The need for full-fledged collaboration software is quite evident, with over 80% of companies saying that digital workplaces (including environments built with collaboration tools) are now essential to the future of company success. As companies grow, scale, and mature as enterprises, that need is even more pressing. This is why many businesses look to adopt a 360-degree collaboration platform that addresses both their present needs and proves efficient even as the company scales.
Enterprise collaboration software should go beyond traditional collaboration tools to include advanced features and integrations that are instrumental in enabling cross-functional collaboration. Before we look at our two software choices, let us look at the factors a business should consider before choosing an enterprise collaboration solution.
Things To Consider When Signing Up For A Workplace Software:
Enterprise collaboration software is a broad term that refers to various tools used by employees to collaborate seamlessly. This can include email, document collaboration, centralized file storage, instant messaging, employee engagement tools, and more.
It is best for businesses to carefully assess their requirements before they select their preferred platform, to ensure that the features and functionalities are what your company needs.
Common features to consider include:
- Security and Privacy: This is probably the most important factor as businesses often create and share sensitive and confidential data in their communications.
- Pricing: While most software companies offer special pricing for enterprises, it is always good to ensure that their list prices fall within your IT budget.
- Ecosystem Compatibility: If your business already has an ecosystem in place, you should make sure that your collaboration software plugs in well with the same.
- Migration Assistance: If you are not choosing a new platform but rather moving from an existing one, ensure that the migration process will be assisted and lossless.
- Flexibility: Enterprises have diverse roles and employees with varying levels of access. The same should be possible in your enterprise collaboration tools.
- Advanced Enterprise Features: There are data laws and certifications you may have to comply with. Choose a platform that upholds the same.
Zoho Workplace vs Google Workspace
Zoho Workplace is the communication and collaboration offering from Zoho, a software company that has been around for more than 25 years.
Known for their CRM, Zoho gradually built an entire suite of products that could serve as the operating system for a business. Workplace includes tools for emailing and messaging, business calendars, file storage, online meetings, employee intranet, and a complete office suite and is trusted by over 16 million users worldwide.
Google Workspace, formerly known as GSuite, puts together tools that are designed to help teams connect, create, and collaborate, and reportedly has over 3 billion users across the globe. The platform includes tools for emailing, site building, forms, and an office suite as well as a business calendar.
Let’s see how they compare with each other in different categories.
Plans and Pricing
Zoho Workplace has two plans, Standard and Professional, and also offers other Mail Only options for businesses that need only emailing and business chat.
Google Workspace comes with three plans, Starter, Standard and Business Plus.
Both services offer tailor-made prices for enterprises, which have to be discussed offline through their sales representatives.
If budget is your primary consideration, Zoho offers much better price points for each user, with its highest plan, inclusive of advanced features costing only $6/user per month when billed annually.
Features Comparison
Plan Flexibility and Frontline Support
Enterprise organizations have employees working across different roles and needing different levels of access. Zoho Workplace offers a flexible licensing model, where the company admin can mix and match plans for different users in the company.
For example, the desk staff or the frontline employees may require only email and chat, whereas the managers may need the entire breadth of applications. This is possible by purchasing Mail Lite licenses for the desk staff and frontline employees and opting for Professional licenses for the higher-level management. The great news is, there is no cap on the number of users to be added to each plan.
While Google also introduced the flexible pricing model recently, when mixing across Business and Enterprise plans, there is a minimum purchase for Enterprise of 100 licenses or 15% of the total number of users purchased. Google, on the other hand, has introduced an exclusive plan for frontline users, which is a stripped-down version of Workspace with fewer tools and storage, but there is no mention of this plan being available in the flexible licensing model.
The biggest advantages of a flexible pricing model are price and scalability. Organizations can add licenses with appropriate permissions, and in turn, save costs by not being forced to pay for the highest edition for all employees in the same organization.
Security and Privacy
Both Zoho Workplace and Google Workspace comply with a long list of industry standards and laws and certifications. They also come with end-to-end encryption and multi-factor authentication.
However, when it comes to privacy, Zoho is a step ahead. Zoho has traditionally stayed away from ads and selling user data ever since its inception and provides ad-free services even on its free plan. Google Workspace is ad-free in its paid edition, but serves ads for free users.
Advanced Enterprise Features
Once a business qualifies as an enterprise, by law, they have to comply with certain data requirements like retention and archival, eDiscovery, and backup.
