Teams and individuals alike flock to Google Docs for the purpose of note-taking, organizing internal documents, planning daily agendas, designing manuscripts, outlining table of contents, creating wiki guides, writing poetry, and beyond. It’s one of the countless online word processors that give you flexibility when it comes to creating and formatting documents, making the lives of those who need to organize and store information a lot easier.
Google Docs is a reliable and commonly used tool for word processing and collaboration, but is it the best tool for your specific needs? But, what are the Google Docs alternatives that can help your productivity in the same fashion?
If you’re part of an organization that houses a lot of data and information, you might need a little more freedom than Google Docs can provide. In that case, you should consider testing the waters with an alternative cloud-based word processor where you not only can communicate with your team but also stay on top of tasks and regulate a substantial amount of files.
If you have a Google email account, people tend to gravitate towards Google Docs as a document editor because it is accessible and familiar.
Google Docs transforms a static piece of paper into a live document where collaboration with colleagues is made possible with the click of a button. This “all-in-one” system makes for a seamless experience when it comes to documenting, revising, organizing, auto-saving, recovering files, and collaborating in real-time.
Yet not much has changed over the years in terms of feature add-ons. Google Docs’ text editor has more or less stayed the exact same, despite document management needs becoming increasingly demanding.
With collaboration tools on the rise, many organizations turn to Slack and Zoom in addition to other internal forms of communication, leaving teams struggling to keep track of various communication tools.
Certain cloud-based services have caught on to the idea that simple text editing and document management requires communication beyond commenting and tagging. Almanac is a prime example of a traditional word processing software transformed to fit the needs of 21st century folks by allowing for collaboration all in one place.
Despite Google Doc’s numerous outstanding features, there’s an abundance of other cloud-based word management tools that offer enhanced security, customization, integrations, embeds, and are overall less restrictive.
Certain platforms are specifically designed to focus on categorizing and sub-categorizing content, while others emphasize customization and transparency. If you’re in need of complete transparency within your team, communication with Google Docs is severely limited, and asset management can have its pitfalls with the product. Why settle for a product that isn’t tailored to fit your exact needs?
With considerable shifts in the way organizations run their business, both internally and externally, asset management is not to be taken lightly. Follow along as we go through an extensive list of Google Doc alternatives, so you can decide for yourself which product is the best fit for you and your organization.
If you’ve scoured the Internet tirelessly for a tool that aligns with what you do and felt like you’ve only come to dead ends or carbon copies, it can be frustrating to go on another exploration to find and learn a new tool, only to be uncertain whether you’ll stick with it.
That’s why we’ve highlighted and expanded on several unique Google Doc alternatives that are sure to increase your productivity and provide peace of mind.
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Almanac is a revolutionary collaborative tool that can house all the information and internal documents for your establishment. It eliminates the tedious process of communicating with employees via third party avenues such as Slack, text, or Zoom, since all messaging, suggestions, feedback, and communication can be done right inside the platform.
Almanac surpasses competitors by not only being an organizational tool, but also offering unique admin capabilities, offering single sign-on, advanced security controls, and user provisioning, so you can assign user identities specific roles and capabilities right in the cloud. And unlike other competitors, Almanac doesn’t charge per user: it segments pricing by number of team members, so you aren’t paying an arm and a leg if you have a substantial number of employees.
This helpful chart highlights the differences between Almanac, Google Docs, and other alternatives:
Almanac offers priority support that is quick and effective. Once you create an account and select your pricing plan, you’ll be assigned a dedicated Community Manager. You’ll also have access to live support via chat in the case that you require immediate assistance.
Another incredible aspect is that you’ll receive a custom contract & invoicing to ensure you’re utilizing the right features at the best cost. And if most of your documents and assets already exist within another system, they offer bulk importing so you don’t have to start from square one.
Curious to learn more? You can start with Almanac’s beta pricing to gain exclusive access to their platform.
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Microsoft Office is a productivity solution with unique offerings fit for small to medium-sized businesses, enterprises, and individuals or families–depending on your plan. Similar to Libreoffice–an open-source word processor for teams–Microsoft Office allows you to draw directly into the platform.
It offers advanced security and compliance, as well as calendar syncing for smooth scheduling. Microsoft Office also has superior editing, formatting, and markup tools, but lacks in collaborative efforts. One thing to note is that Microsoft is constantly updating it’s software, meaning you’ll have to adjust to new changes frequently.
