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Office 365 vs Symphony comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Office 365
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
152
Ranking in other categories
Content Collaboration Platforms (1st)
Symphony
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Social Software (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Messaging and Collaboration solutions, they serve different purposes. Office 365 is designed for Content Collaboration Platforms and holds a mindshare of 6.8%, down 10.1% compared to last year.
Symphony, on the other hand, focuses on Enterprise Social Software, holds 3.0% mindshare, down 6.6% since last year.
Content Collaboration Platforms Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Office 3656.8%
Box - Intelligent Content Management8.1%
Dropbox Business - Enterprise7.0%
Other78.1%
Content Collaboration Platforms
Enterprise Social Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Symphony3.0%
Slack Business - Enterprise9.6%
Atlassian Confluence7.1%
Other80.3%
Enterprise Social Software
 

Featured Reviews

BasilJiji - PeerSpot reviewer
System engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Collaboration has transformed how our teams work and Copilot now drives faster daily decisions
The interface for the security and compliance center could be simplified. It changes frequently, which can make it somewhat difficult for admins to stay up-to-date on where specific settings are located. The compliance center modification or improvement of Office 365 needs to be introduced. The rest of the features feel acceptable to me. The reason it is not a ten is because of the complexity of managing the vast array of admin settings, which requires a specialized IT team. Even though it meets industry standards for decent security compliance such as SOC and HIPAA, the complexity of managing the admin settings needs to improve.
Nenad Pejcic - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Professional Services Engineer at Aspire Technology
Makes tasks like network planning and performance monitoring much easier
I have experience with solutions from other vendors like Nokia, Huawei, and Tyson. The main pros of Symphony, in comparison, are the modules that provide a comprehensive overview and the automation features for planning data. These aspects are notably beneficial and stand out. On the downside, the major cons revolve around user customization. Unlike other vendors where you can create your reports and customize navigation, Symphony's user optimization in the SCAP module is limited. This lack of flexibility is a significant drawback, especially when compared to other solutions. Overall, while certain modules like those related to SolarWinds are straightforward and comparable, Symphony falls short in terms of user customization.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"If they need to minimize their administration, Office 365 would be an excellent option."
"The most innovative feature of Office 365 is the Power Apps, which allows us to automate literally everything that we want automated."
"Teams is more usable and has a lot more features."
"With Office 365, I have never encountered issues; my experience is entirely positive."
"We use it for documentation management, to collaborate with Microsoft Teams, web calls, web conference calls, chats, and as a documentation repository mainly. We have an Office pack suite to be able to write documentation, make spreadsheets, and create PowerPoints."
"Email transmission has greatly improved since we migrated to Office 365, collaboration with SharePoint and Teams has increased users productivity, downtime is minimal and IT management is very minimal hence we can concentrate on other IT tasks."
"I can recommend Office 365 to people because it allows them to concentrate on their core job while Microsoft handles any problems from the cloud."
"Especially now with Office 365, you can access your files always on the go—you do not have to use your laptop or connect to the company network, and as long as you have a device, even a mobile device, you can actually use it and access your emails."
"The entire product is good, and the number of available features justifies its cost."
"The solution is user-friendly, and it is very good security-wise."
"The overall functions are good."
"I found the RAM Commander module in Symphony to be the most valuable."
"The entire product is good."
"Symphony and Laravel are the most comfortable frameworks for any developer. It is also lightweight."
 

Cons

"I think it would be better if Office 365 enhanced communication about update policies."
"There are many issues with Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange, making it difficult to identify positive aspects."
"The issue arises when I need to ask Microsoft directly for support, and I have had delays, such as with a SharePoint issue that took two weeks to resolve, and another instance where the ticket was mishandled and sent to the wrong queue, which delayed the response even further."
"A need that a company like ours has is that we want to be able to have data flow into one tool, for example, for all the management of tasks through the company and workflow of who is doing what and so on. There are no real solutions for this at the moment in Office 365. It would be nice if they could implement this in the next release, so we can have one solution from one company giving us the whole data and flow of data into the company."
"Currently, Microsoft can improve Office 365 by enhancing the persistence of the user experience from platform to platform and screen to screen, ensuring that wherever you log in, whatever you're doing, everything is still readily accessible and intuitive, as you left it."
"Task management needs to improve."
"The cost is a big challenge. It is really quite expensive and puts quite a strain on our budget."
"I have contacted CrowdStrike for support regarding the same incident, and my experience was pretty bad."
"To improve the situation, enhancing the functionality for integrating with other applications and addressing ticketing issues is crucial."
"The area that needs to be improved is modular asset management. When we are uploading the assets in bulk, it is not aligned."
"The solution is very expensive, and its pricing could be improved."
"The solution needs to improve CI."
"Compared to established vendors, it lacks user flexibility and customization, especially in the PM module."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"For the moment, we are paying on a monthly basis because we are still adapting the support and how we want to proceed. I think we will move to paying for the annual license."
"Most of the time, we purchase Microsoft Exchange licenses, which are less expensive and provide only an email platform and 50 gigabytes of email storage for free."
"The pricing is good for all the features that we receive, e.g., Skype for Business."
"I think that we pay $9.99 USD per user, monthly."
"The pricing is not really high, but one can get the software with the license key for free."
"Licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis, or we prepay them."
"We have a license to use this solution. We have an E3 license which covers many different solutions."
"Licensing, billing, and accounting are available from the management interface."
"Symphony is expensive."
"It's a costly product, but the number of available features justifies it."
"It is fairly an expensive product, but works for us."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Construction Company
15%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
39%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Media Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business62
Midsize Enterprise31
Large Enterprise70
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Office 365?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Office 365 is that it is moderate.
What needs improvement with Office 365?
Office 365 could be improved or enhanced in some ways. It would be better if it were more simple to find the points, or sometimes there are so many possible configurations that it makes you confuse...
What is your primary use case for Office 365?
Teams and Outlook are important for us, and Teams is central to our operations. I utilize Power Automate for streamlining repetitive tasks in our organization, but not for large tasks. For tasks su...
Ask a question
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Also Known As

Microsoft Office 365, Office 365 Enterprise, Office 365 Enterprise E1, Office 365 Enterprise E3, Office 365 Enterprise E5, Office 365 ProPlus, Office 365 Business, Office 365 Business Essentials, Office 365 Business Premium, Office 365 F1
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Me & the Bees Lemonade
BNP Paribas, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Citi, Credit Suisse, JP Morgan Chase
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Google, Dropbox and others in Content Collaboration Platforms. Updated: October 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.