Google Drive (also known as G Suite) and Microsoft Office 365 are both powerful tools that enable businesses and individuals to be more productive. Both providers allow users to have work completed and stored in the cloud.

They enable businesses to save on space as fewer computers and servers are on the premises. Saving on money and other related computer expenses, users can communicate easily and remotely access their work from anywhere with these services.

With both being two powerful products, businesses need to know which is the best for their situation. Here are some considerations to take before choosing which suits your needs best.

Pricing

Google Drive business suite offers three pricing levels:

• Basic: Costing $5 per user/month and providing 30GB of storage space
• Business: $10 per user/month with unlimited storage & enhanced suite
• Enterprise: $25 per user/month with unlimited storage & premium suite

Comparatively, Office 365 also has three distinct pricing categories suited for different business classifications. Each category includes 1 TB of storage space.

• Essentials: $6 per user/month
• Business: $10 per user/month
• Premium: $15 per user/month

Unlike Google Drive’s G Suite, Office 365 expects customers to pay annually rather than monthly for its services.

File Storage Space

At the different price points of each product offering, users are provided with different storage space capacity. At the cheapest of each category, Google Drive only provides 30GB of storage capacity while Office 365 provides 1TB of storage capacity.

When you move to the other categories, Google Drive provides unlimited storage capacity to every user of the product while Office 365 provides 1TB storage capacity and an additional 50GB for email storage.

Usability Apps

Businesses will choose whichever of the two tools is most compatible with their needs. Here, Office 365 contains the Microsoft Office Suite of applications such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint – the most common office application tools.

Google Drive’s G Suite also has an equivalent to these applications, but most people are familiar with Microsoft products already. Their comparative offerings are Docs, Sheets, and Slides respectively.

Collaboration

With these two business tools allowing for remote working, how then will colleagues work as a team? Each of these two tools has apps and capabilities that lead to enhanced collaboration. With G Suite, it’s very easy for colleagues to communicate via face to face, SMS, or email. This is done through the Google Hangouts app which allows for text and video communications between team members, wherever they may be. In addition, colleagues could work on the same document by creating notes and comments on it, leading to increased teamwork.

Office 365 on the other hand allows for collaboration with team members to create changes, make notes, and comment on a single document. For communication, it uses Skype for both video and text communication.