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My company recently tried to find an alternative to Google Workspace. We looked at Hey and really liked it. However, they lacked a calendar and we felt trainin
by minton 5y ago
My company recently tried to find an alternative to Google Workspace.
We looked at Hey and really liked it. However, they lacked a calendar and we felt training some of our less technical users would be too much effort.
We tried ProtonMail (Business account) but ran into these issues:
- no shared Calendar
- no way to enforce MFA
- no way to enforce a password policy
- no way to forward emails (except manually) so we can use Zapier
- no way to help employees with password resets
In the end we just stayed with Google as we couldn’t find a competitor with matching services.
- forbiddenvoid 5y agoCurious: Did you evaluate MS Office? I feel like Microsoft gets left out of a lot of these conversations because of a cult-like 'M$ is bad' culture in SV, but a lot of people I've talked to haven't even used or tried their products in years if ever.
- kwanbix 5y agoI use both. Google Workspace at work and my personal account which I got free at the time, and Office 365 Family. Gapps is very good. It does probably 100% of what 90% of the people need. Same for Office. My only grip with Office is that in Android, the integration seems to be less polished than that of Google. The advantage for Office is the family plan that for about 50~100 euros per year gives you 6 accounts. Something similar for Google Workspace will be 300~360. And if you must have office desktop, that is the cheapest way.
- minton 5y agoWe looked at Microsoft’s offering, but IT felt the administration burden was too high even compared to Google Workspace.
- yonixw 5y agoI had a similar experience searching for MS Office\Google Docs self-hosted alternative. While evaluation ONLYOFFICE, I found that they don't have RTL support (for over 4 years: https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/issues/19 https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/issues/19)
- yosito 5y agoDid you look into Nextcloud? If you don't have the expertise to maintain it in-house, you might have to pay for a managed instance, but it's been a pretty solid replacement for Google services for me.
- josefresco 5y agoDid you evaluate Zoho or Office365?
- minton 5y agoWe looked briefly at Zoho but the founder didn't trust the brand for whatever reason. Office365 seemed like too much a burden on IT to setup and configure everything properly. Also, we're trying to move away from these “suite” type offerings that come with a ton of tools. We just want email and calendar.
- bredren 5y agoFwiw, zoho’s brand logo has needed an update since the crm launched. The child blocks don't scream professionalism.
- pjerem 5y agoIt looks like Fastmail checks all your needs (not sure about password policy) and it’s a fantastic product. It deserves the « fast » in its name and the webmail as well as the calendar are really great (and fast, too). It’s one of those rare products you can feel that they have been crafted with a lot of love.
- callahad 5y agoLove Fastmail, and use it both personally and at work, but in business contexts the shared calendaring situation is dire. No free/busy scheduling aids at all.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- grammers 5y agoDid you take a look at Tutanota? Very similar & it does have shared calendar, enforce 2FA and password reset for employees. But not sure about mail forwarding.