OneDrive vs. Google Drive, a brief comparison

Google Docs and Microsoft OneDrive are both excellent office suites that offer many positives (and a few negatives) for classroom use.

I like that OneDrive integrates itself with Office Online – it is nice to be able to create/edit word documents, powerpoints, etc. from the cloud. Microsoft Office is a piece of software that most students and teachers are very familiar with, so it might not have as steep a learning curve as Google Docs could have. As well, you can see a list of recent documents that you have worked on in Microsoft Office anywhere else you have been working, which is a positive.

On the other hand, OneDrive has a few downsides – it is optimized for Windows devices – Windows Phones, tablets, and PCs. While there are applications available for other platforms, they are not nearly as complete as those created for the Windows platform.  As well, with regards to online storage, Microsoft OneDrive only offers 7 GB of free space, with a maximum 2 GB file size, which can fill up pretty quickly if it is being used for any type of media storage.

On the other hand, Google Drive offers 15 GB of free space, which, while not a ton more, is more than double the space offered by Microsoft, and that can be seen as a huge ‘selling’ feature. The other positive about Google Drive is that it seems as though they have done a better job of optimizing their suite for all of the platforms, as I would consider the iOS version to be as fully featured as that for the Chromebook or the Android platform.

On the downside, while Google Drive can be used to organize files, there is no way to upload documents automatically, which is a feature that OneDrive offers. This can be an issue, as having a shared photostream/document stream can be extremely convenient.

Unfortunately, my board has settled on the Google Drive software suite, which means that I likely won't get the opportunity to do much with Microsoft OneDrive, which is unfortunate because, while a bit more limited now, it seems as though Microsoft is definitely trying to 'one up' Google here.