Google Sheets vs Excel for Business — Complete Comparison 2027

Pricing Comparison

Google Sheets: Free for personal use. Google Workspace Business starts at $7.20/user/month.

Microsoft Excel: Microsoft 365 Business starts at $6/user/month. Standalone license: one-time $159.99.

For Vietnamese SMEs, Google Sheets wins on cost — the free tier is sufficient for most small businesses, while Excel requires a paid subscription for cloud features.

Collaboration Features

Google Sheets was built for real-time collaboration. Multiple users can edit simultaneously with instant visibility of changes. Comments, suggestions mode, and version history are built-in.

Excel has improved with Microsoft 365 cloud, but collaboration is still not as smooth. File conflicts can occur, and real-time co-editing requires OneDrive/SharePoint.

Formula Power and Performance

Excel remains superior for heavy computation: pivot tables, Power Query, VBA macros, and handling 1M+ rows of data.

Google Sheets excels with QUERY, IMPORTRANGE, GOOGLEFINANCE, and IMPORTDATA functions that have no Excel equivalent. Apps Script automation is more accessible than VBA for beginners.

Performance ceiling: Google Sheets handles up to 10 million cells. Excel desktop has virtually no limit. For datasets above 100K rows, Excel is faster.

Which Should You Choose?

Choose Google Sheets if: your team is under 50 people, you need real-time collaboration, you want free cloud storage, or you are building automated workflows with Apps Script.

Choose Excel if: you handle massive datasets (100K+ rows), need advanced financial modeling, require Power BI integration, or your organization already has Microsoft 365 licenses.

Best of both: Use Google Sheets for daily operations and collaboration, Excel for heavy analysis. SheetStore templates are designed for Google Sheets but exportable to Excel.