Outlook vs. Gmail: Who Is the King of Email?

Having аn email address is like having a phone

number: Once it’s out in the world, you don’t want to change it.

Aside from the estimated 30% of email

addresses that change each year–most of which are business emails–most people

probably wouldn’t want to deal with the hassle of transferring contacts,

redirecting people to the new email address, or hunting down every site,

subscription, and bill payee to update their email address on file.

However, sometimes people have a good reason

to make a massive move from one digital locale to another. It could be your

email provider is outdated and can’t keep up with the modern paragons; or maybe

your provider is shuttering and you need to find a new home.

Most people don’t really have a good concept of what’s out there and what differentiates one email service from another. But the fact is, Microsoft Outlook and Google Gmail have become the two most exemplary platforms for managing what has almost become an essential aspect of life.

What makes these two email providers better,

worse, different, or the same in comparison with each other? When it comes to

free personal plans, the nuances between Outlook and Gmail are likely

insignificant to most users. That’s why, here, we’ll focus on comparing each

service’s subscription-based business plan, so you can decide which one makes

more sense for you or your company and employees.

Look, Feel and Cost

Let’s get this out of the way. Outlook and

Gmail offer very different interfaces. To put it simply, Outlook maintains a

corporate feel, while Gmail offers something a little more creative and

startup-like. If Outlook is the modern take on corporate communications, Gmail

is postmodern.

Outlook’s interface is packed with options and

customizable features, many of which you or your employees will never end up

using. While Gmail offers its own set of functionality, it’s overall a much

simpler user experience focused on providing the essentials you need to be

efficient.

When it comes to purchasing these email services, you’re actually purchasing the suites they come with, Microsoft Office 365 and Google G Suite. One thing to keep in mind is Office 365 requires an annual commitment, though you’re charged monthly. G Suite is purely a monthly subscription plan based on headcount. Here’s how these price out per user per month.

Office 365

G Suite

Office 365 Business Essentials: $5

G Suite Basic: $6

Office 365 Business: $8.25

G Suite Business: $12

Office 365 Business Premium: $12.50

G Suite Enterprise: $25

Tool Suite

Again, when you buy Outlook or Gmail for business, you’re really buying more than just an email service. You’re buying a suite of tools, of which email is but one.

When it comes to what makes Office 365 and G Suite different, it’s really a comparison between an incumbent and its disruptor. We’ll cover more of what makes these two suites the same and different in a future article, but here are some of the contrasting aspects that stand out.

Microsoft Office 365

We’ve all used Microsoft Word, Excel and

PowerPoint. These are the core tenets of Office, but Office 365 offers even

more. Today, These three programs are available online, not just as desktop

programs, making the work you do in them easier to save and share. In addition,

365 gives you:

Outlook for emailOneDrive for cloud file storageOneNote, a digital notebookSharePoint, a corporate intranetMicrosoft Teams for instant messaging and

video conferencing

These few apps offer extensive capabilities

that have come to define the way businesses operate internally at digital

scale. It’s a huge draw that Microsoft has successfully consolidated so much

into these tools to simplify the experience it offers businesses.

Google G Suite

While G Suite offers its own array of

applications that are on par with Microsoft’s staple products–plus more. G

Suite’s alternatives to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are Docs, Sheets, and

Slides. But G Suite offers even more that would be useful for any business:

Calendar for easy team schedulingCurrents for company wide discussionsHangouts Chat for instant messagingHangouts Meet for video conferencingForms for creating surveys and formsSites for creating websitesApp Builder for creating business appsKeep for organizing ideasJamboard, a digital whiteboardDrive for storing and sharing filesGoogle Cloud Search to search across G SuiteAdmin, Vault, and Mobile for securely managing

users, devices and data

Clearly, there’s a lot to consider here. Outlook

consolidates a lot into the few yet robust applications it offers. Google

offers a seemingly much wider range of capabilities spread out across several

applications, some of which Office 365 doesn’t offer at all.

