This is part 2 of my comparison between these two suites for families. As such, my focus is on how they help address my particular use-case, family use.
Email is ubiquitous, even in a time of Texting, WhatsApp, Instagram or Facebook. As of today, most online registrations require an email address. This is the reason email support, in addition to support for groups and aliases is very important.
Below is a list of the items I compared and how they faired:
| Feature | GSuite | Zoho | Comments |
| Webmail | X | X | |
| Mobile Support | X | X | Google supports both, google’s integration with mobile devices, and activesync. Zoho only provides activesync. I recommend activesync, even for Google on iOS (this allows for push notifications) since that also brings in your contacts and calendar for Zoho. |
| Desktop support | X | X | Google supports it through its integration with the actual device (I tested it on a Macbook Pro), and POP3 and IMAP. Zoho supports this through POP3 and IMAP only. |
| Aliases | X | X | Both support creating aliases. |
| Send-as Alias | X | X | Both supported, though on GSuite, there are two places were you can have an alias, in GSuite’s admin and in gmail settings. |
| Groups | X | X | Both support groups. Groups are important, because you can use a single email address to distribute incoming mail to multiple users automatically |
| Email Folder sharing | X | This is a big deal. I cannot tell you how many times I had to create a group in order to distribute emails, when a simple Folder share would have sufficed. |
Other considerations:
- Setup and configuration across devices is much easier with GSuite, as easy as a normal Google account. While mobile setup and configuration is equally easy with both, on desktop, GSuite wins because it supports strong integration with Hardware manufactures. With Zoho, on desktop, you need to it up using IMAP.
- On Zoho, groups can be created within the Webmail app. On GSuite, you need to do that on the GSuite admin page.
- GSuite basic and Zoho standard both have a limit of 30GB of email storage. I have the largest email store my family and I’m at 8GB.
With the above in mind, for my purposes, even with the setup complexities, Zoho is good-enough.
Next I will investigate Calendaring.
