Gartner reported that Microsoft had 87.5% of market share for office suite software in 2018, with Google owning only 10.4% of the market share. If you’re a G Suite user, you may be wondering why—and contemplating a switch.
Microsoft Office 365 and G Suite offer a lot of similar productivity capabilities. It’s often attractive to use G Suite for small companies, but as these companies grow, there often comes a time when this flips, and Office 365 becomes the most cost-effective option.
While G Suite offers great functionality and collaborative tools for smaller organizations, larger organizations often need a higher level of functionality to support their operations than they can achieve with G Suite. To gain that functionality, they might have to add on third-party vendor services to G Suite, driving up the true per-user cost.
According to 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrants, Microsoft came ahead of Google as a leader and outperformed Google in the meeting solutions, enterprise information archiving and content collaboration categories. And many of the applications that you would have to add on through a third-party vendor with G Suite are available through Microsoft Office 365 as part of your per-user cost.
Having these applications under one umbrella reduces redundancies and extra costs across your cloud services. This saves many companies a substantial amount of money when they switch. Plus, these streamlined and synchronized applications have the added benefit of creating enhanced, convenient experiences for admins and users.
Could your organization experience cost savings by switching to Microsoft Office 365? And what are other benefits of the product? For many businesses that make the switch, the results are:
- Reduced monthly spending for cloud services
- Less redundancy in applications
- Fewer or no third-party vendors
- Added functionalities like Power Apps
- Enhanced functionalities
- More frequent updates
To get a look at these potential benefits in action, here’s a comparison of G Suite vs Microsoft Office 365 based on an actual company’s current and potential subscription options:
Microsoft Office 365 Cost Savings Example
Recently, a company we’ve been working with was spending $65,000 per month, for 800 users, on G Suite licensing and the additional services they needed to achieve their required functionality. Columbus proposed moving them to select Office 365 licensing options that would reduce their monthly license costs to $20,250. Even incorporating assumed migration costs, the assumed payback period for this move would be less than a quarter. Their monthly ongoing savings would be an estimated $44,750 with an annual post-migration savings of $537,000 per year.
This company can also take advantage of FastTrack for their migration services. Microsoft offers FastTrack to companies that have organization sizes larger than 500. This service provides remote assistance, documentation, software tools, admin consoles and scripts for migration at no cost. Columbus is available to support businesses across all stages of their rollout, supplementing the FastTrack benefit.
Potential ROI with Microsoft Office 365
- Current Cost with G Suite and Add-ons: $65,000/month
- License Cost with Microsoft Office 365: $20,250/month
- Ongoing monthly savings: $44,750
G Suite vs Office 365 Comparison Chart
In doing this switch, the example company will be able to perform the same functions within Microsoft’s comparable apps—and more. They can drop several third-party vendor services for things like security or single sign-on providers and fold them into their monthly cost for Microsoft Office 365. They also get the added benefit of Microsoft applications like Power Apps. Here is a direct breakdown of the comparable applications:
Microsoft Office 365: Features and Benefits
According to Microsoft’s eBook Seize the Power of the Cloud: 7 reasons to switch to Microsoft 365, the top reasons to switch to Microsoft 365 from any other solution are:
- Easy and intuitive Office 365 collaboration tools with automatic backups
- Secure file sharing with secure links for controlling access/permissions and viewing version histories
- Ability to use Office 365 apps on both desktop and mobile with superb security management and protection
- Machine learning-enabled efficiencies like data insights and suggestions for functions like meeting times and PowerPoint designs
- Agility of Microsoft Teams, which improves efficiency and productivity for employees, allowing for collaboration, chat, video meetings and file sharing
- Built-in advanced threat protection for data on all devices to protect data and guard against cyber threats
- Capabilities to help safeguard data to comply with General Data Protection Regulation and other global, regional and industry-specific regulations
At Columbus, we have the expertise to help you evaluate your options and determine whether switching to Microsoft Office 365 is the right move for your business. We can help you build out the applications that you truly need, eliminating redundancies and providing more cohesive experiences for both admins and users, so that you can make a direct comparison to your current solutions. In our experience, companies often discover that Microsoft products are far more accessible than they anticipated.
