Outlook vs. Gmail: How to choose the best email service

Do you spend a lot of time sifting through emails every day? A 2021 Adobe research shows that Americans spend 149 minutes daily checking work emails. That’s more than 5% of the day.

An efficient email service with helpful features can save you precious time. 

Gmail and Outlook are both popular email services that individuals and businesses use. While both are good in many ways, let’s compare them to understand what fits your requirement.

Table of Contents

1. The basics

2. Comparison of features

3. Which’s better for you? 

Outlook and Gmail: The basics

Gmail is an email service owned by Google and part of Google Workspace. In contrast, Microsoft owns Outlook email, and it’s included in the Microsoft 365 suite. 

Both Gmail and Outlook provide an email address and an interface to access your emails. That means they work as mail servers, letting you check your emails on the browser, personal computer, or mobile. 

Outlook vs. Gmail: Comparison of features

It’s essential to compare the cost and features of Outlook and Gmail to choose the right email service.

Cost

Both Outlook and Gmail are free for personal use. 

However, the Outlook desktop app isn’t free. You have to subscribe to Microsoft 365 to install Outlook on your PC, and the personal plan is priced at $6.99 per month. 

For business, Outlook offers a web-based subscription priced at $6 per user per month, while the desktop-based plans start at $12.50 per user per month.

When it comes to Gmail, there’s no official desktop app. And if you want to use Gmail for your business, you can get a Google Workspace account that starts at $6 per user per month. 

Storage

Both Outlook and Gmail offer 15 GB of storage. However, Google’s 15 GB storage is shared across Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos. In the case of Outlook, the 15 GB is available exclusively for Outlook.com.

You may increase your storage by upgrading to Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.

Email interface

Outlook organizes emails into folders and subfolders. It resembles the file organization of files and folders in a PC. In contrast, Gmail offers labels and categories to manage your emails. Gmail also categorizes your emails into tabs like “promotions” and “social.”

Gmail and Outlook let you customize the email interface in many ways:

• Use themes to customize colors and fonts
• Customize the inbox layout
• View email conversations in a thread 
• Use a custom email signature

Gmail has more extensive customization options compared to Outlook. But, Outlook works well if you want a clean and straightforward interface. 

Security

Gmail and Outlook have many features to enhance security, like:

• Two-step authentication
• Spam detection
• Enabling trusted/verified senders

In addition, Gmail lets you see when your email account was last used, which isn’t present in Outlook. 

Gmail vs. Outlook: Which’s better for you? 

Both Gmail and Outlook are secure email services with great features. 

Outlook is a natural choice if you use other Microsoft products like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. But if you’re more comfortable with the Google counterparts, Gmail will be a better option.