Best Email Hosting in 2024
Email has been the go-to method of electronic communication for many years, and it’s likely to remain that way for years to come. There are a lot of free email services out there, but many of them don’t have the specialized features that make them ideal for office use, like central management. With more and more people using email every day, the number of email users around the world is on the rise. If you’re looking to get more out of your free email offerings, give your team a professional email address and have some control over your company’s email communications, you’ll want to sign up for an email hosting service. Microsoft 365 is the most widely used business productivity suite, followed by Google Workspace. Both Microsoft 365 and Workspace are designed to provide a comprehensive cloud-based suite of applications and services to make communication and collaboration easier. Both are powerful, dependable and offer several advantages to businesses of any size. Therefore, choosing the right productivity suite for your business can be a daunting task. This blog will analyze the features of each of these productivity suites to help you decide which one is right for you.
Feature comparison between Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace
Both Office 365 and G Suite offer many features and functionalities in common, such as a wide range of business applications, the ability to share files and store them in the cloud, various collaboration tools like video calls and audio calls, as well as chat platforms, and the ability to set up business email using an enterprise-specific domain name. Let’s take a closer look at these features and functionalities.
Cloud Storage
Microsoft 365 OneDrive has 1TB storage space, whereas Google Drive has 30GB of storage space for its starter plans. The storage space in Google Drive is also shared with the email storage and file storage. For example, if your Google Drive subscription plan has a storage space of 30GB and your emails take up 5GB of it, then you have only 25GB of space for your files. Google Workspace offers several options to purchase additional storage space.
File Sharing
Microsoft 365, like Google Workspace, provides the ability to share files between users within your enterprise (full capabilities) and outside your enterprise (limited capabilities). But here’s the rub: unlike Microsoft, which has a Microsoft SharePoint Online (part of 265 Suite), Google has none. SharePoint Online adds extra file sharing capabilities and highly collaborative tools, while leveraging other Microsoft 365 applications. Google, on the other hand, offers Team Drives (based on Google Drive folders), which allows multiple users to share and manage their files. Unlike SharePoint, Google’s Team Drives doesn’t integrate with many intranet sites.
Both Google and Microsoft 365 provide the functionality that Microsoft 365 provides. Microsoft 365 has a robust email platform called Microsoft Outlook, which can be installed on both macOS and Windows machines. Contacts and calendars can also be managed on Google and Microsoft, but contacts and calendars are part of Outlook. In Google Workspace, the Google Contacts and the Calendar are separate applications and may take a bit more effort to manage. Microsoft Exchange Online offers many more options for email configuration in an enterprise than Google Workspace.
Conferencing Tools
Microsoft Teams is a full-featured conferencing platform with video conferencing capabilities, group chat, custom workspaces, shared team file repositories and team meeting. The overall conferencing functionality of Microsoft Teams is much more advanced than that of Google Hangout. Microsoft Teams is also integrated with many other applications like SharePoint, Outlook and OneDrive for business. Google works on the same lines with Microsoft Teams. Google has its own conferencing apps like Hangouts Meet and Google Hangouts Chat for video conferencing and messaging, respectively. These tools are integrated with other Workspace apps but have limited functionalities compared to Microsoft 365.
Editor Tools
When it comes to editing tools, the list isn’t complete without Microsoft Word. With a wide range of features and options including templates and formatting options, this is a great tool to edit text rich documents. If you are looking for infinite capabilities to work on documents with an application that can be utilized offline as well, then Microsoft Word is the right pick. In contrast to Microsoft Word, Google has an amazing functionality in the form of Google Docs where multiple users can collaborate and edit one single document in the real time.
Security
Any comparison between Office 365 and G Suite is incomplete without considering the security aspect. Both these platforms are highly concerned about the client and data security; thus all their tools and apps come with complete security features. Both platforms have multi-factor authentication to reduce the risk of an account being hacked. For higher subscription plans, there are several advanced security features. Some of the security capabilities common to both Office 365 and G Suite include role-based access control, real-time security audits, and complete data encryption.
Conclusion
Selecting a hosting email service may seem like a simple task, but making the wrong choice can have a negative impact on your email performance as well as other marketing activities. Every business is unique and so are its requirements. Therefore, we recommend that you consider your industry, your current IT environment, your inbox and attachment size needs, feature needs, and more when making your decision.