Tougather vs Google Workspace: an honest feature comparison

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Where Google Workspace wins

Starting with the losses, because a comparison without any is an advert.

Live co-editing

Google Docs merges edits character by character; ten people can sit in one paragraph and nobody overwrites anybody. Tougather has a live session — presence, other people's cursors, changes sent as changes rather than snapshots — but sync is per block and last writer wins. It is not a CRDT: two people typing in one paragraph at the same second overwrite each other. Different sections never touch.

Gmail and Calendar

There is no email here and no calendar. Not a thinner version — none. For most people that is the larger half of what they open Google for.

Sharing everybody already understands

Google shares per person, per group and per domain, with an admin console behind it. Tougather shares per link. There is an admin surface — audit log, members, roles, retention, purge with a preview — but it runs only against a real database, and with none configured every call returns a setup notice: an audit log of one browser is a diary, deletable by the person it logs.

What collaboration means here, exactly

Worth being exact, because “real-time collaboration” can mean four different things. A session runs over a relay: server-sent events down, an ordinary POST up. It stores nothing and forgets a room when its last participant leaves. What travels is presence, cursor positions and the blocks you changed.

It opens only for a project you have explicitly shared. A session holds an open event stream while the project is on screen, and a browser allows about six connections to one origin — a room per open project would stop the app loading anything after the sixth tab.

Where it breaks is written down too. The relay's rooms live in one process's memory, so a serverless or autoscaled deployment puts two people in two processes that cannot see each other. The client proves the round trip with a probe before claiming to be live; if that fails, the session drops to BroadcastChannel — other windows of the same browser — and reports the downgrade.

The asynchronous half is stronger. Comments anchor to a block rather than a character range, because a comment pinned to an offset lands on the wrong sentence the first time somebody edits above it. Suggestions are accepted or rejected across blocks nobody has opened.

Four things that work differently

No account

The free plan has no login. Nothing to sign up for and nothing to verify: you open the app and the work goes into this browser's local storage. The counterweight is a backup file that carries every store plus the fonts and pictures kept in IndexedDB, restorable in any browser.

Offline is a state, not a fallback

In Google Docs, offline is a setting you had to switch on before the connection went: Chrome or Edge, the extension, each file marked in advance. Here the work is local to begin with, so the only thing that ever needed a network was the app itself. The service worker handles that: navigations network-first with a cached shell behind them, hashed assets cache-first, and /api/… never cached at all, so a row fetched for one account is not replayed to the next person on that browser. See also how offline mode works in Google Docs.

One project instead of four files

A thesis in Google Workspace is a Doc, a Sheet, a Slides file and whatever whiteboard you settled on — four files that drift apart the moment you copy a number between them. Here they are blocks in one project, and a chart reads from its table by id, so there is one copy of the data. Every table is also a sheet, so Costs!B2:B40 and [Costs]![Amount] address other tables in the same project. A pivot re-derives from its source on every render and is itself a table block, so charts, sorting and export work on it for free.

Files leave in the format they arrived in

Word files are real OOXML both ways: footnotes Word lays out on the page, w:ins and w:del tracked changes it can review, a header with a page field, a table-of-contents field. Spreadsheets read and write .xlsx with sheet-name sanitising and date serials; CSV handles quoted fields, CRLF, a BOM and delimiter sniffing across comma, semicolon, tab and pipe. Decks read and write .pptx with speaker notes.

The gaps sit in the same place. PDF export is window.print() into a clean popup rather than a generated file, and page numbers do not survive it: CSS margin boxes are unimplemented in every shipping engine, so they go into the Word export instead. PDF import does not exist at all.

Side by side

Who should stay on Google

The cases where switching would cost you something real:

• Two of you routinely write into the same paragraph at once. Nothing here compensates for that.
• Gmail and Calendar are the centre of your day — you would keep paying Google anyway.
• An IT department has to approve it. Without a database there is no organisation-wide administration to show them.
• Your sheets run past fifty thousand rows. A hundred thousand is refused outright, and paging rows individually is a different storage model, not a setting.
• You depend on Apps Script, or on reading PDFs where they sit.

Where it fits is narrower: one person, or a small group who mostly work in different sections of the same thing. If the question is broader than this one tool, we keep every comparison in one place, including how Microsoft 365 compares and Notion compared.

Questions people ask