Organization

When you’re in business, emails are nonstop;

and they’re more than just vehicles for conversing. Emails are vessels of

knowledge that professionals use to make business decisions, some of which are

mission-critical. If you can’t keep conversations and information prioritized and

organized, it’s going to be difficult to work effectively and efficiently at

the speed of business and avoid compromising quality outcomes.

Outlook

If you think about traditional, pre-digital

methods of organization, folders and files probably come to mind. As

digitization is essentially the process of taking tangible activities and

abstracting them into digital processes, one would naturally assume creating

email folders and files is the natural course of action.

This is how Outlook works. It uses a traditional

folder system and allows you to categorize emails within those folders using

colored tabs, just like you would with an expandable file. You can create as

many folders and subfolders as you’d like. Outlook also does its best to

prioritize emails by filtering out those you would consider clutter. These go

to the Clutter folder to stay out of your way until you’re ready to view them.

Gmail

In description, it may come across as there

being only a slight nuance between how Gmail and Outlook organize email;

however, in actively using Gmail’s system, the organization and prioritization

method is noticeably different.

Rather than abstracting the traditional

“folder, file” method, Gmail uses labels. You can tag messages with multiple

labels, rather than put them in a folder.

You can customize Gmail to show Important,

Unread, and Starred emails first. It can also automatically filters emails by Primary,

Social, Promotions, Updates, and Forums. This prioritization and organization

system makes it really easy to identify which emails are most important to you

and get to them fast.

Despite these differences in Gmail, what’s

interesting is if you’re using Gmail through another email client (such as

Outlook) its labels will show up as folders. In one sense, this makes Gmail

more versatile and capable of providing a more flexible user experience.

Search

Search goes hand in hand with organization

when it comes to email. If you can’t quickly and efficiently find the

information you need, which is potentially buried in an email from months ago,

you’re going to end up wasting valuable time hunting things down instead of

taking action.

Outlook

Outlook’s search function is good enough in

that you can hunt down emails across all your folders, including thousands of

emails in your Deleted folder, based on keyword and email address. Where

Outlook can sometimes fall short is accuracy.

Searching on a keyword doesn’t always pull up

the correct email or emails, and there’s always a chance Outlook will pull up

only a select few emails from a chain, yet leave out the one email you need.

While it works well most of the time, it certainly doesn’t employ the same

level of search functionality as an email service from Google.

Gmail

Gmail’s search functionality is imbued with

Google’s search power, which is also why Gmail was created in the first place:

to provide an email service that operates like Google’s search engine. Not only

can you search on simple terms and trust that Gmail will serve up the correct

results, you can also use advanced search operators like “from:,” “to:,”

“shortcut:,” and several more that can help you find specifically what you

need.

Email Recall

While there are several key features both

Gmail and Outlook provide to varying degrees of detailed functionality, one

major function each does quite differently is email recall. The difference in

operation is worth highlighting because most people, at some point, experience

the nerve wracking situation of sending the wrong email to the wrong person or

sending something they shouldn’t have at all.

Outlook

Outlook is great for email recall and replace. As long as the email

address you sent an email to is hosted on Microsoft Exchange–the actual email

service Outlook runs on–you have the ability to delete and replace any unread

message.

Of course, if the email has already been

opened, you can’t recall or replace it, but having this capability with unread

messages could save you from embarrassment in the event of sending something

you shouldn’t have, or help you resend a better email with more clarification

rather than sending follow-up emails elaborating one the previous send.

Gmail

Gmail falls a little short here compared to

Outlook. In fact, Gmail doesn’t even offer legitimate email recall. Instead,

you have a few seconds after sending an email to cancel the send. You can turn

it on or off and adjust the cancelation time to last up to 30 seconds. If you

aren’t quick enough, that baby’s gone for good.

Who Is the King of Email?

When it comes to choosing which email service is best for your business, Outlook and Gmail both offer what you need, one sometimes better than the other. Email is just the start.

It’s the larger systems each belongs to–Office 365 and G Suite–that really make a difference in how your business operates. We’ll cover the differences between these two toolkits in an upcoming article so you can really decide what’s best for your business.