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Notion is a new open-source tool focusing on streamlining workflows and keeping things simple. This innovative task management software features comprehensive formatting tools that will help you create tables, charts, check lists, and calendars.
Notion can be used for individuals to create personal portfolios and case studies, or collaboratively for internal documentation. Simply start typing, then format accordingly.
When it comes to customization and formatting, you’ll find that Notion’s functionalities are slim. And because Notion is at a fair price, encryption of data and information is relatively nonexistent. Your files are not encrypted or secure in a way that other competitive tools can offer.
If you’re looking for a straightforward text management system, Notion will do wonders. But if you are looking for internal collaboration, seamless communication, and enhanced privacy and security, you’ll want to try other platforms like Almanac.
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Read our complete Notion Review.
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Confluence boasts a clean and functional interface with rich text editing and an extensive library of plug-ins. Being a product of Atlassian, Confluence flexes enterprise security and access control.
You can be assured your documents are protected and secured with Confluence, and if you’re looking for templates, confluence has a large template library for all of your documentation needs. You can create, edit, and organize pages and calendars, and create polls to gain a better sense of what your employees lean towards when making internal decisions.
When it comes to collaboration, one drawback of Confluence is real-time updates. When another person is editing a document, users won’t be able to see changes immediately until the user making the changes refreshes the page. And how Confluence nests information can make searching for and locating documents confusing at times.
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Dropbox Paper–a product of Dropbox–is a co-editing tool that is great for collaboration, project planning, and word processing online across web, iOS, and Android. Imagine a continuous sheet of paper that goes on forever, with the ability to embed many of your internal documents. Because of the nature of Dropbox Paper’s structure, the learning curve is extremely easy, so you won’t have to train your employees on how to use it. It’s also a free product, which is a big plus if your team is just starting out.
A few cons of Dropbox Paper are the slightly updated UI. Additionally, sequential sequences for dates and calendaring are a bit scattered. Much like Notion, there are limited choices for highlighting and formatting, which makes it a difficult tool to use if you need to do a lot of customization.
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If your company utilizes Salesforce as an account management tool, Quip (proprietary software) is an efficient way to combine documents, spreadsheets, and communication into one streamlined place all inside Salesforce.
Your team will be able to sync Quip across all of your devices, use Quip offline, and access version histories in the case you need to revisit older files and information. Another robust feature of Quip is the news feed, which enables all users to see and keep up with all changes made to documents and sheets.
While it is easy to use, Quip lacks advanced features and formatting capabilities that makes it not the best fit for complex projects. For example, segmenting teams and getting more granular with notifications can be problematic at times, as team members might receive notifications on subject matters that are irrelevant to them due to lack of capabilities with individual and group mentions.
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Evernote is a functional note-taking app that enables you to create, customize, share, and search notebooks, and collaborate on projects. If you’re one who needs to subgroup and categorize notes on a highly detailed level, Evernote is an organizational-lover's dream.
A distinctive feature of Evernote is the ability to scan handwritten documents, whiteboards, and even business cards to create a personal database of contacts. You can also record and play back audio notes, as well as annotate images and PDFS.
While Evernote is a great note-taking application, permissions can be a bit fuzzy. If notes are pinned within your team, you might not be able to edit unless you are given permission. In addition, there is not much security or password protection on notes or notebooks.
Because of its limitations, Evernote is better suited for taking meeting notes and documenting brainstorm sessions, as opposed to storing important information and knowledge based articles for your business.
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Github is quite different from other collaborative tools listed here as it is primarily for code management, workflow, and hosting. The target audiences are typically developers and programmers, but that doesn’t mean other employees won’t be able to utilize it, too.
What’s phenomenal about Github is the version control and collaboration capabilities, as well as its integration with JIRA to track bugs–providing real-time updates when problems occur. So, if your business does a fair amount of coding, GitHub is likely to be your go to, as it can house and store a ton of data and code.
Please be advised that there’s a steep learning curve when getting to know your way around Github. It is not a beginner-friendly site, you’ll need some team members to be dedicated trainers for your employees in order to get the most out of Github’s features.
Another thing to point out is the security limitations with Github. Private repositories are not that great, so if you have high class data, you might want to keep on searching through other platforms that have more reliable security systems in place.
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Site is an innovative cloud-based solution that advocates playfulness in the workplace. Its user-friendly system is a powerhouse for garnering documents and fostering team connections. Employees will have their own account and receive updates specifically tailored to their workflow, tasks, and agenda.
