Best Google Docs Alternatives in 2024
After Google Docs first came out in 2006, it quickly transformed the way we collaborate. No more attaching files to your emails. No more Report_v15.docx. No more having to hit "Save" every few minutes. People were eager to leave the cluttered and confusing interface of Microsoft Word behind and embraced the intuitiveness of Google Docs.
Today, it's hard to imagine life without the convenience of real-time document collaboration.
But Google Docs is not without its shortcomings, and there are many reasons why you may be looking for a Google Docs alternative. Fortunately, technology has come a long way in the past decade, and there are many excellent options to choose from.
Top 5 Google Docs alternatives
To make your decision easier, we've put together a list of 5 best alternatives to Google Docs:
Each one of these tools comes with its own unique strengths and feature sets. Depending on what you like and dislike about Google Docs, some of these tools may fit your needs better than others.
Learn more about your options and find the best Google Docs alternative for you and your team.
1. Nuclino
Nuclino is a lightweight and fast alternative to Google Docs. It has everything most users love about Google Docs – real-time collaborative editing, auto-save of changes, version history, comments, and more. The formatting options are less extensive, as Nuclino prioritizes the ease and speed of the editing experience and helps you keep your documentation consistent.
It stands out among other Google Docs alternatives thanks to its unique approach to organizing content. Instead of disconnected docs in separate folders, Nuclino allows you to link related pages together like in a wiki. Users can structure their documentation like their own internal Wikipedia, making it easy to discover relevant information. Simply type @ inside a document to easily link it to other related content.
But Nuclino is more than just a document collaboration tool. The list, board, table, and graph views allow you to organize your content visually, adapting the tool to your workflow. This flexibility makes Nuclino a great tool for knowledge sharing, sprint planning, employee onboarding and offboarding, business memos, and much more. It works like a collective brain, allowing you to bring all your team's work together in one place and collaborate without the chaos of files and folders, context switching, or silos.
Nuclino also offers built-in visual collaboration and allows you to add an infinite collaborative canvas to any document. You can use it to create diagrams and flowcharts, brainstorm ideas using sticky notes, build moodboards, and much more.
Nuclino is tightly integrated with Google Drive, making it a great Google Docs replacement for teams that still use Google Sheets, Slides, and Drawings.
Nuclino also comes with an AI-powered assistant called Sidekick that can help you with various aspects of the writing process. Sidekick can help you generate images, come up with ideas, create first drafts, improve your writing, summarize long documents, and more.
What users say about Nuclino:
"I use Nuclino to document the projects I work on. It serves as a wiki for the project which helps anyone joining the project at later stages understand what was done during the design process, and why certain decisions were made. It is definitely a big step up from using Google Docs and Google Sheets which gets very messy during the course of a project."
— Capterra review (read more reviews of Nuclino)
2. Quip
Quip is a team collaboration software that combines documents, spreadsheets, checklists, presentation slides, and chat in one tool. While Quip is more expensive than most other alternatives, it can replace not only Google Docs but the entire Google Drive, Slack, and other online collaboration tools.
All Quip documents include a chat section where you can easily discuss the content with your team. This allows you to keep all discussions organized in one place and preserve the context of every decision.
Quip does not offer the same advanced formatting and customization features as Google Docs. However, if you are not looking to create documents with complex layouts, the Quip editor should be more than enough. And what it lacks in formatting features, it makes up for in extensive collaboration features and rich content embeds.
A notable feature of Quip is its close integration with Salesforce, allowing you to link it with your Salesforce account and integrate your data with Quip's live documents and spreadsheets.
What users say about Quip:
"Quip is a great collaboration tool that is something similar to Slack, Google Docs and Google Sheets all wrapped up into one."
3. Zoho Docs
Zoho Docs is a part of Zoho Office Suite, which quite closely matches the functionality of Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) and even exceeds it in many regards.
The editor includes highly advanced formatting options, allowing you to design beautiful documents with custom layouts and your company branding. Its editor makes it a solid competitor not just to Google Docs but also to MS Word.
These powerful features come with a bit of a learning curve. While the layout is simple and clean, it includes numerous hidden menus and may not seem intuitive to new users.
What users say about Zoho Docs:
"Zoho Docs provides feature parity with Google Docs and improves it in many respects. As always with Zoho products, I was pleasantly surprised at the features provided for free."
4. Microsoft Office 365
Before Google took the world by storm, Microsoft ruled the market, and it remains a decent alternative to Google Docs and other Google Workspace products. With the launch of the cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 (which includes the online versions of all Microsoft apps, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), it firmly positioned itself as an enterprise-grade Google Docs competitor.
Google Docs’ minimalist approach certainly has its place, it's what makes it so great for simpler, informal document collaboration. On the other hand, Word undeniably offers a much wider range of document creation and editing features. Its interface may be more complex and cluttered than that of Google Docs, with numerous toolbars and tabs, but it also offers significantly more flexibility and freedom when it comes to formatting your documents.
All in all, Microsoft remains one of the most popular business productivity platforms, and not without reason. If your organization is already powered by other products in the Microsoft suite, transitioning from Google Docs to Word should not be difficult.
What users say about Office 365:
"Microsoft 365 has been around for a long time and it has been consistent. There's no big learning curve and they still have most of the features that the older version I learned 20 years ago has. This is great compared to other programs like Google Docs that has fewer features and is harder to use."
5. OnlyOffice Docs
Like Quip and Office 365, OnlyOffice offers a full suite of business productivity apps. It includes a collaborative document editor which can easily serve as a Google Docs alternative.
OnlyOffice Docs stands out among other solutions on this list because it can be self-hosted. It's a free and open-source alternative to Google Docs that gives you full control over your content. A free cloud-based version is also available, leaving the choice up to you.
Like Microsoft Word, the editing experience offered by OnlyOffice is powerful but complex, so be prepared to invest some time in learning all the quirks of the tool.
What users say about OnlyOffice:
"Overall, OnlyOffice is a game-changer. It is a viable alternative to mega cloud corporations like Google and Microsoft. It's nice to have your own private server with control of your data. It runs fast on both desktop and in the browser."
Find the right Google Docs alternative for you
New alternatives to Google Docs pop up all the time, and there is a reason for that. When Google Docs first launched, it was a refreshingly lightweight and modern alternative to MS Word. Today, it often falls short when it comes to ease of use and speed.
While choosing between all these options may seem overwhelming at first, it's an opportunity to find a solution that better matches your team's unique needs. We hope this list has made the decision a little easier.
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