Tougather vs Microsoft 365: what you get, what you give up

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Where Microsoft 365 is better

A comparison with no losses in it is an advertisement. Each of these was checked against the code.

Excel, past a certain point

The spreadsheet has 167 functions in one merged library, eleven of them finance and fifteen statistics. Nine are absent on purpose. RAND and RANDBETWEEN, because a cell that changes on every render cannot be compared with what it said a second ago. UNIQUE, SORT, FILTER and TRANSPOSE, because each spills into cells you did not select and there is no spill model here. INDIRECT and OFFSET, because they assemble a reference out of text while the sheet runs, blinding the cycle guard. And VBA: there are no macros.

The ceiling is measured, not estimated. At 50,000 rows a table opens in 0.56 seconds and a keystroke lands in 118 milliseconds. At 100,000 the browser refuses the write — 6.8 MB is past what it holds — and a bar across the app says the work is no longer being saved. Excel does just over a million rows a sheet. For that one component, see spreadsheets specifically, versus Excel.

Outlook: mail and the calendar

No email, no calendar. Not a thin version, not a roadmap item. For most people that is the larger half of what Outlook is, and it is why our own about page says this is not a replacement for Microsoft 365. Price a switch as keeping your mail where it is.

Teams, and two people in one paragraph

Chat exists as a model: channels, DMs, threads, private channels behind a passcode. The transport shipped under it is simulated, with scripted peers. Live editing is real but narrow — a session opens only for a project you explicitly shared, and sync is per block and last-writer-wins rather than a CRDT. Different sections never collide. The same paragraph at the same second does.

Administration an IT department can sign off

Admin is real here — audit log, members, roles, retention, purge with a preview — and works against a configured database only. With none, every call returns a setup notice explaining why: an audit log of a browser is a log of one person's own actions, kept and deletable by that person. Single sign-on is a hand-off, not an implementation, and there is no SCIM. Provisioning two thousand students describes Microsoft's product, not this one.

Desktop applications

Word and Excel open a file from your disk with no network involved. Here there is an installable PWA: navigations are network-first, so offline you get the last known shell, and anything under /api is never cached, so one account's AI answer cannot be replayed to whoever opens the browser next. No native build exists. Both sides are in keeping documents editable offline.

Where one workspace wins

One document model instead of four files

A project is not a file. It opens as one canvas of blocks, in nine kinds: text, table, chart, slides, code, image, bibliography, contents and form. A chart holds the id of the table it reads from, so the two are one piece of data seen twice, not a spreadsheet and a picture of a spreadsheet that stopped agreeing in March. The contents page is derived on every render and never stored. Footnotes number themselves in document order. Figure and table captions run as two sequences and renumber when you insert one in the middle.

One subscription, not a seat for everyone who opens a file

Microsoft 365 is licensed per person. Pro here is €14 a month and is not billed per seat. What it buys is the AI allowance — 3,000 credits a month and then metered, against the free plan's 200. Projects, boards, sources, citations, version history and Word and PowerPoint import all work on the free plan today. Team is €24 a seat, 6,000 credits pooled. An invariant in the config keeps that honest — a plan's allowance is worth less than the plan, so seats can never be a cheaper way to buy credits.

It opens with no account

The free plan has no login. Your workspace lives in the browser, which is the whole promise and the whole risk: browsers evict best-effort storage under pressure without warning. So the app asks for persistent storage, says how much room is left before it matters, and exports everything — fonts and pictures in IndexedDB included — to one file you can restore anywhere. A view link puts the document in the URL fragment, which is never sent to a server.

Real .docx, .xlsx and .pptx, in and out

Import reads .docx including footnotes and w:ins/w:del tracked changes, which arrive as proposals you accept or reject one at a time. It reads .xlsx and .pptx, and CSV with quoted fields, CRLF, a BOM and delimiter sniffing across comma, semicolon, tab and pipe. Export writes real OOXML rather than Word-flavoured HTML with a .doc extension: footnotes at the foot of the page, tracked changes reviewable in Word, a header and footer with a PAGE field, a TOC field. One gap on the way in: PowerPoint import drops theme, images, positioning and animations and keeps text, bullets and speaker notes, because a half-copy of a layout looks broken.

Side by side

Six of these twelve rows go to Microsoft. The same exercise against Google is in the same comparison against Google Workspace.

What each one costs

Microsoft's price depends on the plan and the country, so take it from their page. This side is fixed. Free is €0 and includes 200 AI credits a month, which stop rather than becoming an invoice. Pro is €14 a month. Team is €24 a seat, so five seats is €1,440 a year and twenty is €5,760. Metered AI is €3 per 1,000 credits, marked provisional and rendered with a visible marker until usage data sets it.

And what a comparison page ought to admit: you cannot pay us yet. Every Stripe price ID is null, on purpose — an invented one would look configured and fail at the counter. The free plan is what runs today.

Who should not switch

Stay on Microsoft 365 if your workbook runs macros, if you work past fifty thousand rows, if two of you edit the same paragraph at once, if your institution needs SSO, or if Outlook is the reason the licence exists. Those are consequences of keeping your work in your own browser, not gaps being quietly closed.

Who this is for: a student whose thesis numbers, chapters and defence deck keep drifting apart, and a four-person company paying five licences to write one proposal. All our tool comparisons has the full set, and the formulas you'd use in either tool work the same on both sides of that table.

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