Google Workspace vs. Microsoft 365 vs. Microsoft SharePoint

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.

Incentivized

Microsoft 365 would be well suited for medium to large enterprises. This is where there are several hundreds or thousands of people. Since most everyone has used one of the applications the learning curve would be reduced. Another reason would be the ability to implement security measures to prevent access to sensitive data. This could justify the cost of an Enterprise license.

Incentivized

SharePoint Document Management excels as a central repository for storing, organising, and retrieving documents. It supports version control, metadata tagging, secure access, and integration with tools like Power Automate. At our organisation, it's used for managing contracts, policies, and supplier documents. SharePoint Workflow Automation integrates with Power Automate to streamline approvals, gather feedback, and automate recurring tasks. This reduces reliance on email chains and manual trackers.

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

• Chat with teams and the integrations with the other apps, and many more smaller ones, like to-dos, news, and the recent Outlook integration.
• Easy embedding on SharePoint to broadcast all the content created in the different tools.
• The office package is still robust with the good things from the past and new additions.

Incentivized

• We track employees' performance sheets, which are accessible to the employee, his manager, and HR, and this helps with transparency.
• We maintain technical process documents and SOPs, which help us quickly provide relevant documents during audits.
• We maintain incident documents change request forms in SharePoint, which helps us in tracking the changes.

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.

• Forms lack comprehensive features and parameters for detailed questioning for example cannot be directly linked with Power BI
• Outlook email filters are not handy to use and require more detailing in terms of location past emails
• Teams requires substantially large amounts of system resources which could be finetuned

Incentivized

• Windows Explorer users have some difficulty having to constantly UPLOAD / DOWNLOAD files. Specifically on the DOWNLOAD when they are used to Drag & Drop in & out of LOCAL folders via Window's explorer.
• Microsoft SharePoint supports multiple "library" types. When implementing our "image" library the search function is done via "tags" and boolean logic. This is challenging to most end users. I'd like our users to be able to search our Microsoft SharePoint image library without having to enter KEYWORD or other BOOLEAN logic.
• Microsoft SharePoint can also be an internal website for each department or company wide communication tool but I believe these features are geared for much larger organizations. Since we are a SMB we really aren't using these features. So maybe something more useful to SMBs would be nice.

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

So far the Microsoft 365 platform provides features and tools that can cater to 100% of present organizations needs considering both technical and business necessities, however most features are not been effectively utilised at present. The current featureset is able to cover for most of the future needs of the business and technical functions.

Incentivized

It's integral to our business. It's already included with most of the Office 365 licensing we buy, so the cost is effectively zero. It stores our files, it is the foundation for custom applications, and Microsoft only continues to enhance its functionality and its connections to other Microsoft tools. SharePoint just keeps getting better and better.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Microsoft 365 is the gold standard for performing project tasks in a professional environment, enabling the quick transfer and exchange of files and ideas for team members who work locally and remotely. Its suite of tools is familiar and has evolved to being cloud based, allowing for files to be updated in real time from near and far.

Incentivized

No usability issues reported. Individual teams also have allocated areas which replace legacy shared drives on local LANs. Access to Sharepoint resources is fully integrated with corporate Active Directory with additional two-factor authentication required for administrative users. Users have access to Microsoft Services Hub which allows you to create, manage, and track support requests while staying current on Microsoft technologies with access to select self-paced learning paths

Incentivized

To-date Microsoft 365 platform has offered an amazing uptime and availability percentage per year compared to all other products which provide the stability and overall business resilience of their ecosystem which is a great relief for information technology service entitites which heavy rely on Microsoft offerings as a whole to redeliver their own custom products

Incentivized

The Microsoft 365 tools expects and demands a substantial amount of system resources to operate at optimal level and even more when integrated with other applications which is a downside, however given that external supporting tech factors such as fibre/broadband speed bandwidth, high speed RAM and ample storage resources are allocated the tools work error free providing robust communication

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

Over the past 8 years of using Microsoft 365, I have noticed that they change vendors often. This always leads to a poor experience in the beginning, then levels out after some time for the company to get things worked out. As a customer, it is really frustrating because I don't have time when something isn't working to have them "look into my issue" and get back with me. They have even closed a ticket I specifically told them to keep open. Your applications are only as good as the support.

