When it comes to business productivity programs for Smartphones, there are two main competitors: Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps for Business. Many people have a hard time picking between the two, so this article will compare them so you can see which one is best for your business.

Features

When you look at the features offered by both programs, it is practically a tie. The Office 365 features are slightly more polished and Google Apps has some features that Office 365 lacks, but overall they are about the same.

While the features list is about the same, there is a clear winner. It can be difficult navigating the Google Apps toolbars to find a tool, as the key features are hidden behind menus and dialog boxes. Microsoft has learned long ago to push key features to the front, making Office 365 the winner due to ease of use.

Collaboration Features

Most businesses that use mobile business programs have teams of employees that work together to finish a project, so collaboration is important. Google Apps has a fair amount of collaboration tools, allowing video chat, instant messaging and file sharing.

While this might be enough, Office 365 has some more collaboration methods. In addition to the above, Office 365 also has online whiteboard tools and real-time presence information. Since it has a few more tools, this category also goes to Microsoft.

Internet Compatibility

The three major Internet browsers are Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox. Since they are the most popular, you will most likely upload your files on one of these three browsers. It goes without saying that Office 365 works best with IE and Google Apps works best with Chrome.

Office 365 has no compatibility issues with Chrome or Firefox. Google Apps, on the other hand, displays an annoying warning in IE and Firefox will not properly display Google Apps unless you set Firefox to accept cookies. This is yet another Microsoft win.

Price

This is the one area where Google is a definite winner. Google Apps has a free version, and the paid version costs $50 per year for each user. Office 365 costs $6 per month for each user on the Small Business plan, and it goes up to $27 per month for each user in their Enterprise plan.

If you have a very small team of 10 people or less, you can use Google Apps without spending any money, but you will need to pay for the professional version if you have more people.