Office 365 by Microsoft and G Suite by Google are two of the most popular cloud-based solutions for email, file storage, document editing and work collaboration. Both are essentially portable offices that you and your employees can access from anywhere. In some cases, you can even use one suite to open and edit a file created with the other suite — but that doesn’t mean Microsoft Office 365 and G Suite are the same. Let’s examine how the two suites differ and learn more about what might lead your business to choose one over the other.

Price Structure

Between Microsoft Office 365 and G Suite, G Suite has the simpler price structure. For the business version of G Suite, you’ll pay $10 per month for each user who accesses the service. Microsoft Office 365 has three business versions and four enterprise versions available. The monthly fee per user ranges from $5-$35, and each version has a slightly different selection of applications and features.

What’s Included

Microsoft Office 365 and G Suite include many of the same core features. Those include:

Email hosting

Cloud storage

Productivity applications for creating and editing documents

Communication applications for collaboration, voice calls, video conferencing and chatting

Although the two services’ feature sets largely match, Microsoft Office 365 does have two applications — the Access database application and the Publisher desktop publishing application — for which G Suite has no equivalent.

Familiarity and Integration

For more than two decades, Microsoft has largely set the standard in office software. If your employees already use a desktop version of Microsoft Office, they’ll likely appreciate the familiar interface of Microsoft Office 365. If the computers in your office run Windows, Microsoft Office 365 also provides a benefit in that many of its features integrate easily with Windows. For example, Windows has the built-in ability to synchronize a folder with Microsoft OneDrive.

Collaborative Features

One of the most important features that separates a cloud-based office suite from a desktop office suite is the ability to collaborate easily with coworkers. Microsoft Office 365 allows multiple people to work on the same document simultaneously. Each person sees the changes that others have made. If someone has a question, he or she can open a real-time chat session.

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