Zoho vs G Suite – Which One Should You Get?

Zoho and G Suite both have excellent features and benefits that they bring businesses. They are both at the top of the list in the market regarding document tools, email, CRM, and storing documents on the cloud.

To give a little background on both:

G Suite, as most people know, is Google’s flagship work suite. It offers excellent collaboration and productivity. It stands out from the mix by offering unlimited cloud storage, and it includes cloud search functionality, security, and a wide array of administration controls. You receive advanced features than the basic G suite plan when you purchase their business plan. You can expect advanced tracking, files, chats, policy implementation options for emails, and Cloud Search to name a few.

For Zoho, they have a ton of products like Zoho Mail and Zoho CRM. Depending on what you are looking for will help you make the best decision for you and your business. Zoho is one of the most recognizable providers of software and solutions for small businesses. Their SaaS products are meant to help streamline your business. Their Zoho mail is a smart hosted email solution also for small businesses. They help businesses by providing cost-efficient, easy configurable mail programs that integrate with a wide array of apps and solutions.

The obvious question is, which one should you get? Let’s get into it.

Our Recommendation: G Suite

When it comes to an easy solution to use and excellent integration, G Suite is the market winner. When it comes to their immediate solution,, you will find that the Gmail user interface is straightforward and easy to use. You can make customizations to your email dashboard, how it looks and how its setup.

Gmail is the clear highlight of G Suite, but there are plenty of other features and collaboration methods for your team. Google Hangouts gives you the ability to communicate over video conferencing and share your screen, which in today’s current pace is needed. Remote meetings have become the new normal. Google Hangouts will make this process easy for you.

If you or your business is looking for simplicity, G Suite will offer that with all of its tools and features.

Now, just because we choose G Suite over Zoho does not mean we would not recommend Zoho. As I said above, Zoho offers so many products like Zoho CRM and Zoho Workplace.

That’s just to name a couple. But where Zoho stands out is their CRM. Most users will go to them for a full CRM solution. It is a full-featured CRM suite with a long list of features and integrations. Some of their best features are lead management, sales automation, omnichannel interactions with customers, and analytics options. When it comes to performance management, they stand out as well; they provide accurate forecasts and features that will help your sales team exceed sales quotas and reach targets.

When looking at both of these options, it will come down to what your business needs. If you are looking for a solution with mail and expert document needs, G Suite will be the best choice for you. If you are looking for a solution that can provide it all, then Zoho may have what you are looking for in one of their large selection of products or their flagship choice Zoho CRM.

Pricing – Is Zoho or G Suite the Better Deal?

As stated above, Zoho has so many products that they offer, but to narrow down and compare the right solutions to each other we will look at Zoho Workplace, which is a solution that bundles apps on email, documentation management, presentation, chat, and other communication tools in one platform. It will be the best comparable to G Suite.

Zoho

If you decide to choose Zoho Workplace, you will receive the following tools and features:

• Zoho Mail
• Zoho Chat
• Zoho Writer
• Zoho Show
• Zoho Sheet
• Zoho Docs
• Zoho Sites

All of these tools will help your business in the forms of communication, collaboration, presentation, and document management.

They offer two pricing plans. See below.

Workplace Standard – $4/per user monthly

• 30GB of mail storage per user
• Support and migration
• Zoho Mail
• Zoho Work drive
• Calendar
• Tasks
• And much more

This plan is best for start-ups and midsize businesses.

Workplace Professional – $7/per user monthly

• Everything that the standard plan offers.
• Unlimited mail storage per user
• Notes
• Zoho Meeting
• Zoho Connect
• Zoho Showtime

This plan would suit larger companies and companies scaling at a fast pace.

To learn more about Zoho’s pricing plans, check them out here.

G Suite

G Suite offers three main pricing plans: Basic, Business, and Enterprise. They do a pretty good job of offering plans that would suit small and medium-sized businesses and larger organizations. Let’s take a look at all three options.

G Suite Basic – $6/per user monthly

• Professional email
• G Suite products: Gmail, Drive, Slides, Calendar, Hangouts, Forms
• 30GB of file storage
• 24/7 support
• 25 max Hangouts participants

If you have a bigger team or concerned about the 30GB of personal storage, then it would be worth considering the G Suite Business plan.

G Suite Business – $12/per user monthly

• Everything that the Basic plan offers.
• Unlimited file storage
• App maker
• 50 max number of Hangouts
• Cloud Search
• Google Vault

Please note, unlimited storage on the Business plan is only available if you have 5 or more users. Otherwise, you will get 1TB of storage per user.

G Suite Enterprise – $25/per user monthly

• Everything the plans above offer.
• 100 max Hangout participants
• Record and save Hangout Meetings
• Live stream Hangouts
• Advanced enterprise controls: Security center, data loss prevention

This plan will be the best selection for larger companies.

