Office 365 alternatives and competitors

Our primary use case is having it as our primary sharing and collaboration tool.  

Our company is in the entertainment industry. We have lots of different departments like finance, legal, animation, sound, editing — all of that. The actual use case really depends on the department and sometimes the user. For example, I am in our tech department. If I want to share some sort of document with my team, I just put it on OneDrive. Then, if I already shared a folder, I just drop it in that folder and everyone with access to that folder gets access to that file.  

That is pretty much how everyone is doing their work and sharing their stuff. They create shared folders and they give permissions to different people as to what they can access and then they put stuff in those folders. That covers our basic use cases.  

OneDrive has improved our organization by making things faster. People do not have to use email anymore for file transfers because communications and collaborations are handled via OneDrive. Instead of sending attachments to different people, you share with different people using folders that the groups you work with have access to. You just drop in whatever you want there and people can easily access it. It all gets nicely stored in one place.  

I would say the most valuable feature is that it is a Microsoft product so it is well integrated with Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and all the other products in the Microsoft suite. In OneDrive, when you use Excel, Word, or PowerPoint it automatically manages the versioning. It is kind of how Google Sheets and Google Drive and all of those products work. Multiple people can work on a Word document at the same time because it is completely integrated and it is an online copy of that document that you do not have to physically move back-and-forth.  

Autosave is always on for everything. That is a very good feature, I feel. Another thing is OneDrive has a version history as well. If you have multiple changes to a document and Microsoft sees it as different versions then you can actually recover different versions in case something gets replaced unexpectedly. For example, if you did something in version five and then you realize that version four was better, you can actually recover that earlier versions in OneDrive.  

The integration between all Microsoft products is a key advantage to OneDrive. I would say that is probably the most valuable feature. Because it is Microsoft and everyone uses Word and Excel almost globally, it works well in sharing those documents. But regardless of if you are a Google user or Apple user, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are still 90% of what the world uses for business tasks. Because everything is integrated with Microsoft, instead of going through Google Sheet and then exporting it to an Excel file, here you just work directly in Excel. It is fewer conversions and fewer problems in that way.  

Syncing is one area that can be improved. When you click on sync on the online version, what happens is that it creates a drive on your desktop. Basically, it is like you have the online version directly on your desktop. Syncing has been an issue sometimes when there are huge folders. It might not be a huge folder in terms of space, but when there are a large number of files. When there are a lot of files, that is when the issue arises.  

For example, say you have a folder that has 200 files. When you sync it to a computer, it takes some time to load. When people start updating stuff in that same folder, it can slow down your computer because it updates you locally as well every time there is a change. That constant syncing can cause performance issues. It works fine if it is a smaller number of folders and files, but whenever there is a large number of files, that has been an issue for sure. They need to really improve on that. That is the biggest weakness of the solution, I would say. Syncing is number one.  

Another thing is when you delete stuff. You do not get a notification if you delete something online. So for example, if you are the owner of a folder and I have access to that folder and there is a file there and I delete it, it actually goes to your recycle bin. In other words, it goes to the owner's recycle bin. That is fine, but then the owner never gets a notification. So, if you have 10 files and then you notice that one is missing, you do not even know who deleted it or when it got deleted. It is residing in your recycle bin, and you can see that it is there. But you do not even know that you have to look at your recycle bin because you never got a notification. That is really a potentially huge issue with the solution. If you are a team leader and you do not know if someone is deleting your stuff, you might eventually lose something by accident.  

Another thing is permissions. There is no way to set non-delete permissions. You can be a viewer or an editor. If you are an editor, you can delete files. If you are a viewer, you can not delete files. But there is no option to remove the delete privileges from an editor. I think other companies, like Box and Dropbox, have that feature and they allow you to make it so you can edit but you do not have the ability to delete. You want people to be able to edit without deleting probably most of the time.  

I think that these are some pretty basic and fundamental things that Microsoft just does not have. But they could do even more with permissions. Just having viewing and editing permission is pretty basic, but even in Box, a person can view and edit, but not download. Or a person can view, edit, and download. The point is that there is more to do than just view and edit. There are many different options and combinations in Box that OneDrive just does not have. It is not so interesting to just have more new features. What is more important is having features that are really necessary and already exist in other competing products. That is something that I think Microsoft should strive for with OneDrive. Microsoft is probably one of the biggest companies in the world. If something like Box or Dropbox has better features than you, then you really need to look at your products and make some revisions.  

