Having an email address is like having a phone number: Once it’s in the world, you don’t want to change it.
Aside from an estimated 30% of email addresses that change each year – most of which are work emails – most people probably wouldn’t want to deal with the hassle of transferring contacts, redirecting people to new email or search every website, subscriber and bill recipient to update their email address on file.
However, sometimes people have a good reason to make the big move from one digital language to another. It could be that your email service provider is outdated and can’t keep up with modern models; Or maybe your supplier is closing and you need to find a new home.

Most people don’t really have a good concept of what’s out there and what distinguishes one email service from another. But the fact is, Microsoft Outlook and Google’s Gmail have become the two most exemplary platforms for managing what has become almost an essential aspect of life.
What makes these two email service providers better, worse, different or the same from each other? When it comes to free personal plans, the nuances between Outlook and Gmail are probably insignificant for most users. That’s why, here, we’ll focus on comparing each service’s subscription-based business plan, so you can decide which plan makes more sense for you or your company and employees.
Table of Contents
Look, feel and cost
Stay away from this. Outlook and Gmail offer very different interfaces. Simply put, Outlook maintains an enterprise feel, while Gmail offers something more creative and a bit more startup-like. If Outlook is the modern tool in corporate communication, Gmail is postmodern.
Outlook’s interface is packed with customizable options and features, many of which you or your employees will never use. While Gmail offers its own set of functions, the overall user experience is much simpler, focused on providing the essentials for efficient operation.
When it comes to buying these email services, you’re actually buying the suites they come with, Microsoft Office 365 and Google G Suite. One thing to keep in mind is that Office 365 requires an annual commitment, although you are charged a monthly fee. G Suite is purely a monthly subscription based on number of users. Here’s how to calculate this price per user per month.
Office 365 | G Suite |
Basics of Office 365 Business: $5 |
G Suite Basic: $6 |
Office 365 Business: $8.25 |
G Suite Business: $12 |
Office 365 Business Premium: $12.50 |
G Suite Enterprise: $25 |
Tools
Again, when you buy Outlook or Gmail for business, you’re actually buying more than just an email service. You are buying a toolkit, of which email is just one.
When it comes to what sets Office 365 and G Suite apart, it’s really the comparison between an incumbent and its disruptor. We’ll cover more of what makes these two suites similar and different in a future post, but here are some striking contrasting aspects.
Microsoft Office 365
We have all used Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. These are the core tenets of Office, but Office 365 offers so much more. These three programs are available online these days, not just desktop programs, making it easier to save and share the work you do in them. In addition, 365 gives you:
- Opinion for email
- A disk to store files in the cloud
- One notea digital notebook
- Points shareda corporate intranet
- Microsoft Team for instant messaging and video conferencing
Some of these applications provide extensibility capabilities that help define how businesses operate internally at digital scale. It’s a big draw that Microsoft has so successfully incorporated these tools to simplify the experience it offers businesses.

Google G Suite
While G Suite offers its own array of apps on par with Microsoft’s flagship products – more. G Suite alternatives for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are Docs, Sheets, and Slides. But G Suite offers much more than that that will be useful to any business:
- Calendar for easy group scheduling
- Electric for company-wide discussions
- Chat in Hangouts for instant messaging
- Hangouts Meet for video conferencing
- Forms to create surveys and forms
- Websites to create a website
- App Builder to create business apps
- Keep for to organize ideas
- Jamboarda digital whiteboard
- Driver for file storage and sharing
- Google Cloud Search to search on G Suite
- Admin, Vault and Mobile for secure management of users, devices, and data

Obviously, there’s a lot to consider here. Outlook packs a lot into the few powerful applications it offers. Google offers a seemingly broader array of capabilities across a number of apps, some of which Office 365 doesn’t offer at all.
Organ
When you’re in business, email is non-stop; And they’re not just a means of conversing. Email is a source of knowledge that professionals use to make business decisions, some of which are significant. If you cannot keep conversations and information prioritized and organized, it will be difficult to work efficiently at the speed of business and avoid compromising quality results.
Opinion
If you think about traditional, digital methods of organizing, you probably think of folders and files. Since digitization is essentially the process of taking tangible operations and abstracting them into digital processes, one would implicitly assume that creating email folders and files is an operational process. nature.
This is how Outlook works. It uses a traditional folder system and lets you categorize emails in those folders with colored tabs, just like you would with an expandable file. You can create as many folders and subfolders as you like. Outlook also does its best to prioritize emails by filtering out those you consider cluttered. These will go to the Clutter folder to keep you out of your mind until you’re ready to view them.

Gmail
In the description, it can be caught because there is only a slight nuance between the way Gmail and Outlook organize email; However, when actively using Gmail’s system, the organization and method of preference differ significantly.
Instead of abstracting away from the traditional “folder, file” approach, Gmail uses labels. You can tag messages with multiple labels instead of placing them in a folder.
You can customize Gmail to show Important, Unread, and Starred emails first. It can also automatically filter emails by Primary, Social, Promotional, Update and Forum. This system of sorting and prioritizing makes it really easy to identify which emails are most important to you and get to them quickly.
Despite these differences in Gmail, the cool thing is that if you’re using Gmail through another email client (such as Outlook), its label will show up as a folder. In a sense, this makes Gmail more flexible and capable of providing a more fluid user experience.

Search
Search goes hand in hand with organization when it comes to email. If you can’t find the information you need quickly and efficiently, which is likely buried in emails from months ago, you’ll be wasting precious time looking for things instead of taking action. motion.
Opinion
Outlook’s search functionality is good enough that you can search emails across all your folders, including thousands of emails in your Deleted folder, based on keywords and email addresses. The point where Outlook can sometimes fall short is accuracy.
Keyword search doesn’t always find the right email or emails, and there’s always a chance that Outlook will pull only a few selected emails from a thread, but leave out the one you need. While it works well most of the time, it certainly doesn’t use the same level of search functionality as a Google email service.
Gmail
Gmail’s search functionality is imbued with the power of Google’s search, which is also why Gmail was created in the first place: to provide an email service that works like Google’s search engine. Not only can you search with simple phrases and trust that Gmail will provide accurate results, you can also use advanced search operators like “from :,” “to :,” “shortcut :,” and many other operators can help you find exactly what you need.
Resend email
While there are a number of key features that both Gmail and Outlook offer to varying degrees of functionality, one key function that each does quite differently is email recall. The difference in performance is worth highlighting because most people, at some point, experience the stressful situation of sending the wrong email to the wrong person or sending something they shouldn’t have.
Opinion
Outlook is great for email recall and replace. As long as the email address you sent the email to is stored on Microsoft Exchange – the actual email service that Outlook runs – you can delete and replace any unread messages.
Of course, if the email is already open, you can’t recall it or replace it, but having this feature with unread messages can help you avoid confusion in the case of sending something you shouldn’t have or help you out. resend emails with a clearer explanation than sending follow-up emails clarifying an email that was sent earlier.
Gmail
Gmail here is a bit short compared to Outlook. In fact, Gmail doesn’t even offer the ability to revoke legitimate email. Instead, you have a few seconds after sending the email to cancel sending. You can turn it on or off and adjust the cancellation time to as long as 30 seconds. If you’re not fast enough, that baby will disappear.
Who is the King of Email?
When it comes to choosing which email service is best for your business, both Outlook and Gmail provide what you need, one is sometimes better than the other. Email is just the beginning.
It’s the larger systems that each belong to – Office 365 and G Suite – that really make the difference in how your business works. We’ll cover the differences between these two toolkits in an upcoming article so you can really decide what’s best for your business.