Checked September 26, 2026. Based on published pricing pages. Jet Admin publishes this comparison and competes with neither product.
The most common framing of this comparison — free versus paid — is wrong. Both Google Sheets and Excel have free browser versions. Sheets is free with a Google account; Excel is available in a browser at no cost with a Microsoft account.
What you pay for is the desktop application on Microsoft's side, and organizational infrastructure on both. So the decision is about capability and working style, not about whether you can afford a spreadsheet.
At a glance
| Google Sheets | Excel | |
|---|---|---|
| Free option | Free with a Google account | Excel for the web, free with a Microsoft account |
| Individual paid | — | Microsoft 365 Personal — $9.99/month or $99.99/year |
| Household | — | Family — $12.99/month or $129.99/year |
| Premium individual | — | Premium — $19.99/month or $199.99/year |
| Organization entry | Workspace Starter — €6.80/user/month, 30 GB pooled per person | Microsoft 365 Business plans |
| Organization higher | Standard €13.60 (2 TB); Plus €21.10 (5 TB) | Varies by plan |
| Desktop app | No — browser and mobile | Yes, on all paid individual plans |
| User cap | 300 on Starter, Standard and Plus | — |
Sources: Google Workspace pricing and Microsoft 365 plan comparison, checked September 26, 2026.
Two notes on the figures. Google's pricing page served us euros — Workspace prices vary by region, so check yours; Google also lists a 16% annual-commitment saving and promotional first-three-month rates that don't reflect the ongoing price. And Microsoft's business plan pricing wasn't published on the page we read, so the figures above cover individual plans only; check Microsoft's business pricing separately if you're buying for an organization.
Excel is the more powerful tool
This is not close, and pretending otherwise does readers a disservice.
Excel's desktop application handles larger datasets more comfortably, has a deeper function library, and carries decades of analytical tooling — PivotTables, Power Query, Power Pivot, the Analysis ToolPak, VBA. If you do serious financial modelling, statistical work or large-scale data manipulation, Excel is the professional standard for reasons that hold up.
Sheets has closed a lot of ground and has genuine advantages of its own — QUERY, ARRAYFORMULA, IMPORTRANGE and native connections to other Google services are all things Excel users miss when they switch. But at the deep end of analytical work, Excel is ahead.
Sheets is the better collaboration model
Sheets was multiplayer from the start, and the difference shows in the details: no file versions, no "who has it open," no reconciling two copies someone emailed around. Everyone is in the same document, edits appear live, and history is automatic.
Excel has collaborative editing through OneDrive and SharePoint, and it works. But it was added to a desktop application built around files, and that origin is still visible — particularly when someone opens the desktop app on a document others are editing.
Sharing is the other half. A Sheets link works for anyone with a browser, no account or license required to view. Excel sharing is smoother inside a Microsoft-licensed organization than outside it.
Which should you choose?
Choose Excel if you do financial modelling, statistical analysis or heavy data work; if you need the desktop app's power and offline reliability; if your industry runs on .xlsx files and expects Excel-native workbooks; or if your organization is already on Microsoft 365, in which case it's paid for.
Choose Google Sheets if collaboration is the point, if your team is distributed, if you share spreadsheets outside your organization regularly, or if you're already on Workspace and Sheets is included at no marginal cost.
The honest default: use whichever your organization already pays for. Both are capable enough for most work, and the cost of maintaining two ecosystems — or of being the one person on the other platform — usually exceeds any capability gap.
The honest exception: if you personally do deep analytical work, Excel on a $99.99 annual Personal subscription is inexpensive against the time it saves, even in a Google-first organization.
Where Jet Admin fits
Neither is really an alternative to Jet Admin, but there's a pattern worth naming: the spreadsheet that became an application. Most teams have one — a tracker, a pipeline, an inventory — that started as a few columns and is now load-bearing, with formulas nobody wants to touch and one person who understands it.
That's not a Sheets-versus-Excel problem; it's a signal that the work outgrew a spreadsheet. Jet Admin builds an interface over a proper database with permissions and validation. The tell is when you start worrying about someone accidentally overwriting a column, or when you've built approval workflows out of conditional formatting.
For analysis, modelling and anything genuinely spreadsheet-shaped, a spreadsheet is the right tool and no platform should talk you out of it.
Frequently asked questions
Is Excel free?
Excel for the web is free with a Microsoft account. The desktop application requires a paid plan — Microsoft 365 Personal starts at $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year.
Is Google Sheets free?
Yes, with any Google account, and included in every Workspace plan.
Which handles more data?
Excel's desktop application, comfortably. If your datasets are large enough that this is a real question, that answer probably settles it.
Can Sheets open Excel files?
Yes, and it can export back to .xlsx. Complex workbooks — heavy macros, advanced pivot configurations, some formula edge cases — don't always survive the round trip cleanly. Test with a real file before committing to a migration.
Which is better for teams?
Sheets, on collaboration mechanics. Excel has collaborative editing, but Sheets was built for it and shares more easily outside your organization.
What about macros and VBA?
Excel has VBA; Sheets has Apps Script. Both are capable. If you have an existing VBA estate, that's a strong argument for staying on Excel — porting is real work.
Use what you already pay for
For most people this is settled by what's already on the corporate card. Both tools are good, the capability gap only matters at the extremes, and running against your organization's ecosystem costs more in friction than it saves in features.
If you're at one of those extremes — deep analytical work, or a genuinely distributed team sharing constantly — the answer is Excel and Sheets respectively, and it's worth the friction.
And if the spreadsheet in question has quietly become an application several people depend on, that's the point to move it onto a real database with an interface over it.