We have been using OneDrive for about six or seven months I would say.  

I do not think that OneDrive is very stable. There are a lot of bugs. For example, we were doing a file migration from Box which is what we used to use. We moved to OneDrive because we have the Microsoft license for free with Office 365. But when we did the file migrations something happened. A lot of users had files that they were sharing. There is an option where you can see who shared files with you and there is a shared tab on the online version of OneDrive. For some people, when they clicked on the shared tab, it was blank. We had to call Microsoft to fix it for them. It was a case by case scenario for some reason and it was not a global fix. It is annoying and even now we are still having issues with that as we continue to roll out the OneDrive initiative.  

There are plenty of other bugs. For example, sometimes the search does not work properly. They have a search option on the online version, but it is not a good search in general. It does not really search inside folders. When you search for something, it just searches; it does not give you the location of where the file is. You do not know which folder it was in. If you do not know the exact name of a file, it will try to search it for you because it looks up the characters. You will get the file, but that is it. It could be better.  

The use of this product will probably grow along with our company. We are a pretty big company already. We have been introducing the use of OneDrive to different locations. We are going at it location by location. Now that everyone is using it, I guess I would say the scalability is good.  

When I say everyone in our company, I mean somewhere between 1400 to 1500 people are using the product. The roles could be everything from the receptionist to a tech person, to a legal finance person, to a VP, to the CEO. It is literally everybody in the company.  

I would rate technical support as a three-out-of-ten. They are not very good. Whenever we talk to tech support, they never have the solution that they should at the tips of their fingers. This is such a big product for them, simple stuff should be something they can answer quickly. Like if you ask them why the sync is not working, they should have those solutions. We end up solving problems more quickly by ourselves.  

If we can solve it for ourselves, why do we have call tech support? They are not responsive. It is very hard to get in touch with them. Maybe that is because we did not opt for the enterprise-level tech support — we just have the basic tech support. We are considering getting enterprise support. Things might improve if we get a dedicated customer service person or a dedicated account manager. I do hope so.  

My unfiltered review is that tech support currently only deserves that three-out-of-ten, and that is it.  

We did previously use Box in our company. The reason we switched from Box was not that there was any problem with the functionality. It was just a money-driven decision. If everyone has a Microsoft license and they have OneDrive included, then why are we paying extra for a different solution? Box is enough of an expenditure that it is worth removing from the budget. We were paying for every single user license to add on functionality that we already had access to. We could work with what we already had for free. Why should we pay that additional money? It makes no sense to have two storage solutions when we could use the one that Microsoft offers. Box may have had a few more features and was more stable, but it did not really justify the additional cost.  

From my personal view, the choice was made from a functionality point-of-view, but it is more like a budget point-of-view for us as a company.  

The integration is good, but the setup is not that easy. I had to train a lot of people on how to use OneDrive. It is not like Google Drive which is pretty straightforward. There are a lot of different features in OneDrive which are both good and bad. But one of the problems is that there are actually too many things in some ways. People do not always seem to know how to use it intuitively. Even though we have been using it for six or seven months in our company, there are still people who come to me with questions about how they can do things that are relatively simple. I would say it is 50/50. If you are tech-savvy, I guess it is a little easier. But for new users who have never used something like OneDrive and who are used to the ease-of-use of something like Google Drive, it is just different and there is a learning curve. I would give it a five-out-of-ten for the setup.  

If they fixed all the little things, it could be a great product. It pretty much is a great product already. The integrations are still good. Initially I was really amazed. But then I got to know its many bugs and glitches and I have to take a global view of the solution. I was the main point of implementation on this, so I have been involved with the OneDrive implementation from start to finish. I know everything that has been in the product, outside of the product, limitations, trends, how people are looking at OneDrive, how they are they using it — everything.  

