
Adobe
Adobe Acrobat is well suited for creating PDFs, scanning, and creating files, editing and fixing PDFs, such as if you want to swap pages or edit text. Also good at combining multiple files and organizing them. Adobe Acrobat is not good at working with numbers or editing photos. There are Excel and Photoshop, which are the industry standards for those specific tasks.
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Google
Google Workspace does offer several different plans that can match well with the stage of your business. As your business grows, the higher plans can provide the better tooling or expanded features/products to scale with your needs. It would probably become very complicated to swap over to, if you are deeply embedded with another competitor. But, it could be a nice platform to consolidate several disconnected systems under one roof.
Read full review
Pros
Adobe
  • OCR on scanned documents actually works well for standard business docs; it makes old vendor contracts searchable without manual retyping.
  • Page organization is genuinely useful, helping with merging, reordering, and splitting PDFs in one place without needing a separate tool or script.
  • Editing PDFs you didn't create without breaking the original formatting works more reliably than anything else.
Read full review
Google
  • Google Calendar...amazing. I don't need to ask team members when they're busy anymore and play this game of bouncing times back and forth. All I need to do is enter their email address and it shows my calendar and theirs side by side and then select the day and time I find that works best for the both of us.
  • I actually prefer Google Meet over Zoom. Zoom bogs down my computer and I find their UI overcomplicated for what it actually does. Google Meet is simple and does practically everything Zoom does without needing to pay any extra money.
  • Sheets integrates with our CRM (Copper) so it's perfect for us. Being able to export information out of our CRM into sheets and then create pivot tables from that data makes our lives a million times better.
Read full review
Cons
Adobe
  • The UI is awkward to navigate in professional workflows.
  • Major UI changes are much too frequent, which affects productivity adversely even when the changes are "improvements." Muscle memory is a thing.
  • The new AI features tend to be intrusive and distracting if you turn them on, and there are better alternatives for document summary and analysis.
Read full review
Google
  • Pricing is a little bit higher than other services
  • The cost of each email inbox costs the same whether you want just email or all of the features. For example, we wanted a support email address that we could setup our support desk with. The cost of that added account is the same as the account I use with all of the features.
  • They removed their free tier for small organizations like mine and restricted the free tier from adding new domain names. This was likely due to abuse, but everyone lost the privilege of the free service.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Adobe
Adobe Acrobat works seamlessly with the other Adobe products we use that are industry-standard. We will certainly continue to use Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator, meaning it will always be convenient to work seamlessly with Adobe Acrobat for our organization. We are happy with the performance of Acrobat and it's meets our expectations.
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Google
There is no better solution for cloud storage and real time collaboration. The amount of features included in G Suite is unmatched and out of other things we’ve tried over the years, nothing comes close to being as great of a tool.
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Usability
Adobe
It's a 10; well, at least for me, as I jump from desktop to mobile often. The responsiveness of my document in Acrobat makes it easier to read or make comments even when working in a smaller space. My second reason for that score is just that Acrobat keeps it simple and the workspace clean. The icons are perfect where words would be jumbled in a mobile space.
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Google
Google Workspace is incredibly intuitive and user friendly. It's easy to adopt through simple features, for example the prompts to enable Gemini on each call for note taking is reliable, and helps to stop you forgetting to use the feature. The main reason for a strong rating is the consistency and reliability, whilst there's definitely areas for improvement, for example additional calendar features (sharing), or deeper functionality in sheets. The level that it provides means that anyone adopting it will be able to take full use of features within a day or two. Gmail, calendar and the documentation suite contain all the basic features for a small / medium business to run at a high level day to day, with minimal downtime or learning curves.
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Reliability and Availability
Adobe
We have not had availability issues with Adobe Acrobat, or at least none that I am personally aware of. Some may encounter crashes of the software during outages of electricity in their city or neighborhood, which no one can plan for, but with generators in our organization, we have been lucky not to have outages
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Google
No answers on this topic
Performance
Adobe
One of the best features of Adobe Acrobat is its speed and stability. When dealing with massive multi-page files, having to reload a crashed program over and over again would slow down progress unnecessarily. And expanding on that, having the table of contents generated allows me to skip to different pages with ease, a necessary feature with exceptionally long files. word searches are even more helpful with text recognition.
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Google
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Adobe
For a while, Acrobat DC crashed pretty frequently. I contacted Adobe Acrobat support about the problem. At first support was unable to provide a solution. After about a month Adobe's software engineers provided a fix. I just wish it had taken less than a month to solve the problem.
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Google
My experiences of getting support have been positive. Calling in is not overly difficult, but it does require getting a PIN. The knowledge of those responding to the calls has been impressive. I have managed to work with them to fix two Google bugs that I had identified. These bugs required a some technical expertise and the support staff were able to understand the issue and forward the concerns to the appropriate persons. The first bug was fixed with 24 hours. The second bug took a little longer, but it was also more complicated to reproduce.
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Online Training
Adobe
Answered basic questions.
Read full review
Google
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Adobe
I was not involved with the implementation process, so I cannot answer this question. However, when it was installed on my computer system, they did so virtually. I just sat there while they took control of my computer over the network and watch them install it, lickety split
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Google
nothing to say
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Adobe
I am sure it works fine but I do not have any reason to ever use it instead of or in addition to acrobat. If the software is working fine, has the features you need and is already well known by the staff, it would be foolish to switch to a different software.
Read full review
Google
There are lots of competitors to various tools in Workspace, like Meet versus Zoom. However, Microsoft is the other big competitor I can think of for Google Workspace as a whole. To me, at least, the strength of Workspace is how easy it is to share and collaborate with others. For items that I only need for myself and can keep on my own computer, I typically rely on Microsoft Word, Excel, etc. For items that I need to share, I turn to Workspace a lot. Being able to collaborate in real-time and not having to send documents back and forth is so amazing, and such a time saver. And I love that Workspace is also a built-in tool with Dropbox now.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Adobe
I am not responsible for sales or purchasing
Read full review
Google
No answers on this topic
Scalability
Adobe
I find that many users aren't aware of many features of the software they use, nor may they be comfortable with learning multiple-step processes. For the simplest of PDF purposes (scanning, downloading, exporting), it gets a thumbs-up. For anything involving electronic signatures, meh--causes eyes to glaze over, or forgetting what all is involved.
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Google
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Adobe
  • Again, the ability to make multiple versions of a PDF has helped speed up getting them to the warehouse and making it easier to print for them!
  • In marketing, there are multiple uses of Adobe Acrobat where it speeds up our process making us more efficient.
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Google
  • Zero to no time managing tools allows us to focus on work saving us time and money
  • Google Workspace allowed us to seamlessly transition to a fully remote workforce when the Coronavirus pandemic started - no lost time or productivity.
  • Easily able to extend our workspace and add features, e.g. Voice, saving us time implementing other services.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Adobe Acrobat Screenshots

Screenshot of where to create, edit, convert, and share PDF files all from within Microsoft Teams – as part of Acrobat integrations with Microsoft 365 apps.Screenshot of Liquid Mode in Adobe Acrobat Reader mobile app, where users can read PDFs on phones and tablets without having to pinch and zoom. Navigate lengthy documents with intelligent outline and search tools, while maximizing readability and comfort with font size and line spacing that are adjustable.Screenshot of where to fill and sign PDF forms from anywhere and on any device. Here, users can collect signatures, digitally track progress, and automatically archive the signed document.Screenshot of the Adobe Scan mobile app, used to capture and convert documents into high-quality, interactive PDF documents that can be filled out, signed, and shared. This eliminates the hassle of finding a printer, filling a form by hand, and scanning it again.