Despite Slite’s impressive interface and functional attributes, some shortcomings of the platform include importing and exporting limitations, as well as difficulty creating automatically updated and discoverable knowledge bases.
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Read our complete Slite review
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Slab is a unique platform designed to help teams access shared knowledge, learn, and edit all in one place. It’s a great option for companies who want to make it easy on all of their employees–including those who are non-tech–when it comes to documenting, communicating, and accessing all files within an organization.
That being said, Slab doesn’t allow much personalization when using tables: you’re unable to set column sizes or ratios, and like Notion and other platforms, styling is also limited. There are no custom fonts or colors, so branding is narrow.
Additionally, permissions aren’t granular, meaning administration permissions can be abused. Those in charge must proceed with caution when granting access, as admins can demote other admins and limit their permissions.
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Monday.com has intuitive and playful color-coding features to help with prioritization. Additionally, you can assign tags to specific teams or people. So, this is a great performance tool that can integrate with your existing tools efficiently.
Monday.com also provides automation for repetitive tasks like sending out weekly newsletters or reminders to your employees to complete any daily or weekly assignment.
So, the system can label low, medium, and high priority tasks. Yet, users are unable to add a specific completion percentage of a task to notify other members of how complete a specific team task. This issue can confuse users on what is still needing to be done.
Time-tracking on projects can also be difficult to manage. Tracking how much time is spent on each task is tricky. Moreover, the platform can be a little finicky when there is a lot of information to display. Plus, notifications can be a bit overwhelming as notification setting options are limited.
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ClickUp has an upper hand when compared with other similar platforms since it can track time automatically and manually, can give time estimates, and time reporting for all tasks. There’s total customization for fields, statuses, assignees, hot keys and shortcuts, as well as real-time editing and mentions and a two-way calendar sync.
They also offer free training and 24-hour support to ensure you make the most out of their services.
Unfortunately, coordinating with other team members through avenues such as commenting and mentions often get lost.
The sharing feature doesn’t always work, and sometimes their information architecture makes it difficult to discover certain information. The learning curve can also be a challenge, so non tech-savvy individuals might find it troublesome to navigate.
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Nuclino (proprietary software) is sufficient if your team is small, and you don’t need to utilize it for much more than onboarding. However, fonts and colors for branding are limited. So, it’s not a great source if you have a big database and hundreds of documents.
Also, file sharing and management is simplistic, auto-saving and collaborative editing is efficient, and you can do surveys, receive notifications, and automate workflow.
As an internal knowledge base, Nuclino is a reliable organizational tool where you can download files directly, and link external documents, but embedding large content such as a table is taxing as you cannot control width and scrolling can get messy. Exporting can also be problematic.
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Zoho (proprietary software) is a unique and powerful suite of software providing a complete
customer relationship management solution for growing businesses and enterprises. Much like Quip, Zoho is another Salesforce optimization tool that helps deal with lead management, deal management, contact management, and workflow automation.
Eliminate manual work and create automated tasks and emails in order to connect with your client.
Zoho is more of a management system than an internal documentation and collaboration system. It hasn’t quite reached the level of UI that competitors like Almanac or ClickUp have. Zoho Doc’s navigation can be a bit tricky and has comparable limitations to Google Docs.
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Coda is a spreadsheet-forward product that can help you launch your own products, scale small businesses, study for tests, etc. It offers customizable views and dark-mode integration with Gmail, Slack, and Zapier. Automation for row creations and actions can help streamline processes and save time.
Where Coda thrives in certain departments, it lacks in other areas, including its UI. Current customers note that UX can be improved, and formulas aren’t very intuitive compared with Excel and other spreadsheets.
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Now that we’ve served you up (maybe too much) information on collaborative text editors and file and task management applications, you might be wondering what option is right for you or your business.
Whether Gmail is your email service provider or not, going the extra mile to research and experiment with other cloud-based technologies for your organization is worth it if it means creating more efficiency and productivity within your workplace.
With the wide range of competitors out there that offer superior formatting capabilities, customization, feedback, group, and 1-on-1 communication, it’s easy to find a better fit than Google Docs. There are more than enough options out there to fulfill your internal repository and organizational needs, it really depends on what the needs of your company are–and those might even change over time.
Almanac goes above and beyond with its communication features, integrations, and admin control functions. Almanac is your best option for running projects for yourself and your organization.