For other people looking to OneDrive as a solution, I would suggest it if people already use other Microsoft products like Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. If I was making a recommendation for a friend of mine for personal use, the one advantage of OneDrive is they give you one terabyte of space. That is more than any of the other products of this type will give you. That is by default. If you pay for $10 a month — the normal Microsoft personal home license — you get OneDrive included and one terabyte of storage, which is a lot of space. With Google Drive, they do not give you nearly that much. I think Google Drive gives you 50 gigs of space. I do not remember exactly, but it was not that much, storage-wise.  

The other thing I would say is for professionals or big companies is that if they are using Excel, Word, PowerPoint, other Microsoft solutions a lot, then OneDrive makes perfect sense. It is integrated so well with typical office productivity tools that they should not even consider any other solution like Google Drive. This is the best-integrated solution for all of them. It makes it very easy to collaborate. Just look past the glitches until they fix all of them. Then it will clearly be the better solution.  

So, that is my advice. The negatives are there, yes. Microsoft tech support is terrible — everyone knows that. If you do have issues, then you might have to wait two or three weeks before it gets solved — and there are some nagging issues that have not been solved at all. Microsoft acknowledges a few things as just being a flaw in the product and they say they are going to have to fix it, but they do not seem to be in a rush to take care of anything.  

Before I used OneDrive, I have to admit that I was very anti-Microsoft. But right now, I do appreciate what they have been doing. In terms of collaboration, Google has always owned that area of the market. With Google Drive, Google Sheets, Google Slides and all, they own the online collaboration arena. But now Microsoft really is improving to such an extent that they could actually compete with Google and maybe they will end up surpassing them. They have an advantage in that Excel and Word and PowerPoint are just more powerful and mature than whatever Google has right now.  

If you have some patience and you can stomach through the initial growing pains of the Microsoft bugs, then I would certainly recommend this product. I would actually suggest that this should be the product that everyone should use for sharing and collaboration. It is hard to love OneDrive right now. You will probably like it more than you love it. If you call me in a year's time, I might just have to say that everything in OneDrive is great now.  

But right now, on a scale of one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate it a six-point-five out of ten. It really is not even a seven yet just because of the overall experience and the missing features.  

I am not a technical person, I am from the sales side and more on the commercial side of things. Our company is in Mozambique and we are the main Dell EMC repair center and service provider.  

My main use case for Office 365 is really to type documents with Word, to prepare presentations with the PowerPoint, and also to do spreadsheets with Excel. The product in the suite that I use the most is Word. PowerPoint and Excel to a somewhat lesser extent. But I do use all three frequently.  

We also resell the product so we do deployments for our customers as well.  

With Office, the interface is now more user-friendly than the previous versions of Microsoft Office. The functionality and ability to work offline are also great. There are more helpful tools in the interfacer now. For example, if you are working with Excel and you are typing a formula, Office 365 gives you tips as you work if you do something wrong. It will identify what is wrong and then you can apply the corrections. Things like that make the product more intuitive and helpful. The previous version did not have that kind of help to this extent. So, the most valuable features are the ability to work offline, the ability to have tips when writing formulas, and the improved more user-friendly interface.  

I believe one thing I enjoy more about the experience of using the product is that it now the basic features that I use most frequently are easier to find, access, and manage. This helps to make my work easier and speed up productivity.  

Microsoft could still work on the bandwidth used with Office 365. It does not seem to behave the same depending on the networks that I am working on. Sometimes I can tell the program uses more or less bandwidth and actually measure the difference. I believe that this can be enhanced to be independent of the network that I am working on. The bandwidth consumption should always be about the same.  

Some features of specific products could be more user-friendly. For instance, in Excel, some functionalities like the Pivot tables are not always so easy to use. Right now if you want to create a new formula, you need to have some knowledge about programming in Visual Basic. It does not seem to me that this should be a requirement. So you can type a command and then set up a new formula that is not listed on standard functions supplied with Excel. For users who do not understand the basics of programming and VBA, that really becomes an impossible mission. They may know that they can create a formula and what they might want it to do but they do not know how to do it. So if they do not find the formula in what is provided, then they really have to forget using Excel for that type of solution. If they knew how to do the programming they can do virtually anything through Excel, but they need to have the ability to do the programming and develop the formula. It does not really have to be that way. Microsoft could expand those capabilities.  

