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Google Sheets vs Microsoft Excel
Excel goes deeper on statistical and financial modeling on the desktop; Google Sheets wins on real-time collaboration and a direct line into BigQuery.
Side by side
| Google Sheets | Microsoft Excel | |||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Microsoft | |||||||||||||||
| Pricing model | Free tier + paid plans | Subscription | ||||||||||||||
| Free tier | Yes | Yes | ||||||||||||||
| Deployment | Cloud | Cloud | ||||||||||||||
| Open source | No | No | ||||||||||||||
| Best for | Teams needing free or low-cost, real-time collaborative spreadsheets with a direct line into BigQuery. | Analysts and business users who need ad hoc modeling, pivot analysis, and statistical calculations in a familiar spreadsheet. | ||||||||||||||
| Pricing | Free with a personal Google account; paid Google Workspace plans add pooled storage, admin controls, and enterprise features.
Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget. | A limited free web version of Excel is available with a Microsoft account; full Microsoft 365 plans with desktop Excel start at $9.99/month.
Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget. | ||||||||||||||
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Verdict
Most organizations already have both licensed somewhere, so this comparison is less "which one" and more "which one for this job." Microsoft Excel is desktop-first with a genuinely deep analytical toolkit: Power Query for import and transformation, PivotTables and PivotCharts, the Analysis ToolPak for regression and statistical routines, and Power Pivot with DAX for relating multiple large tables in a columnar data model. Google Sheets is cloud-first and built for simultaneous multi-user editing with full revision history, and its distinguishing analytical feature is Connected Sheets — querying live BigQuery tables with billions of rows directly from the spreadsheet, without exporting data or hitting Sheets' own row limits.
Neither is a strict upgrade over the other. If your work is heavy statistical or financial modeling on a dataset that fits comfortably in a spreadsheet, Excel's tooling goes deeper. If your work involves querying a data warehouse at scale, or several people editing the same model simultaneously, Sheets' architecture fits better.
Choose Microsoft Excel if
- You need the Analysis ToolPak's statistical routines, or Power Pivot's DAX-based multi-table modeling.
- Your organization already standardizes on Microsoft 365 and colleagues expect
.xlsxas the default format. - Offline, desktop-first work is the norm rather than the exception for your team.
Choose Google Sheets if
- Multiple people need to edit the same model at the same time with reliable, visible revision history.
- You need to query a BigQuery warehouse with billions of rows directly from a spreadsheet interface via Connected Sheets.
- Your organization is Google Workspace-first and free access with a personal account matters for lightweight or external collaborators.
What they share
Both support pivot tables, built-in charting, data validation, and scripting for custom automation (Apps Script for Sheets, Power Query and VBA-adjacent tooling for Excel), and both now ship AI-assisted analysis features — Sheets' Explore panel, Excel's Copilot integration on paid Microsoft 365 tiers. Files move between the two with reasonable but imperfect fidelity; complex Excel features like Power Pivot models and certain chart types don't always translate cleanly to Sheets and back. See data modeling and Self-service BI for how either fits into a broader analytics stack.
Last reviewed September 22, 2026