To learn more about G Suite’s pricing plans, check them out here.

Both Zoho and G Suite offer a great choice of plans. They are both closely priced to each other. It may have to come down to the size of your business. G Suite offers more plans that may suit your business needs. In regards to features, they both provide a significant number of features, while G Suite gives more insight to what their plans offer, you may have to contact Zoho to get a better understanding of what specific features and tools will come with the plan you are looking into.

When it comes to G Suite Business and Enterprise, they offer more features than the Zoho Plans. The best comparison for Zoho would be G Suite’s Basic plan. For that plan, it will have to come down to features, in which we will get into details in the next section below. If I had to choose who has the best plan and offers the most, it would be G Suite.

Word Documents

G Suite’s Google Docs is one of the most popular choices when it comes to word processing and documents. When it comes to collaborative features or editing tools, they offer an excellent solution. However, it is not the only word document provider. Zoho Docs or Zoho Writer, which they call it, are climbing the ladder as well. Let’s look into them both.

Zoho Docs

Zoho Docs is enjoyed by users for its excellent online editing tools, easy sharing, and collaborating, and integration with Dropbox, Google Drive, and Adobe Sign.

When purchasing Zoho Docs alone, they offer two plans. Standard and premium. You receive a 15-day free trial for a free plan test out for 25 users. The free plan of Zoho Docs offers unlimited file and folder sharing, desktop sync, editing tools, and under management.

The Premium $8/per user monthly includes all standard features plus the ability to email documents directly using a Zoho account.

For the Standard plan, $5/per user monthly you receive, common editing tools, password-protected documents, and file and folder sharing.

In Zoho Docs, you can share documents and collaborate with your team. You can add tasks to documents if you need to send docs to a colleague for review or revision. When you assign a task to a colleague, the recipient will receive an alert and a link associated with the document.

Zoho also offers a plethora of templates. From creative writing, resumes, cover letters and many more.

Zoho and G Suite’s Google Docs are very similar in their offerings. Zoho Docs offers more modern touch and advanced editing tools like embedding code or adding fillable fields. Note that Zoho Docs is not free, they offer a free plan, yes, but once you pass 1Gb file upload and over 25 users you will be charged for another plan.

Google Docs

Google’s Docs stand out for its simplicity and elegant interface. It’s fast and user friendly. The apps and features that are in the Docs are in plain sight and easy to use. For example, their normal text, various titles, headings, and paragraph styles can be modified easily.

When you collaborate on a document and open it after someone has edited it, you will receive alerts to recent changes and the complete history of the document.

They just added a cool new feature called “Explore.” This feature will display information and suggestions based on what’s showing in your document. For example, If you were to click in the Explore Button on the document, it will let you ask questions about your data and include suggestions.

When it comes to predictions in spell check, Google does it best. It predicts what you are typing or what you will write next, this is super helpful. You can also customize your spell check settings.

Just like Zoho Docs, multiple format options can be downloaded to your computer, DOCX, ODT, RTF, and PDF. Google Docs also is known for its collection of templates, newsletters, resumes, and a template gallery.

As you can see, both Documents providers are very similar, the main difference, I think, is that Google Docs is free, while Zoho Docs is not. They offer a free plan but their free plan will not give you as much access and features as Google Standard Docs.

Email

Both G Suite and Zoho offer hosted email services. Let’s look at both of them below.

Zoho Mail

Zoho Mail is a hosted email service that includes 5 GB of storage for the entry-level plan, which costs $1 per user monthly. It is a fully capable email solution with intuitive features and inbox technology. What makes Zoho Mail great is the business apps that it integrates with. They can integrate and collaborate with apps that dive into finance, project management, sales, and marketing.

Like most Email host providers, they offer anti-spam features that will stop your inboxes from being filled with junk. But some users say that the provider doesn’t do anything special beyond just categorizing emails as spam, unlike Google, who does an excellent job of protecting users’ inboxes from suspicious links and giving additional warnings.

Zoho Mail is on a mission of being the go-to email provider for Small to medium-sized businesses. They aim to make their users more productive by powerful calendars, tasks, bookmark features, and notes.

Gmail

More than likely you are familiar with the free version of Gmail, but they also offer Gmail for business which allows you to send and receive emails from a professional email address and will operate under a G suite license.

They will come with a monthly subscription plan which will come with a host of other productivity apps and features.

Gmail is paired with G Suite so all the tools will be included in all three of their pricing packages. They offer a basic plan $6/ per user monthly. A business plan which is $12/per user monthly and lastly their Enterprise plan which costs $25/per user monthly.