Incentivized

Support for SharePoint is quite good. Microsoft provides good support. Microsoft offers

• Quick turnaround time for issues
• A range of support services
• Access to a network of resources
• Escalation of issues
• Ongoing development and commitment to produce enhancement

The majority of support is required for initial installation. Once complete and the system is operating we have had very few support issues.

Incentivized

The resellers involved with selling Microsoft products are reluctant to provide in person specialist trainings to consumers due to the fact of costs of economies of scale and is not provided free of charge most of the time. In Person trainings needs to be agreed to at the initiation of projects and implementations for better ROI.

Incentivized

The face to face training I received was on SharePoint Administration. It was rushed as there was a lot of information to cover and the application of the labs weren't that great either. I like to be able to relate what I am learning to what I am currently doing.

The standard training offered with 3rd part resellers are fairly standard and covers the basic workability however the trainings needs to be specifically customised according to unique requirements of the organizations. for example an MSP would need to master specific communications verticals within Microsoft 365 whereas and online store using Microsoft 365 would needs to master a different set of tools within the suite to get the best ROI post implementation.

Incentivized

I like to learn at my own pace and online training allows for that. Additionally, you can skip through pieces of content that you already know or are already comfortable with. Microsoft actually offers great videos on their website for basic fundamental SharePoint Training. I have used these training videos in some of my own training sessions with end users.

nothing to say

The Microsoft support partners are more than capable of handling implementations and dealing with unprecedented errors during the implementations. Not part of the implementation though the setup was done with minimum misconfigurations which is evident with present live setup which works fine without any bugs and gaps at present context.

Incentivized

Planning to the last detail would be advised. SharePoint is a very large application that takes a lot of finesse to get operational

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

Typically I prefer working with companies with Microsoft 365 as their main tool because they're usually a fast growing company with a global presence. I like using it for work because it's easy to collaborate, share, review, comment, reply in any of the tools. The mobile app for Outlook and Teams are lifesavers when we're constantly traveling and you can join meetings on the mobile Teams to never miss a beat.

Incentivized

The reasons for selecting MS SharePoint are: SharePoint provides ease of use and web design assistance and support SharePoint helps you schedule your content for publishing. enables users to share documents with external parties and offers a better internal structure of the content and better indexing and searching capabilities.

Incentivized

Microsoft pricing is not very expensive and yet not very cheap as well, and it hovers in between the baseline. The charges are mostly based on the tier level partners who charge based on their individual reputation in the market. Power negotiation will lead to cost effective and attractive pricing

Incentivized

Multiple tools within the same platform have been deployed successfully within different functional technical and non technical teams such as Devops, SOC, NOC, Shared services, Managed services, Global Information technology, Cloud operations, Finance, Administration, human resources and all these teams collaborate while maintaining central uniformity in terms of global standards who are dispersed in different geographical locations with ease

Incentivized

Have not directly obtained professional services from Microsoft but rather obtained specialized services such as implementations and configurations, setting up and integration support with Microsoft authorized suppliers, 3rd parties, and resellers, which has been a pleasant experience. Again the level of delivery quality on professional services is based on the level of hands on exposure of the 3rd party

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 have a lot of nonprofit users, so they have a good ROI.
• I like the constant updates without having to purchase the software repeatedly.
• I used to purchase each Office (insert year here) often, so the software was up to date and had the newest options and connectors. I think my return on investment would have been much better if Microsoft had updated those versions to keep them current; after all, we did pay for them.
• Microsoft 365's offering a monthly fee or a discount for a year helps, and you can look at it as a free backup if you have everything set to back up to One Drive. (Cloud-based document filing you can access anywhere ( with an internet connection)—you Can't beat that!)

• It comes with Office 365. It won't cost you any additional charges.
• It will help you to streamline your communication and work as a central hub for all tasks, files[,] and events[.]
• Setting it up will need a bit [of] planning. If you jump blindly it will become a confusing place for your team members and make them frustrated[.]

Incentivized