Acrobat.com Vs Google Docs

On 15Th June Adobe has announced that it has moved Acrobat.com out of beta.


Those of you who do not know what Acrobat.com is ,it is an online collaboration tool to create and share documents ,communicate in real time and simplify working with others.It was first launched in June 2008 which included a collaborative word processing application called Buzzword.Recently it has added two new products namely Presentations and Tables to Acrobat.com .It offers two new paid subscription services that add capacity and capabilities for intensive business use .


Google provides all the above features plus many more free of cost as part of google docs . Acrobat.com table provides basic table functionalities where as Google spread sheet provides all the functionalities of a spreadsheet .I tried creating a large table on Acrobat.com table and compared the same with Google spread sheet and found that the performance in Acrobat.com table was really poor .You might go for Acrobat.com tables if your data size is very less .While Adobe might provide a better look and feel with its rich user interface google docs delivers more in feature and performance.

Recently google labs launched another product called Fusion Tables for managing large collections of tabular data in the cloud.Using Fusion Tables you can upload tables up to 100 MB and work with them.You can even visualise it on maps and other charts and can use it for collaboration with several levels of granularity.

While Adobe plans to extend the functionality of Acrobat.com over the next year to provide simple ,anywhere access to an open and comprehensive online workspace ,Google docs still remains my favourite.

Also Adobe will have to compete with several other competitors in the online document collaboration market such as Zoho and TextFlow.