Gmail separates itself from the pack by providing all of its services regardless of the plan that is chosen. The difference between the plans lie in the features and limits within each tool depending on the plan. G Suite offers a 2-week free demo of the plan you are interested in before fully committing.

Spreadsheets

G Suite and Zoho both offer effective Spreadsheet solutions which have some similarities and differences, lets look at them both.

Zoho Sheets

Zoho Sheets is part of the Zoho Docs suite. Most users say it is the exact equivalent of G Suite’s Google Sheets.

Documents can be imported and exported from Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, and OneDrive. If they cannot be, documents will be saved in your Zoho account. Collaboration efforts work smoothly, team members can simultaneously edit the same document, add comments, answers, and chat with your team.

Zoho Sheets also works with third-party CRM systems as it can import and export data.

Along with working with outside integration, Zoho Sheets connects and integrates internally with all of their products that flow under their document products.

Google Sheets

Google sheets is well integrated with all of G Suite’s cloud services. Similar to their Docs, the file content is saved on Google’s web servers. When you sync your files with your desktop you get shortcuts that pen the correct file in the browser.

Importing and editing excel compatible files is very easy to do. All documents that are edited are saved in real-time so you won’t lose any of your last edits.

All of Google Sheets features are fully functional and arranged in a simple interface, a classic menu and horizontal toolbar for most used functions.

Online team collaboration remains strong as it always is for G Suite’s services. Every member gets a colored cursor for Sheets, and a chat section that allows for fast communication between those who have proper rights to edit the document.

Google Sheets is another classic feature you can’t go wrong with in G Suite’s offerings.

Presentations

Very similar to the features above, both G Suite and Zoho offer presentation slide features. Let’s take a look at how they compare with each other.

Zoho Show

Zoho Show ia a browser based online presentation tool with real time collaboration features. It allows users to customize their slides with texts, images, graphics, tables, charts, and video. Slides can also have animated edits.

Zoho Show also supports importing and exporting files. It can read presentations in various file formats and save them in the appropriate place on your desktop with different formats. It also offers public sharing, the application can publish presentations in public channels and embed them in blogs, forums, and websites. Customizable features are offered or they offer a wide array of pre-made themes for slides. They do an excellent job of offering features that will satisfy personal and businesses users.

You will have to pay for Zoho Show when using it as a standalone tool. To learn about their pricing check them out here.

Google Slides

Google Slides is recognized as being the best free presentation app you can find on the market. It has strong collaboration capabilities, easy to learn and use, and a free slideshow creation tool.

A few things that users wish Google Slides offered was, exporting videos, adding audio import, and offering a desktop app.

The greatest thing about Google Slides is that you can start to use them immediately, nothing to download or install. As long as you have a Google account you can get started. Slides offers some cool features like the ability to generate URLs which the audience can submit questions to you in real time. They offer excellent slideshow creation, presentation services, and collaboration features.

Cloud and Document Storage

Lastly, we will look into storage. Let’s look at our last comparison of G Suite and Zoho.

Zoho WorkDrive

Zoho WorkDrive is known to be a reliable and secure platform for storing your files, file management, and collaboration. It is designed to support small and midsize businesses, allowing employees to work together regardless if the teams are together. Users who have this tool, also have access to Zoho’s other features in their Suite.

WorkDrive is meant to remove the need of overflowing email inboxes and organizing them and sharing them to the appropriate people and files. Employees can share information quickly and easily without compromising data security or privacy.

Some users have issues with sending links easily. The process isn’t always fluid, but WorkDrive is desired for its easy data management, advanced admin controls, access on any device, and sharing and interacting files easily.

Zoho offers three pricing plans. Starter, Team, and Business. To learn more in depth information on these plans go here.

Google Drive

Google Drive is one of the best cloud-based storage and syncing services out on the market. While being free, you cannot go wrong with choosing Google Drive. You can create, edit, store, and collaborate on documents. Users can specify any folder in the drive to backup on the computer and businesses are able to save space and not make duplications on the local storage drive.

Note that Google Drive is free unless you need more than 15GB of data, if you are in need of data you will want to look into the Google One pricing plan.

Files can be uploaded and converted to the format file you need and edited real time. You can edit them online, whether they are new documents, spreadsheets, or slide presentations.

Integrations with third party services come smoothly. There is a list of services that integrate well with Google Drive. At the end of the day, Google Drive is the best choice for an online cloud storage for its compatibility, price, and integrations.

Is Zoho or G Suite best for you?

To reiterate what I said in the beginning of the article. We prefer G Suite over Zoho. As most of their features may be comparable, G Suite is one of the best platforms in the market today and has been for a long time. Their tools and features are easy to use, compatible, price friendly for businesses and reliable. I hope this article can help lead you to making the right decision for you and your business.