An email address is like a phone number: when it appears in the world, you won’t want to change it.
Aside from the roughly 30% email addresses that change every year – most of which are business addresses – most people probably won’t want to face the challenges of transferring contacts, redirecting people to a new email address, or finding each site, sign up and recipient accounts to update your email address in the file.
However, sometimes people have compelling reasons to massively move from one digital region to another. Perhaps your email provider is outdated and not keeping up with modern designs; or perhaps your provider is closing the shutters and you need to find a new home.
Most people don’t really have a clear idea of ??what is and what makes one email service different from another. But the fact is, Microsoft Outlook and Google Gmail have become two of the most exemplary platforms for managing what has almost become an important aspect of life.
What makes these two email providers better, worse, different, or the same compared to each other? When it comes to free personal plans, the nuances between Outlook and Gmail are probably irrelevant for most users. That’s why here we’ll focus on comparing the subscription-based business plan for each service so you can decide which one is best for you, your company and your employees.
See, feel and cost
Let’s get rid of this. Outlook and Gmail offer very different interfaces. To put it simply, Outlook maintains a corporate identity, while Gmail offers something more creative and innovative. If Outlook is the modern take on corporate communications, Gmail is postmodern.
Outlook’s interface is filled with options and customizable features, many of which you or your employees will never use. While Gmail offers its own set of features, overall it’s a much simpler user interface focused on providing everything you need to work effectively.
When it comes to buying these email services, you are actually buying the bundles that include them: Microsoft Office 365 and Google G Suite Keep in mind that Office 365 requires an annual commitment, although you pay monthly. G Suite is a purely monthly subscription plan based on headcount. Here is their cost per user per month.
| Office 365 | G Suite |
| Office 365 Business Essentials: $ 5 | G Suite Basic: $ 6 |
| Office 365 Business: $ 8.25 | G Suite Business: $ 12 |
| Office 365 Business Premium: $ 12.50 | G Suite Enterprise: $ 25 |
Toolkit
Then again, when you buy Outlook or Gmail for business, you are really buying more than just an email service. You buy a set of tools, one of which is email.
When it comes to what separates Office 365 from G Suite, it’s actually a comparison between the incumbent and the offender. In the next article we’ll take a closer look at what makes these two packages the same and different, but here are some of the distinguishing aspects.
Microsoft Office 365
We’ve all used Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. These are the foundations of Office, but Office 365 offers even more. Today, these three programs are available online, not just desktop, making it easy to save and distribute your work. In addition, 365 gives you:
- Outlook for email
- OneDrive for cloud file storage
- OneNote digital notebook
- SharePoint, corporate intranet
- Microsoft Teams for instant messaging and video conferencing.
These few applications offer vast capabilities that shape the way companies work internally digitally. The huge benefit is that Microsoft has successfully combined so much in these tools to simplify the work it offers companies.
Google G Suite
G Suite offers its own set of applications that rival the mainstream Microsoft products, and much more. In G Suite, you can use Docs, Sheets, and Slides instead of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. But G Suite offers even more that would be useful for any business:
- Calendar for easy team planning.
- Ongoing company-wide discussions
- Hangouts Chat for instant messaging
- Hangouts Meet for video conferencing
- Forms for creating polls and forms
- Websites to build websites
- Application Builder to build a business application
- Keep to organize ideas.
- Jamboard, digital whiteboard.
- Drive for storing and sharing files.
- Google Cloud Search for G Suite Search
- Admin, Vault and Mobile for secure user, device and data management.
It is clear that there is something to consider here. Outlook bundles a lot in the few yet robust applications that it offers. Google offers a much broader range of capabilities spread across multiple apps, some of which Office 365 doesn’t offer at all.
organisation
When you are in business, emails go on continuously; and they are more than just communication tools. Emails are vessels of knowledge that professionals use to make business decisions, some of which are critical. If you are unable to streamline and streamline conversations and information, it will be difficult to operate efficiently and effectively, keeping up with the pace of the business, and avoiding compromising on the quality of the results.
Outlook
If you’re thinking about traditional, pre-digital methods of organizing, folders and files probably come to mind. Since digitization is essentially the process of transforming real actions and abstracting them into digital processes, it is natural to assume that creating email folders and files is a natural way of doing things.
This is how Outlook works. It uses the traditional folder system and allows you to categorize emails in those folders using colored tabs, just like with an expandable file. You can create as many folders and subfolders as you like. Outlook also does its best to prioritize your email by filtering out the ones that you find cluttered. They go to the Clutter folder so they don’t get in your way until you are ready to view them.
Gmail
In the description, this might seem like a minor nuance between how Gmail and Outlook organize email; however, with active use of Gmail, the organization and method of prioritization differ markedly.
Rather than abstracting from the traditional folder-file method, Gmail uses shortcuts. You can tag messages with multiple labels instead of putting them in a folder.
You can set up Gmail to show important, unread, and flagged emails first. It can also automatically filter emails by main, social, promotions, updates and forums. This prioritization and organization system makes it very easy to determine which emails are most important to you and get to them quickly.
Despite these differences in Gmail, interestingly, if you use Gmail through another email client (such as Outlook), its labels will appear as folders. In a way, this makes Gmail more versatile and capable of providing a more flexible user experience.
Search
When it comes to email, search goes hand in hand with organization. If you can’t quickly and efficiently find the information you are looking for, which is potentially hidden in an email received several months ago, you will end up wasting valuable time looking for things instead of taking action.
Outlook
Outlook’s search feature is good enough in that you can search emails in all of your folders, including thousands of emails in your Deleted Items folder, based on your keyword and email address. What Outlook can sometimes lack is exactly.
Keyword searches do not always display the correct email address or emails, and there is always the possibility that Outlook will only find a select few of the email messages in the thread, but leave the one email you want. While it works well most of the time, it certainly doesn’t use the same level of search functionality as Google’s email service.
Gmail
Gmail search functionality is blessed with Google search capabilities. This is why Gmail was created in the first place: to provide email that works like a Google search engine. Not only can you search for simple queries and be sure that Gmail will provide the correct results, but you can also use advanced search operators such as “from:”, “to:”, “shortcut:” and others to help you find exactly what you need.
Email call
While Gmail and Outlook provide several key features in varying degrees of granularity, one of the primary features each performs is email recall. The difference in work is worth highlighting because most people get nervous at some point when they send the wrong email to the wrong person or send something that they shouldn’t be at all.
Outlook
Outlook is great for revocation and replacements. As long as the email address you sent the email to is hosted in Microsoft Exchange – the actual Outlook mail service is running – you have the option to delete and replace any unread message.
Of course, if an email has already been opened, you can’t remember or replace it, but having this option with unread messages can save you the embarrassment of sending something that you shouldn’t, or help you resend a better email with additional clarifications, and not sending subsequent letters clarifying one of the previous ones.
Gmail
Gmail is slightly inferior to Outlook here. In fact, Gmail doesn’t even support legitimate email revocation. Instead, you have a few seconds after sending the email to cancel sending. You can turn it on or off and set the undo time up to 30 seconds. If you don’t hurry, the baby will be gone forever.
Who is the king of e-mail?
When it comes to choosing which email service is best for your business, Outlook and Gmail offer what you need, sometimes better than the other. Email is just the beginning.
Each of the larger systems – Office 365 and G Suite – truly impacts how your business operates. We’ll cover the differences between these two toolkits in the next article so you can really decide what’s best for your business.
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