Google Docs vs. Zoho- Head to Head (Part 1)

A reference in my post about Google winning the web apps war, followed by an exchange of comments with Arvind from Zoho, were reasons enough for me to take another poke at Zoho's Writer and Sheet applications. Although I had declared my love for Google Docs over the Zoho alternatives for reasons unknown, the feeling that Zoho had a headstart over google was rooted pretty strongly somewhere in the back of my mind. One of the reasons probably being my love for anything Indian (especially given the virtual non-existence of the country on the web 2.0 map).

Performance
I started with Zoho Sheet, since spreadsheets are my preferred format for documentation over plain (or formatted) text. The first thing that struck me was just how much more responsive it felt as compared to Google Spreadsheets. I had learned to ignore the lag I felt in Spreadsheets as a compromize for using a web app over a desktop one and expected the same, if not more from Sheet. Not done, the Chennai guys seem to believe. Zoho Sheet genuinely feels and responds as smoothly as a Microsoft Excel on my desktop!

A good measure to feel this difference is try and re-size columns and rows. The difference is absolutely huge! That Zoho also allows an input field to define row widths and column heights is just an icing on the cake for someone a compulsive format-freak like me then. Zoho Sheet also feels much faster in nearly every other area like applying cell formatting, copy-pasting or even in the undo and redo actions. It's auto-update also seems smoother than Google's, but that's probably because it is much more un-obtrusive than the ugly red update box in the top-left corner in Spreadsheets.

The same cannot be said about the word processors though. Here, Google's offering seems to be just marginally faster than Zoho's. One of the reasons could be the much simpler interface of Docs as against Writer which - on the surface - makes Zoho Writer seem more feature-full than Google Docs (more on the feature-set later). The difference in performance is negligible though, and not nearly as obtrusive as the lag in Google Spreadsheets (especially noticeable once you have tried Zoho Sheet).

On the performance front - therefore - Zoho is a clear winner for me. The ability to work on an online version of a spreadsheet with the responsiveness of a desktop application is just too much of a killer feature.

A disclaimer here, before I end this post, is that the difference in performance is what I have personally experienced on two computers with Windows 2000 and XP installed, using Firefox 2.0 as the browser. There may be variations in results on other platforms, but I think I'm fair in my observations as long as I'm using the same browser and internet connection for both sets of applications.

In the next post, I will try to compare the features of both sets of applications...