DfE funded digital platform: G suite or office 365?

[BitchyHen]

Does anybody have experience of G suite for Education of Office 365 Education? Head has asked me to look in to whether it's worth applying for funding and setting up.
We are a KS4 PRU with up to 48 places with 5 teachers.
I'm thinking that it might be helpful to have a platform going forward as we always have a few school phobic students, however when we have used something like this before (Edlounge) we found it wasn't really suitable for us.
Any advice would be appreciated

We use Office 365. Teams is good at the moment, as it allows us to have individual class groups and use all of the rest of the Office suite within this. Office 365 also allows all pupils to download the Office apps and use them on their own devices (including offline, I believe), which we find helpful in normal times for typing coursework assignments, etc. I would say the major downside we've had recently is because so many pupils and teachers are trying to get online at once, we're having sporadic issues with pupils and teachers not being able to access assignments or quizzes but these are possibly due to the fact that we are accessing it through Glow (Scotland's [theoretically] country-wide system). It's definitely not perfect, but I anticipate that Microsoft will put a lot more time and money into developing the platform now that it's being so widely used/heralded.

I don't have experience of the Google platform, but my sister uses it in a different Local Authority and she says it seems very similar to Teams, so not sure you can really go wrong between the two of them.

We have google, in terms of a cloud (google drive) where all docs can be stored and accessed via your email and we decide who can access / who they're shared with. Only downside is I don't like the actual google docs to work on which many do, so it might be just me.

I've personally got 365 office (not education) and like the fact it's using the same programmes and you save to a cloud. I'm not sure how it works in a shared setting; I seem to be able to send people links to my docs that they can access.

They evaluated google drive and 365 and decided on google for some reason I don't actually know. But we are primary so not sure if 365 would offer more in the way of the actual programmes too.

From a user perspective (teacher and student) I find G suite much, much easier to handle. Very straightforward and intuitive. The Microsoft package is more convoluted and you (again, both teacher and student) need to be a bit more tech savvy.

Don’t do what our school is doing and use both... does my head in!

Thank you for your replies. This is really helpful.