Google Workspace vs. Microsoft 365 Business Premium

I find that google workspace covers all the bases that I would need my day to day work solution to offer. Workspace is perfect if you're someone working in sales who regularly sets up and hosts meetings. The meet solution is reliable, the transcription through Gemini is almost always perfect, and the recording function is easy to use. Calendar backs this up well by being simple and easy to use. Although having the ability to share your calendar link for people to book in meetings would elevate this further. You can also never go wrong with Gmail, it is reliable, has strong spam filters and rarely ever goes down. On the flip side, despite Docs, Slides and Sheets covering the basic functionalities that you would need to create a good base level of documents, it does lack some advanced functionalities that other providers offer. Especially in Sheets, I use sheets regularly for importing and exporting data for cold outreach, it works perfectly fine for this, but if you were looking to start creating dashboards etc using sheets as the base for this, it can start to get a bit tricky and limited.

Incentivized

Microsoft 365 Business Premium is well suited to any size organization and is a must-have for business purposes. It is a vital component for the majority of work software needs, as the Microsoft 365 Business Premium package has apps to handle needs that I didn't know we had. It is a great way to provide the required software programs to teams, especially those that work remotely due to the great sharing capabilities built into it. Furthermore, the nonprofit program provided our small nonprofit with vital components for our remote work, while allowing us to keep our donated funds going directly to our mission.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Work in sync in different departments.
• Being able to work from any device or computer. It is a very noble tool in different devices.
• The work between the different programs (Word, Excel, Notes) that it offers is extremely light and good.

Incentivized

• 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.

• adding calendar invitations is not straight forward
• copying folders from SharePoint libraries to an external drive should not be relying on the available space on the C drive
• administering mailboxes for our company is convoluted forcing me to hunt for settings and options
• lack of flexibility on the location of the OST and PST files
• the new version should not do away with PST files but rather improve their reliability.
• the PST internal structure is inefficient. the PST file should be able to shrink automatically when one delete emails.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It is part of the organisation now. It provides and rich feature set and requires a relatively low amount of administration.

On the user end, it's great, probably some of the most user friendly products out there. On the admin side, it can get a little more arcane, but it's still better than a lot of other services. At worst I wrangle some CSVs to perform mass changes, but it's a far cry from the days of Powershell scripts or purely manual entry.

Incentivized

The basic apps are straightforward and easy to use, especially since they have been around so long. I'm referring to the basic apps like Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, OneNote, etc. Other features such as Microsoft Teams and Sharepoint Sites, Sharepoint Lists, Sharepoint Groups, etc. all require a higher level of knowledge to both implement and use properly

Incentivized

In the last 5 years, Microsoft has come a long way. The performance of the products has become more and more user-friendly and it seems that the feedback provided by the user community is being listened to and worked on. The processes are very fast and seamless. There are negligible errors and doesn't slow the systems down.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

As mentioned elsewhere in the review, Microsoft has historically paid attention to community feedback and issues, but timeliness can improve, and so can the addressing of long-standing issues about which many users have said "I have this issue too!" but no official solution exists. For issues that do have a solution, however, the solution is usually not difficult to find, and the explanation of features on Microsoft's website can mitigate many problems.

Incentivized

nothing to say

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.

Incentivized

Before migrating to Microsoft 365 Business Premium, we possessed an in-house exchange server. Therefore, it was difficult for us to look at alternatives to Microsoft for a solution – we did look at the Google Suite of products, but the transition for us seemed less cumbersome to stay with Microsoft from a staff and administrative perspective. While the G Suite does offer us many outstanding products and services, we also didn’t feel that Gmail is up-to-par as a corporate solution the way Exchange/Outlook/OWA are – this alone was also a driving force for our end-users, as there was minimal transition for them to move from an on-premise solution to an off-premise solution. The additional features of SharePoint, Teams, Project, and so many other applications within Microsoft 365 also helped us make a strong case to stay with Microsoft and expand what we were using. The end-user and mobile protections of InTune have also put us at ease when issuing laptops and mobile phones to an almost fully-remote end-user base.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• We can now keep work going from anywhere. It doesn't matter if we are on a job site or sitting in the office or working from home for a day or two we don't have to miss a beat.
• It has unified how we store information so that everything isn't stored on individual computers

Incentivized