Office 365 Education vs Google Apps Education: A Comparative Picture

Cloud-based productivity suites are currently enjoying enormous popularity. Though these suites are commonly used by business organizations, a large number of educational institutes are also subscribers to these suites. As the requirement of a business organization and an educational institution is the polar opposite, productivity Suite providers came up with customized suites for the educational institutes. Two of the major names in the cloud-based field, Microsoft and Google, have introduced separate plans for the education sector. In this post, we have chosen to talk about Office 365 education Vs Google Apps education. Continue reading to know in which aspects O365 education and G Suite for education differs.

Difference Between Office 365 Education and Google Apps Education

The main difference between these two education suites is that they are the products of different enterprises. However, they are different in various other dimensions too. In this section, we will describe the differences.

1. Price: The basic package of Office 365 Education (also known as Office 365 A1) is available without any cost. However, the cost of two other Education plans named E3 and E5 ranges from $2.50 to $8.00 per user/ month. Google Apps Education plan is completely free of cost for all types of educational institutes if they fulfill the terms and conditions.
2. Documents: Student life seems impossible without documents. Office 365 Education offers MS Word Online for editing and documentation while you will have Google Docs in G Apps Education. These applications ease the process of real-time online editing for both teachers and students. As a result, the same document can be edited by students and their teachers simultaneously. For spreadsheets, Office 365 Education provides MS Excel and G Apps Education offers Google Sheets applications.
3. Presentation: Presentation has become an indispensable part in the education sector. From teachers to students to administrative officers, everyone needs to do the presentation at one time or another. Office 365 Education users get PowerPoint as a part of their plan. Apart from this, Microsoft also released an add-on named “Mix for teachers.” It allows teachers to create videos out of their presentation slides. Teachers can later share this video easily with the students. G Suite Education offers Google Slides that can be used to create Presentation slides.
4. Website Creation: If website creation is a part of the student curriculum, users of these services do not need to take the aid of any external sources. Office 365 Education subscribers can create SharePoint sites but it has some limitations. On the other hand, Google Sites offers students to create a real website. It also has a drag and drop interface, which provides convenience to its users.
5. Data Collection: Students and teachers often need to collect data and perform surveys as part of their academic activity. All these can be done smoothly by Google Forms and Office 365 Forms. Using these applications, the Education plan subscribers of both providers can create various quizzes, surveys, and tests. The responses get collected in a spreadsheet so the next level processing of the data becomes easier.
6. Storage: Both the teachers and students need to store a large number of books and other documents. Therefore, storage is an important part of all education plans. The free version users of Office 365 Education can avail unlimited cloud storage facility if there are five or members of that institute. If the member count is less, each of them is eligible for 1 TB storage. The paid subscribers will get different size of storage depending on their plan. As for Google Apps Education users, 1 TB/ user storage is offered to institutes with four or fewer users. For institutes with five and more members, Google offers unlimited storage.
7. Social Networking: In today’s world, Life seems impossible without Social Networking websites for most of the people. Office 365 Education includes Yammer, the social networking application from Microsoft. In Yammer, users can have complete control over who can access which content. Google Apps Education users can use Google Plus for the purpose of social networking. They can even create groups in Google Plus as the part of social communication.
8. Learning Management: Both Office 365 Education and Google Apps Education have Learning Management application named Microsoft Classroom and Google Classroom respectively. As both of these are at the initial stage of their development, users have to wait for some time to get the best out of these.

Final Words

Here, we have sketched Office 365 Education Vs Google Apps Education chart in detail. Users can take help of this post to pick the preferred education plan according to their requirements. No matter which service they choose, a local backup should be done as the part of the disaster management plan. To back up the contents of Google Apps Education and Office 365 Education, Google Apps Backup Tool and Office 365 Backup Tool can be used respectively.