Switching from GOOGLE DOCS - 3 Full Featured alternatives

I looked at alternatives to replace Google Search, Chrome, as well as Google Maps and GMail. There is one service where Google has put a lot of focus lately, especially towards businesses, and that's Google Docs. Let's take a look at some alternatives !

Google Docs Google Docs might be the least privacy invasive of Google's various offerings. It's also fast, easy to use, has nicely designed templates, it supports extensions, and its interface is coherent.

The major concern on Google Docs stems from its terms of service, which indicate that everything you create might be modified, redistributed and generally used by Google.

Fortunately, there are alternatives to Google Docs. Let's look at a few of them !

Zoho Docs Zoho provides a complete office suite, with a word processor, spreadsheet application, and presentation creator. They are called respectively Writer, Sheet, and Show. The first thing you'll notice is that their interfaces don't look like each other. Writer has its own sidebar on the left with formatting options, Sheet looks just like Google Sheet, and Show looks like its own thing, with a sidebar on the right. This is not a big problem, but consistency is clearly not a priority here.

The Zoho docs applications can also be accessed offline, and let you sync which documents you want to access without a connexion.

A free Zoho account will net you 5GB of storage for your documents, with syncing to the desktop, file versioning, two factor authentication, collaboration features, dropbox integration, and an in-app chat.

The big problem here is that you need a Zoho docs account to edit or view said document. Sharing a link is limited to premium users. Every one of your documents can be synced to your desktop through Zoho Desktop Sync, an app available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

MS Office Online (Office 365) It is not as full featured as the "real" MS office suite. The applications are simple, and light, with only the basics available online. Microsoft still has to sell its subscription to Office 365 and the full Office programs, so they intentionnaly limit what you can do here, but for most people, this should largely be enough.

There were no features that I felt were missing from Office Online to allow me to do what I tried to. MS Office Online doesn't have any offline access though, which is a bummer, compared to Google Docs, which can be accessed even without a connexion.

Your document can be synced to your desktop through OneDrive, but that's not available natively on Linux, although some third party clients are starting to work reliably and with a GUI.

Office Online doesn't have a paid tier, as long as you pay, you get the full Office 365, but in installable format, so only compatible with Windows and Mac OS X, the web applicati ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGEV8ftNUSc