GSuite vs. Office 365: which is better?

[jennysowyrda]

A rivalry almost as old as the internet itself - G Suite vs. Office 365.

This week we're discussing which solution you've found to be better for your business (and your personal life, too)!

Do you have a love / hate relationship with one of these? Are you so loyal to one that even seeing them compared side by side makes you roll your eyes? We want to know which way the HubSpot Community sways on GSuite vs. O365! 

Share your thoughts and comments in the thread below!

[AdamLPW]

I use Gmail for personal email, but all business stuff is Office 365.  It's a little annoying to me that there's no calendar sync between the two (there used to be one going back about 9 years, but for some reason it disappeared).  

Anyway, I personally prefer all things Google, but have been impressed with what can be achieved using Outlook calendar and MS Flow, as well as off-the-shelf integrations with O365.

It's really all about integrations - we all want a world where every app in our software stack talks to every other app in our software stack.  Office 365 seems to delivery quite well on this at present.  

I'd love to hear others' thoughts on the integrations in the two suites, although I don't believe my company would be willing to switch, as we're deeply invested in Office 365.

[sharonlicari]

Hey everyone! 

I'd like to know your thoughts about this debate: GSuite vs. Office 365

@Josh @Mike_Eastwood @AM8 @jimbanks @JonPayne @Dan1 @Joe-Kelp @Krystina @warrendavey @rikkilear 

Thank you

Sharon

[Josh]

While both are great solutions vs Exchange and in-house servers, I'm an advocate for Google. It's super easy to use and either provides or integrates with most of the tools we use. 

We're in Gmail every day, but we have also replaced the Microsoft apps with Google's counterpart (Slides, Docs, Sheets, etc.)

Again, 365 is a great solution as well, but I wouldn't switch away from GSuite without kicking and screaming.

Thanks for the ping @sharonlicari!

[Digna]

That's how I feel able it, they work so well together that it's not a set that you would want to break up and piece out, they're made to work together and they do a **bleep** of a job.  

Not to say Microsoft doesn't do the same but there are just certain tasks come up every once in a while, simple, arbitrary tasks, that just completely break a Microsoft tool in the form of it's just not made to do that, and it's not going to give an inch to help you with it.

[JonPayne]

Both systems work really well with HubSpot (though if you're using Outlook client on your PC for emails, the Sales Tools add in can sometimes cause Outlook to load slowly).

If all things were equal, I'd go GSuite all day long. Particularly if you're a growing business GSuite is a great choice because your new starters almost certainly already have Gmail and so the whole interface is something they're used to.

Reasons not to use GSuite? If you have Powerpoint documents that are 50+ slides long - Google Slides can be laggy when presenting, even online. If you have Excel Spreadsheets that require complex macros to run or are just 2,000 rows plus, unfortunatley we've found that Google Sheets isn't up to the task. We've found shared calendars to be problematic in GSuite too but I think that's more our process than Google 🙂

Which means that, at Noisy Little Monkey (where I work) we use Office 365 for email, calendars.

We use Powerpoint and Excel from Office 365.

We use Google Docs and Microsoft Word interchangably

And we store it all on Google's Drive File Steam. 

Ugh. For each user we have to pay for Office 365 AND GSuite but it gets the job done and I know we're not the only company who has to do that to make everything work.

I'd much prefer to be pure GSuite!

[AdamLPW]

---

@JonPayne wrote:

...if you're using Outlook client on your PC for emails, the Sales Tools add in can sometimes cause Outlook to load slowly.

---

I feel your pain, Jon!  

If you uninstall the Office 365 add-in and reinstall the older Outlook add-in, it'll speed right up for you.  Here's a link to a recent community post where I documented my Support experience with getting this issue resolved, and the reason why the new add-in is slow.   

[JonPayne]

@AdamLPW Love that idea! I'll give it a go. Thanks for the tip! 🙂

[Digna]

Yes, I had the same problem.. could not get it to go any faster.

But then an idea came to me, a very good idea.  

Immediately I ran down stairs and uninstalled outlook from my PC, and then I installed gmail in it's place, and that was all it needed!  Not one problem ever since! 😅

[Digna]

My company pays has both G Suite and Office 365 also

Google slides with 50 pages?! 🤣😂🤣😂 Why??!?!

