Outlook vs. Thunderbird

With money tight, I had been going largely open source with software. Instead of Outlook, I’ve been using Thunderbird. But since Origami Risk is part of Microsoft’s BizSpark program, we get Microsoft software for free.

With the cost objection gone, I have been slowly coming back to the dark side (MS Office, that is). I needed to test Word and Excel because Origami reports export to those formats (among others) and using OpenOffice wasn’t a valid test. I love OneNote, so I’m back using that for meeting notes (Evernote was OK but not as nice).

But I didn’t have any real complaint with Thunderbird. So I kept it for a long time.

Today I installed Outlook 2007 to give it a spin. My first reaction was, “damn it’s slow”. Then I went to sync up my Google calendar and contacts. Ouch.

In Outlook you can have an “internet calendar”. Cool, just like Thunderbird. But in Outlook it’s read only. So you could view your Google calendar, but not add to it. Google does have a sync tool for Outlook, so that’s a better option.

But Thunderbird (with the Lightning calendar add-on) simply works as a Google calendar client. It works with regular Google (my personal calendar) and Google apps (Origami Risk calendar). You could argue that there is a downside to that if I have no internet connection, but overall I think it’s preferable.

Thunderbird certainly isn’t pretty. It doesn’t do Tasks as well as Outlook. Did I mention that Outlook is slow? I never really noticed it when I used it all the time, but after using Thunderbird it seems really pokey.

I’m going to play with both for a while. I may go back to the dark side, but so far I’m leaning open source…