PC World - The war between Google and Microsoft is heating up. Each tech giant offers a productivity suite serving the essentials for serious work online: word processing, spreadsheets, email, and calendars. Should you ally with Google Apps for Business, or root for Microsoft's Office 365 for Small Business? My experience with both brands' productivity tools reflects the workflows many small businesses face.A In 2007, with staff scattered across several countries, my editorial company started usingA Google Apps for Business. It offered email, plus shared text documents and spreadsheets all under our company domain name and logo. Meanwhile, on the desktop, we used Microsoft Word and Excel, particularly for complex documents that we shared with clients. If we were starting over today, we would seriously consider Microsoft's Office 365 for Small Business. For years Microsoft wasn't putting significant functionality online, butA next week's release of Office 365 Small Business Premium is a big step forward. Google and Microsoft each allow personal and business use of their online platform, as well as simultaneous logins to multiple accounts in different browser tabs.A Beyond that, however, their platforms differ greatly in usability, functionality, and mobile support. Read on to discover the standout features and surprising weak points of each. Word processing and collaboration \Google's word processor offers more features than Microsoft's Word Web App, and they work extremely well.A Google's word processor can't create an index, but it has all the standard formatting, as well as hundreds of fonts. If I have a document pulled up in my browser while someone else is editing it on, say, their smartphone, I see the changes as they are typing them, letter by letter. Google's word processor is a what-you-see-is-what-you-get app--unlike Microsoft's Word Web app. The way a document looks onscreen is the way it will look when downloaded to your PC as a Word or PDF file, when printed, or when published as a Web page. Critically important: Google saves your documents A automatically. Back in the old days--2008, say--you might lose all your work at any moment. Today, changes are saved instantaneously, and if you lose Internet connectivity, you're alerted immediately. Google Drive can sync documents on multiple machines and in the cloud. If a Google document is edited offline, there's a potential for conflict with other editors, and again if users apply Word formatting that isn't yet supported by Google. If there are no conflicts, the document syncs automatically. Otherwise, either a brand-new document is created with the changes, or you can choose which changes to use. Microsoft Office 365 shares Google's synchronization problem when documents are edited locally. The Word Web App that comes with Office 365A has a bit less functionality--in addition to the real estate--hogging "ribbon" interface.A But, most important, it lacks auto-save and what-you-see-is-what-you-get. Also, unlike Google, the Word Web App attempts to maintain a level of compatibility with the standard desktop version of Word, but it can't yet display all the formats. Say, for example, that you have white letters on a dark background.A It looks fine when first uploaded and viewed in the Reading View. But click on Editing View,A and the rA(c)sumA(c) sections are immediately misaligned, formatting commands butt into the text, and background colors all disappear. To make sure the edits look right, you'll need to switch back to the Reading View. Editing the same sample rA(c)sumA(c) in Google is an easier matter, as this image shows: With Microsoft's Word Web App, trying to edit the same document from multiple locations is difficult since changes are not saved in real time. There's a complex process of locking, unlocking, and reconciling files if multiple people edited them at once.A If your employees need to do any serious editing, they'll need to use the desktop version of Word 2013, available within pricier Office 365 subscriptions. (Collaborative editing in Word 2013 works only with the step-up Office 365 plans that add SharePoint.) Microsoft's mobile functionality is in place only if you're using the well-built Office apps for Windows Phone 8, or if you've paid for Office desktop software for a Windows 8 tablet. There are no iOS or Android apps for Office 365, though third-party apps let you edit Office documents. Google, on the other hand, offers free apps for iOS and Android, but not for Windows mobile devices. Winner: Google Apps wins. Microsoft's Word Web App isn't ready for prime time. Next page: Spreadsheets, email, calendars, and costs... Online spreadsheets Google's spreadsheet app supports basic Excel functionality--multiple sheets in a workspace, cross-sheet references, and standard formulas. It also has formatting options, charts, drawings, images, gadgets and scripts. Yet, when saving a Google spreadsheet in Excel format, the charts may look a little different, and some functionality might be lost. The same is true when converting an Excel document to edit in Google Apps. The Excel Web App does have autosave, background colors on cells work fine, and multiple people can edit online at once. It supports many more features than Google's spreadsheets do. Cell formats, charts, formulas, and many other advanced functions work perfectly. Not everything is supported, such as objects or tables that pull in data from outside sources.A However, if you upload files saved in older Excel formats, such as .xls, you will need to re-save them first in the latest .xlsx format to edit them. Winner: Microsoft's Excel Web App is superior to Google Spreadsheets. Email and calendars Microsoft's