Productivity tools have become an essential tool for businesses, allowing for seamless collaboration and communication between employees, a significant improvement in productivity and efficiency, and better organization. Google’s G Suite and Microsoft Office 365 stand head and shoulders above other productivity solutions in popularity, with each consistently trying to one-up the other through innovations and improvements. At first glance, it can be difficult for businesses to decide which of these tools suits the needs of their organization. By looking at everything from collaboration and productivity to security and machine learning features, you’ll be better able to determine which solution is worthy of your time and money.

Collaboration and communication

One of the key advantages of productivity tools is the ability for teams to instantly communicate and collaborate with each other, using any device and working from any location. This gives businesses the freedom to host remote work teams without worrying that employees will fall behind or that they won’t be able to contribute to projects.

G Suite was built from the ground up as a cloud-based solution, boasting seamless collaboration and communication features from day one. G Suite apps like Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms can be used simultaneously by employees, who can view, share, edit, comment, and work within them from anywhere. G Suite’s version history feature lets users easily track changes made to documents, indicating who edited and accessed files at what time and date, and allows them to revert back to previous versions with the click of a button. On the communication side of things, employees can make audio and video calls through the versatile Hangouts Meet app, which is also built for reliable conferencing.

Taking a note from the success of G Suite, Office 365 has adopted a number of collaboration features, letting users edit, comment, and work within files from any location and any trusted device. Unlike G Suite, Office 365 is something of a retrofit, starting its life as Microsoft Office but being upgraded to be cloud-based. This means that Office 365 functions less smoothly than G Suite – oftentimes, non-Office 365 users will not be able to access links to documents created in the solution, even when shared directly to them. Skype for Business is Office 365’s communication tool, though, unlike Hangouts Meet, the app isn’t available in a number of subscription plans, and a Skype number is required for Skype-to-phone calls.

G Suite: A Leader in Machine learning and AI features

Applied artificial intelligence and machine learning features are the future, designed to increase employee productivity and efficiency by eliminating time-consuming manual tasks. Common examples include autofilling search queries and emails, and detecting grammatical errors, learning style and habits of employees to continually improve accuracy and effectiveness.

Google is an industry leader when it comes to machine learning and AI design and implementation – these innovations have greatly influenced G Suite. The solution has added intelligent features including Smart Reply and Smart Compose to Gmail, making it easy to reply to efficiently reply to lower priority messages. Applied AI features decline Calendar invitations when they fall outside of established office time, ensuring that team members can maintain a healthy work-life balance.

Office 365 boasts features similar to Smart Reply, letting users choose from suggested replies to quickly send out emails. O365 also features machine learning inbox decluttering, helping to keep inboxes organized. Unfortunately, Office 365 has yet to implement many of the machine learning and AI features seen in G Suite, placing it significantly further behind its competition.

Security of your business data

Your business data is of the utmost importance, making it imperative that data stored in a secure and reliable location where bad actors can’t access it. It’s also important for your employees to have access to an email client that can proactively identify incoming phishing scams and malware threats to ensure that accounts aren’t compromised.

Security is one of the areas where G Suite truly shines, adding a bevvy of new features in the last year, including an admin security center, as well as proactive email security that can identify incoming threats, self-destruct or password protect emails, and much more. Using the admin security center allows your business to block incoming threats, enforce company-wide security guidelines, identify compromised user accounts and devices, and the option to store data in specific geographic locations.

While Office 365 has taken security very seriously since its inception, third-party integrations are often needed to make the solution viable for everyday use. Anti-phishing and anti-spam filters exist to identify and eliminate threats, though other useful features like self-destructing emails have yet to be implemented. In addition to lacking some of the important security features found in G Suite, the security measures available in Office 365 simply aren’t as intuitive or versatile in comparison.

ion8 is an all-in-one agency with a full team of experts who are ready to properly implement and integrate G Suite and other solutions throughout your entire organization. Our team will ensure that your experience is tailored to better suit your business, integrating it with solutions that will get you the most out of your digital marketing strategy. For more information about what ion8 can do for your business, contact us today.