Google Docs vs Quip vs Word Online

I am a huge fan of online document systems that allow real time collaborative editing because they

• Enable two people to work at the same time.
• Remove the need for emailing back and forth with email attachment when working together.
• Enable immediate feedback on documents.

I use Google Docs for my personal use and MS Word Online as well as Quip for professional use. How do they compare in speed and data downloaded? That’s the question I wanted to answer with this post.

I am looking at data downloaded, time taken to completely load the page, and time taken to show content as the three attributes. During loading, each technology will first load data to display the content of the page, and then continue loading other things on the page such as menus, editing options etc.

For each technology, I opened a document with 2 pages of content. I used the same content in all three platforms for consistency. All three talk to their servers on a regular interval or via websockets. I measured the load time from start to the point when the regular ajax or websocket requests start. Times shown are rounded to the nearest second.

There you go! Quip is by far the faster of the three and downloads much less data, but is the slowest to show content during page load. Both Google docs and Word online download the content within a second or two, and then proceed to load the controls.