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
OneNote
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft's OneNote is a digital note-taking app, supporting photos, annotating, web page clipping, emailing, and synchronizing notes across devices.
I'd say that G-Suite is quite similar to Office 365, but its probably pared out and less expensive. It probably doesn't have all the bells and whistles that Office has (for example: in Excel), but it gets you 80% of the functionality in an easy-to-use way, and it's probably …
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.
In my opinion OneNote is a must for anyone who does business. It’s versatile, stable and sustainable. It can keep private information private - like passwords. It can be used for collaborative work - like standard operating procedures. It is fairly easy to use and far superior to pen and paper. When used for meeting notes, it can be flagged with icons that are searchable - like ideas or important items. You can even create Outlook tasks on the fly
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.
Because of its flexibility and ability to hold different types of content (text, images, tables), it is a great tool for collecting content from different resources and organizing it in one place.
Technical support analysts are using sections for their support case analysis; they paste pieces of logs, screen-shots, document their steps in troubleshooting etc., all in one section, to get the full picture yet stay organized.
The logic of content structure; Notebook>Section>Page>Paragraph, allows you to manage and collect all needed information by the areas of the user's responsibility. For example; each of my projects has its own section, in which each page is a task.
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.
The table editing tools are too simplistic and lack the features found in other Office products.
Some content loses its rich text formatting when being pasted into OneNote. A workaround is to paste the content first into Outlook or Word and then copy/pasting that into OneNote.
Microsoft is moving away from a local install of OneNote, which means notebooks have to be in the cloud in Office 2019. This will actually reduce the usefulness of OneNote in some environments and opens the door to competitor products.
Update: Microsoft has now announced that it will continue to support OneNote 2016 through 2023. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Office-365-Blog/Your-OneNote/ba-p/954922
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.
As this is not a compulsory tool in our organization, I would say all depends on the decision makers, however since this is a part of MS Office, I am sure we will have it for as long as we will possibly need it. However, I would not be so sure, if it was a separate product
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.
I find OneNote incredibly usable. I'm fairly middle of the road when it comes to tech savvy-ness. The platform was very easy to learn and explore. I like that OneNote is no clunky and offers a clean interface. This is important when it comes to deciding if a tool is usable for multiple people.
Overall, I rate OneNote's performance highly. In general, notebooks, sections and pages load quickly. OneNote integrates with other apps and info ca easily be shared/copied to and from the tool to other tools. Moreover, Notebooks tend to sync quickly meaning shared notebooks are up to date almost immediately provided there are no syncing issues.
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.
Since it is part of Microsoft Office and used across the globe there are a lot of support options available. It's quickest to just do a google search which will have plenty of articles to help you since there are so many OneNote users but as an Office customer you also have access to Microsoft support and I have had good experiences with their support (probably because I'm with a large company who is a large customer to them).
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.
I tried using Evernote and it is an equally usable tool, however, I prefer the interface and capabilities of OneNote. OneNote seems much easier to use and understand. I think that may primarily be because OneNote is a Microsoft application and I am very used to using Microsoft applications such as Word, Excel, etc. I also use OneNote to keep my grocery list. It does as good of a job as the grocery list applications out there, only I like the flexibility I have with OneNote and how I specifically do my shopping.
OneNote has become our organizational standard method of taking electronic notes (though some still prefer pen and paper.) It has been a zero cost outlay due to its freely available nature.
Its integration with other Microsoft Office products makes it easy to share notes and content between products, allowing for easy collaboration where needed.
OneNote's integration with OneDrive ensures that individual's notes are always safe and secure, taking away the tedious responsibility of backup from the user, and makes it happen seamlessly in the background.