One final issue we have has to do with the backups. Microsoft does not assure the backups of the information that you store at their data centers. So besides deploying Office 365 as a solution, you also need a backup solution specifically for Office 365 on the cloud. We definitely recommend Office 365, but unfortunately in our country — specifically for the public companies — it is not easy to sell because we have some strict policies and regulations regarding data. Public companies cannot store information outside of the country. So, since Microsoft Office 365 is a Cloud product some public companies can not go for that option. They still have to work with previous versions of the product. Private sector companies do not have this type of restriction. We can only recommend the product when interested customers can do it within the proper guidelines.  

I have been using Office 365 for about one year now.  

Office 365 is a stable product. Besides the issues with the bandwidth use where sometimes the product uses more bandwidth depending on the network, it performs well and it is very stable and very reliable.  

We have done sales and installations for SMBs (Small and Medium-sized Businesses) as well as for enterprise companies. The issues with scalability would be budget and Internet bandwidth. If the money is there it is not an issue.  

My technicians deal with Microsoft support if they have to. Mostly they will take care of issues themselves. They have a dedicated contact and a direct portal for support purposes. So that is great. If a technician needs to open a ticket for a customer, the technician can open himself and go straight to the support portal to log the tickets and carry on from there. In terms of response time, I am not exactly sure because I am not directly involved.  

Previously, I was using Microsoft on a version from 2016. So it really is not a complete switch of products as it is still the Microsoft solution. It is just a newer version.  

I do not think the installation was easy but that is because we have around a hundred users. I did not manage the installation, but I heard from the technical guys that it is generally easier than the previous versions. We signed an enterprise agreement with Microsoft. With that, we got the keys and we got the centralized management panel from where we deploy the Office on all the endpoints. So this made it easier. For the previous versions, the technical guy had to go to each user machine to make the installation through a compact disc. But with volume licensing installation is centralized and the IT manager deployed remotely to the endpoints.  

We handle the setup and the deployment in house. We have a separate team with more-or-less 30 technicians. Some of them are specifically certified on Microsoft products through the partnership that we have with Microsoft. So, depending on the infrastructure that our customer has, we can send out as many as three technicians if it is to be deployed for say 200 users. When we need to do a mailbox migration, most of them have to be migrated at the same time. In that case, we allocate two to three technicians to do it as quickly as possible. If we are talking about enterprise companies with 1000 users — depending on what the customer requires in terms of delivery time — we might allocate as many as 20 guys. It is more likely we will allocate 10 guys. It basically depends on the customer's requirements.  

The pricing for the product is a bit of a tricky question. In terms of the total cost of ownership, I can say that it is expensive. It is a fair price, but in our country or another country with economies similar to  Mozambique, the pricing structure may be a little high and prohibitive. The first issue is the volatility of the exchange rate because our currency, the Metical, is very volatile related to the dollar. The problem here is the customer has an agreement and when he realized that he wants to add some other applications or services or something else, he has the expectation of price based on what he signed on the first agreement. But when he sees the new price, it could become a lot higher than expected because of the exchange rate. It would be nice if somehow Microsoft had some flexibility with the initial agreement so that pricing would not fluctuate dramatically because of the exchange rate.  

Another thing that factors into the pricing is that the Internet connection and Internet bandwidth is still very expensive here in Mozambique. So it is not always an easy decision to make the migration to Office 365 due to these two variables.  

I recommend the Microsoft Office 365 product to clients. We are able to do proofs-of-concept with clients who are interested and carry forward from there.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Microsoft Office 365 as eight-and-a-half.  

Our primary use case is mostly collaboration. We use it for document sharing and things of that nature.  

I would say the collaborative part of the product is the most valuable. You can just send a link to to content to other people. You can get stuff done in one place and keep it centralized rather than attaching documents into a emails. Working this way just makes the job function a little bit easier.  

The product has a lot of room for improvement. A lot. The UIs are really clunky and Microsoft needs to fix that. Their access control is horrible and they need to fix that as well. I think overall that the look-and-feel and usability are really 10 years old. They have not done anything to improve and update it over that time. It is a good product. But updating it is definitely something they should look into. I do not know what their strategy is for lagging with the redesign of that.  