Outlook, Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks are similar to Google's counterparts. Outlook allows emails to be grouped into folders and subfolders, while Google has labels and sublabels. A Google email can have multiple labels, but an Outlook email can be copied to multiple folders, and a "Category" option is similar to Gmail's labels. So it's pretty much a wash. Gmail integrates well with many of Google's other tools. Get a foreign-language email? Gmail offers to translate it. Text chat with your contacts without leaving Gmail, add them to your Google+ circles, start a voice or video call, or set up a hangout video conference with several people. Both Outlook and Gmail have nice text editors. The Outlook Web App opens a new pop-up window when a user is reading or creating email--an annoying habit since I have pop-ups blocked. If you've used the free Outlook that comes with Microsoft's personal SkyDrive service, you'll find quite a few differences. The SkyDrive version has some nice tools not in the Office 365 version of Outlook. For example, the folder navigation sidebar on the left includes "Quick views" to quickly scan through emails with attached documents, photos, or shipping updates. Microsoft's online Outlook and Calendar can be used as is. The one significant exception for businesses is the lack of an online mail merge function--you'll have to switch back to the desktop Office suite for that.A (Google Apps supports mail merge through either built-in scripting or withA third-party apps.) Both Gmail and Outlook allow you to manage multiple email addresses from the same account, but Gmail lets you set up different signatures for each address. Both platforms lets you view appointments from multiple calendars. For example, you might have a personal calendar for your own appointments, a group one that everyone on your team has access to, and a home calendar associated with your personal email account. Events from all three calendars will show up on the same screen, color-coded so you can tell them apart. In addition, both calendars can send you reminders by email, pop-up alerts, or via text message to your cell phone. I've used Outlook both on the desktop and on the Web, and I find Microsoft's online interface--for both the Office 365 Outlook and the new consumer-oriented Outlook.com--to be simpler and clearer than the desktop version. But I prefer Gmail to both, not because of any particular features, but simply because I'm more used to the interface after all these years. If your employees have been using Outlook all along, they would probably be happier with the Microsoft's online email client. Winner: Tie What they cost Google Apps for Business starts at $5 per user per month, or $50 per user per year. Each user gets 25GB of storage for email, plus 5 GB of storage on Google Drive. Upgrading to Google Apps for Business with Vault costs $10 per user per month, adding more security and e-discovery features. There are no limits on how many users each company can have on the platform, and additional storage space is available at $4 per month for 20 GB--though storage prices have been falling, and are likely to continue to do so. Office 365 for Small Business costs $6 per user per month for up to 50 users. For more users, you'll need to upgrade to the midsize business and enterprise plan, which starts at $8 a month. The latter is also available at $20/user per month, which adds a subscription to Office Professional Plus 2010 for up to five devices per user, as well as email archiving and unlimited email storage. Both platforms offer free trial periods. Winner: Google Apps for Business costs less. Add-ons and apps Google Apps has its own apps store (not to be confused with the Android Apps Store) in the Google Apps Marketplace. These applications, many also available for mobile devices, integrate with the Google platform. For example, they might allow single sign-on, or add functionality to your calendars, emails, contacts, or documents. By contrast, Microsoft has been slow to the Web, although it still dominates the offline world. Microsoft's Office Store sells apps that integrate with its desktop Office software, not the Web Apps. However, the Office file formats are the default standards for business documents shared with other businesses. An entire industry of developers and service providers helps companies expand on their Microsoft applications, and a great deal of legacy code is designed to work on the Microsoft platform.A Microsoft's offline ecosystem isn't likely to disappear any time soon. If your company has time and money invested in this ecosystem, it makes sense to consider Office 365 for online collaboration, and to be patient while Microsoft improves the feature set. Winner: Google is ahead with its Web ecosystem. Which suite should you choose? For startups and small companies without a great a deal of existing investment in Microsoft Office documents and applications, Google offers a robust and quickly evolving online ecosystem, with broad mobile support. Google Apps is part of a wide Google ecosystem and was born on the Web. Every document--text, spreadsheet, graphic, or presentation--can be instantly published to the Web for public access, or access by a limited group of users. Data can be pulled in from Google's various other applications, including Google Finance, or from easy-to-create online forms. If you're on the fence, ask yourself how important it is for you to edit complex Excel spreadsheets online; if you really need online access to Excel charts, complicated formulas, and fancy graphics, go with Office 365 for Small Business. Otherwise, Google Apps for Business offers the more compelling option.

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