Since both these suites handle sensitive data like email, company files, chat messages, it is important they come bundled with enterprise archival features.
Both Zoho Workplace and Google Workspace provide features like eDiscovery, advanced analytics and reports, 24/7 support on their paid plans. While Zoho offers advanced S/MIME on its Professional plan, Google offers it only on their Enterprise plan which does not have a list price.
When it comes to advanced thread protection and email security, the features to look for are TLS Encryption, IP restrictions and suspicious login alerts, password policy, session length, SAML based SSO integration. Both these vendors tick all these boxes, but Google has even more tools like Data Loss Prevention that Zoho is yet to introduce.
Contextual Integration with Business Apps
A Forrester study reveals that collaboration tools drive a 10% increase in productivity. Teams collaborate and communicate regularly to achieve bigger business goals. So, it is important that these tools work in tandem with business applications like CRM platforms, finance applications, marketing automation, and more, to be able to pass and receive information contextually.
Zoho has the advantage of building all these business applications in-house, and these are by default integrated with each other. So, if you’re an enterprise that would choose to have all business and collaboration applications under one roof, then Zoho will work best for you.
Zoho Workplace also has built-in integrations with many third-party applications, as well as other add-ons that can be enabled from the marketplace. Google also has an add-on library but it comes at an additional cost.
Ease of Access
Within the collaboration bundle, both Zoho and Google offer tight integrations.
For example, a user can effortlessly jump from an email to a chat conversation or a call without losing context. While Workplace always had an integrated interface with all apps accessible in a single tab, Google also has recently introduced an integrated design.
An added advantage that Zoho has is, it also comes with a dashboard with customizable widgets that bring in information from different tools and help perform quick everyday actions.
Zoho Workplace also comes with an AI-powered search bar that can instantly pull up results from different Zoho applications and categorize them accordingly, making data search effortless.
One of the biggest advantages of an integrated collaboration suite is that the information is centralized in one repository, instead of having to juggle between different locations. Google Drive and WorkDrive are the respective cloud storage tools of these two vendors that helps centralize all attachments, office files, documents, presentations, and spreadsheets, accessible only to relevant teams with proper control.
Mobile and Offline Accessibility
If your organization has employees who constantly travel /work outdoors, then choosing a web-based solution will not suffice. Both Google and Zoho have understood the market when it comes to this, and have built mobile applications for all their tools compatible with both iOS and Android. Zoho goes a little extra by introducing a single integrated app for all Workplace tools, that comes bundled with the powerful Zia Search.
Both these suites also provide offline support for their email and office apps, which comes in handy when you’re working from a place with poor internet connection, or working during commute.
Migration Assistance
Not all companies will opt for enterprise collaboration software when starting out. Some of you could be hosting data on your own servers or with other smaller providers in the market. As you scale up, you can move from your existing systems to Google or Zoho. Both these vendors provide easy migration with detailed steps. In addition, Zoho Workplace also recently introduced a dedicated Migration Assistance Program for Google legacy users, following the surge in migrations after Google discontinued its Legacy edition for existing users.
Migration processes for businesses take time as they are usually carried out in phases. It is important to lay your requirements down clearly to the support technician assisting your migration, to ensure a smooth and lossless migration.
An Environment that Boosts Employee Productivity
It is crucial to choose a platform that employees love working on.
Some of the common problems that employees cite as reasons for productivity loss are that there are too many emails, information is not easily accessible, there is a lack of workload visibility, and confusing cross-functional team collaboration.
Both Zoho and Google have their own approaches to solving these challenges.. While Google has a jam board that enables employees to collaborate in real-time, Zoho adds a modern twist to emails through sharing and commenting to lessen the inbox burden. Zoho Workplace also has Connect, the internal engagement platform that helps employees share ideas, discuss topics, and engage in activities that are related to work and otherwise. Interactive elements like polls, reactions, guest comments, and town halls ensure maximum participation.
Zoho Workplace vs. Google Workspace–Which One Should You Choose?
No single tool can address every business’ requirements. The final decision will ultimately come down to what you want and need out of your collaboration platform.
Are you a mid-sized company or an enterprise firm looking for a comprehensive solution? Are you also looking to integrate your business tools into the same ecosystem? If yes then, Zoho is your best pick. If you’re used to working and using the different tools under the Google ecosystem and appreciate the familiarity, Google Workplace may be the best option for you.