It needs better usability and enhanced features. I think SharePoint does allow you to create websites, but if you compare it with the other providers like even Google sites or Google pages, those solutions make it so much easier to create those pages. SharePoint is not up to speed on that functionality. I think that is something they can probably easily do.  

We have been using SharePoint for a pretty long time. It has been around somewhere between five and ten years.  

I think the stability of SharePoint is okay and not all too bad. If you compare it to Outlook —which I think is still not as stable as it should be after all this time — SharePoint is fine by comparison. Stability is generally not an issue.  

I would not know about scalability directly because I use the product and I am not involved in scaling the usage.  

I know that we have about 100,000 people in our company using the solution, and many of those will be using it on a daily basis. Certainly, it can handle high volume.  

I do not know if we have any plans on increasing the usage of Office SharePoint Server. I am not an IT person and I am not involved in that area of planning. Somebody else does everything to maintain the product and then I just use it for my document management.  

I do not really have the type of position where I would be contacting support over any issues I have with SharePoint. I know that Microsoft does not really have impressive support.  

When it comes to the installation, Microsoft has made that fast and efficient. You really do not have to do anything special to get going with the product. Everything is browser-based.  

I think we have a corporate license for SharePoint. We have a special arrangement with Microsoft because we are a reseller for pretty much most of the Microsoft products. Whatever our pricing is will probably not be like the standard model.  

I think SharePoint is a good tool. This is especially true if you are in the Microsoft ecosystem — as in being an Office 365 user — then SharePoint is definitely something you should look at as a solution for collaboration and file sharing. It is well integrated within the Office suite.  

They also have a thing called Microsoft Teams. I do not know how they are planning to use both these solutions in the field because Microsoft Teams also does quite a bit of the same stuff that SharePoint does. There is a lot of overlap.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate Office SharePoint Server somewhere in the middle of the pack for products like it. It is definitely not the worst, but it is also definitely not the best.  

I would only give it only a four-out-of-ten because I really think they need to make a significant effort to bring it up to par.  

We have different use cases. We have a set of people, like the executives and recruiters, who use G Suite for documentation, email, and everything. There is a separate set of people, like the leadership team, who use it just for emails. We also use Google Meet for team meetings. All our laptops are getting backed up to Google Drive. Google has covered everything in one shot.

Being able to back up our data on Google Drive is a critical and valuable feature for our customers. It is just in sync. Imagine you change a file on the desktop, and it gets updated directly to your Google Drive. Our laptop is completely in sync with Google Drive. 

Google Meet, Google Sheets, and Google Docs are also amazing products. They're very versatile and easy to use as compared to Office 365. I am using Google Sheets and Google Docs, which first save the work on my memory or ROM, and then on my RAM. It gives me better productivity through Google Sheets and Google Docs.

There could be more options in Google G Suite. They can include HD calling for Google Meet.

The layout portion in the calendar for Google G Suite can be better designed. When we get into the calendar and start scheduling meetings, we do have few hiccups here and there. The layout can be a little easier. People from different backgrounds are finding it a little bit tough to understand. It should be more intuitive. At the moment, it has a completely white background. To do power saving, it would be good if they can release a darker background.

There are a few issues with the formatting of Google Docs when they get converted to Microsoft docs. It would be amazing if they can resolve it in the next release.

I have been using this solution for the past three years.

It is stable and reliable.

It is scalable. Scalability is the main feature of G Suite. We have somewhere close to 900 to 1,500 users who use it on a daily basis.

I haven't contacted them. I'm an ISM, and my IT team was responsible for handling the hiccups that happened 45 days ago. When the server was down, they were in touch with the technical team.

I didn't find it complex.

I deployed it on my own. It is maintained on its own in the cloud.

Being an ISM, I regularly audit the logs for the G Suite to find out if we have any kind of hiccups. Around 45 days back, our server went down for almost eight hours. I could figure out through the logs why it was down and what was happening. It is not much work when it comes to the maintenance of G Suite.

I had started doing research from my side about what is G Suite and what other options we have for an enterprise solution. Coming from an IT background, it took me a day or so to understand what G Suite is. It did not take me long.

From information security, that is, confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA) as well as stability and reliability point of view, G Suite is the product to go for. 

I would rate G Suite Enterprise a nine out of ten.