You might as well just turn that into a movie! 🤣

[PamCotton]

🎉  🎉  🎉  🎉   Welcome to this week new users in the Community 🎉  🎉  🎉  🎉  

@AW-NL @alex-martin @alfredmurgado @arandazzo @bakem @bchansky @cfinestone @Crystelrynne @imdancoop @DarrenSimons @druderman @dstoker @jhoke722 @Barty @jmbray @James22 @kaelza @MarcusB @mariejansen @MelissaCB 

We would love your opinion on this week's topic and of course connect you with other users!

Thanks,

Pam

[DarrenSimons]

I think it depends who the user is...

Office365 for me - I don't always want everything in the cloud, and Office works nicer with emails, tracked documents etc.

Excel addins are much more advanced than GSuite equivalent.

I do like google for collaborative working and for school/education environment I think gsuite is outstanding

[Barty]

Definitely depends on the size and CMMI maturity of the company to be honest. G Suite is great for small companies who are growing and don't need too much structure, whereas O365 is a beast with lots of features and applications, but most companies don't need them, i.e. Project, Access, PowerBI, etc. 

On a side note, if someone wanted to migrate their data between G Suite Drives and OneDrive/SharePoint, or anything in between check out Movebot 😉 

[Digna]

G Suite!

[mike-ward]

Tricky one! I have a hybrid approach like some others. It also changes somewhat over time... My personal opinion is:

Google Drive > OneDrive

PowerPoint > Slides (except for super simple things)

Docs > Word

Sheets > Excel (for simple things)

Excel > Sheets (for super complex things)

Gmail > Outlook (I can no longer excuse Outlook's ridiculous rendering engine; I'm so tired of having to add so much conditional rendering to marketing emails!!)

But each to their own! It's interesting to watch the 'winner' for each app swing back and forth over recent years.

Mike

[Digna]

Well said

[PamCotton]

🎉  🎉  Continuing welcoming this week new users 🎉  🎉  🎉  🎉   

I hope you find the Community a valuable place, I would like to connect you guys with other users and invite you to participate this weeks debates,  GSuite vs. Office 365: which is better?

@aagwunobi @ABertke @Tedinbos @adaly-idscan @Tedinbos  @adaly-idscan @Salesmaien , @Ashley_T , @barrettc31 @blair1 @breehemphill @brian_keating @KCLT , @cfortini @Cnichols ,  @Csmart , @colbystree , @ddamleyjones  @debbiesnewing @dennisa.

Thank you,

Pam

[ABertke]

Thank you for the invitation to participate!

GSuite and Office 365 (recently renamed to Microsoft 365) seem to have 90% similar functionality for the ways that I use these tools. The difference for me is when I need power or precision, I go with 365. 

For example, Google Sheets will choke when importing very large CSV files or spreadsheets, but Excel can open the file with no problem. Or if some layout options aren't available in Google Docs that are available in Word. 

That being said, I spend most of my time in GSuite these days due to the easy collaboration with other team members. I know that Microsoft has added some of this functionality to 365, but we're already using GSuite, so why bother switching.

[Digna]

A few of you mentioned google apps being slow for certain tasks, and not having the same power as their Microsoft counterparts.  

I've never really experienced anything like that myself, I wonder how much of that was G Suite not having equal power to Microsoft, and how much of it was because of the browser.

If ya'lls browser wasn't updated, and or overloaded with cookies/history/extensions, while also using a laptop rather than desktop then yeah I could see that 🤣🤣 all day

[emmathompson_0]

Such a good debate!

I have recently moved over to GSuite after changing employer... at the moment I still love 365 but there are some that are slowly bringing me around...

Google Drive > OneDrive

Slides > Powerpoint

Excel > Sheets

Docs > Word

Outlook > Gmail

I think moving to a Mac from a Windows doesn't help either... Still, I'm getting there!

Cheers!

[DigitalWoods]

I have recently moved over to Office 365 after using GSuite for ages.  Currently, I'm using both however, some features are hands down better in Office 365.

1. Powerpoint - I was a die-hard fan of Google Slides, but totally blown away by the web version of PowerPoint. They have an exponentially higher number of themes and a smart design suggester makes life so much easy. The app integrations ate also pretty cool.

2. Mail Exchange - The ability to create rules is so much more robust than GSuite Admin.

Everything else (Word, email, Excel, etc.) seems more or less the same. I certainly prefer Gmail over Outlook. There are a ton of Gmail extensions that are not available in Outlook...it may take some time for me to find an alternative. The 365 app store looks promising though.

Also, HubSpot integration with Outlook (web version) is such a pain. The extension is slow and often refuses to open unless the page is refreshed. I had to use the mail exchange features to auto log all emails into HubSpot.