Microsoft 365 vs Google Workspace
The two subscriptions almost every organisation ends up choosing between, and the choice is less about features than about where a document is supposed to live.
We make competing software. Rutba Office is a free office suite, so we have an interest in this comparison and you should read it knowing that. Neither product below is ours. There is a short section about ours at the end, marked as such, and it only addresses things this page actually examined.
The decision
What you are actually choosing between
Whether your documents are files that people send each other, or places that people work in together. Nearly everything else about this decision follows from that.
Head to head
Where they genuinely differ
| Microsoft 365 | Google Workspace | |
|---|---|---|
| What a document is | A file. It has a format, it lives somewhere, and you can hand it over and be finished with it. | A place. It has a URL and a permission list, and handing it over means granting access. |
| Desktop applications | Full desktop apps with decades of features, and web versions that are a subset of them. | Browser-first. There are offline modes; the browser is where the product lives. |
| Collaboration | Real co-authoring, and genuinely good — arrived later and carries more of the file-based model with it. | The thing it was built for, and still the smoother of the two when several people are in one document. |
| File formats | It defines them. A .docx is right by definition when Word renders it. | Converts on import and export. A round trip through Docs is a round trip through a conversion. |
| Working offline | Fully, in the desktop applications. | Partly, for recent documents, with setup. |
| What you are actually buying | Applications, with storage and mail alongside them. | A workspace, with editors inside it. |
Choose Microsoft 365 if
- Your work depends on desktop depth — pivot tables, VBA, mail merge, add-ins, or anything an analyst built in 2014 and still runs
- You exchange files with organisations that will open them in Word and Excel, and the formatting has to survive
- Regulated or offline environments where the applications must work without a connection
- You already run Windows estate management and identity through Microsoft
Choose Google Workspace if
- Most documents are worked on by more than one person at once
- You would rather administer a browser than a fleet of installed applications
- Your team is on mixed hardware, including Chromebooks and tablets
- Search across everything one identity can see is worth more to you than editor depth
Our own product, and we said so at the top
Where Rutba Office fits
We are on the file side of that question, deliberately
A document here is a file on your disk in the Microsoft format, opened and saved without a conversion step in either direction. If the row above that decided your choice was "what a document is", and your answer was "a file", that is the same answer this suite gives.
And we do not compete on collaboration at all
Neither co-authoring nor a shared workspace exists here. If that row is the one that decides it for you — and for many teams it should — nothing on this page is arguing otherwise.
Offline, without the subscription
On the "working offline" row we are at the Microsoft end without the licence: every app works with the network switched off, and there is no account, no renewal and no seat to lose access to.
Model-level descriptions from each vendor’s published licensing and product structure, as of 8 September 2026. No competitor prices appear on this page.
Or take the free one and decide later
It installs beside whatever you use now and costs nothing to try.