HUGO vs Google Docs

A Google Docs alternative
for team meetings, notes, and tasks

Discover Hugo, the meeting management platform built with one goal: to make every meeting worth it.

30,000 + of the world’s best teams and professionals enjoy more productive meetings with Hugo

Feature by feature comparison

Calendar & UX
Calendar-Based Meeting Notes
Intuitive Dashboard
  • Consolidate meetings and tasks in one place
  • Drive best practices and builds good habits for individuals
Meeting Notes & Knowledge Management
Comprehensive Search
Identify Related Documents Based on Common Elements
Task Management
Basic Task Management Capabilities
Track Tasks Based on Assignee, Meeting Title, Meeting Attendee, Tag
Integrations
Calendar & Video: Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams

All platforms

Google Meet

Slack
Project Management

Asana, Clickup, Confluence, Github, Jira, Todoist, Trello

Various options

CRM

Salesforce, Hubspot, Copper, Freshsales, Pipedrive

Limited CRM app integrations exist, but Google Docs open text format is generally not suitable for CRM fields.

Support & Service Desk

Freshdesk, Jira service desk, Zendesk

No native integrations

Zapier-Enabled Workflows
Pricing
Free Plan
Paid Plan Pricing

PRO

$6/user (annual) | $8/user (monthly)

BUSINESS TIER

$12/user with volume discount

BUSINESS STARTER

$6/user (monthly)

BUSINESS STANDARD

$12/user (monthly)

BUSINESS PLUS

$18/user (monthly)

ENTERPRISE TIER

Non-transparent pricing

Start having better meetings with Hugo today

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Portrait illustration of 2 users

3 Key Differences Between Google Docs and Hugo

Hugo is purpose-built for meetings, notes, and tasks.

If your intent is to draft a range of collaborative documents for all sorts of company purposes, then Google Docs has set the bar for quality and performance. If your goal is to help your team run better meetings with shareable and customizable agenda templates, real-time note taking and task assignment, and follow-up trackability of notes and tasks, then Hugo is the way to go. Every one of Hugo’s many features is designed to help users save time and run more productive meetings.

These are two fundamentally different products that both serve an aspect of information management for forward-thinking companies. Many teams may even consider using both products to support their holistic needs.

Dashboard screenshot

Welcome to your new meeting home on hugo.team. With one quick view, take in your day's meetings, notes, and tasks.

Hugo syncs with your calendar to help you stay organized.

Hugo integrates directly with your Google Drive / Google Calendar or Office 365 / Outlook / Microsoft Teams-based calendar. This makes it fast and easy to pull in your meetings, set agendas, and take notes. Everything is auto-organized based on your calendar event data, including who is at the meeting and what company they’re at.

Google Docs, on the other hand, stores notes in folders. This can quickly become tedious and unwieldy when trying to manage team meeting notes across internal and external meetings with a range of meeting participants requiring varying degrees of view or edit access. The reliability of the meeting data in Google Docs then depends on each participant’s willingness to not only annotate, but to make sure the information is shared with the right individuals in appropriately accessible locations. Hugo auto-organizes notes and task sharing based on event attendees as a starting point. 

hugo calendar

View your tasks and meetings side by side. Assign pre or post-meeting work to yourself or others and stay on top of your work week.

  • Simple dashboard & navigation - The product home screen, which is easily accessible with the Chrome extension, features a quick summary of your events, documents, and tasks for the day. This drives best-practices and builds good habits for individuals to prepare for their meetings with agendas and complete outstanding meeting tasks. 
  • Calendar design - The familiar calendar design on the left side of the screen facilitates easy access of your meetings in a chronological format that’s readily understood.
  • Attendee data - From any detail screen of a calendar meeting, you can quickly view attendee data and ascertain whether they are team members or outside guests. These details  support a better approach for when and how to share documents and tasks for every type of meeting, internal and external.
  • Unified view of documents and tasks - Hugo’s calendar detail pages facilitate quick viewing and editing of meeting documents and tasks. This is incredibly useful for efficiently taking notes and follow-up action items during a meeting or reviewing them afterwards.
  • Faster task creation, assignment and tracking - Tasks can be created anytime from the right hand panel of a meeting. You can assign due dates and task participants with just a few clicks. 

Google Docs doesn’t help before, during, or after the meeting. Hugo does.

Before the meeting, Hugo helps you prepare with agenda templates and pre-meeting tasks. Leverage 80+ best practice templates or customize your own. Create collaborative team agendas where participants update their own portion with text or meeting-purposed blocks like form fields, surveys, or asynchronous Loom videos. 

During the meeting, collaborate in real-time on the agenda just as you would in a Google Doc. Mark follow-up action items in the tasks menu on the right and assign them with due dates. Keep track of tasks for yourself and others in Hugo's dedicated task management view. Users can also view all their tasks from Hugo’s dedicated menu and search for notes using the comprehensive search functionality.

Task screenshot

After the meeting, send your notes to Slack, Asana, Salesforce, or other leading collaboration platforms with Hugo’s 20+ native integrations. Collectively, Hugo’s investment in supporting direct integrations reflects a commitment to supporting best-in-class software solutions for teams. Integrations are first-class citizens as part of the Hugo platform and can be prominently leveraged both in and off platform.

  • Chat - Slack, Teams
  • CRM - Salesforce, Hubspot, Copper, Freshsales, Pipedrive
  • Project Management - Asana, Clickup, Confluence, GitHub, Jira, Todoist, Trello
  • Video Conferencing - Google Meet, BlueJeans, Loom, Zoom
Integrations screenshot

Beyond off-platform integrations, with Hugo, all your docs are automatically linked to the following objects: meeting title, meeting attendee, doc author, doc mention, doc tag, doc text.

This allows your documents to be fully searchable which is invaluable for knowledge management, cross-functional collaboration, external meeting heavy departments (e.g. sales & customer success), and much more. With advanced multivariate search, you can find your notes even if you can’t remember the meeting details (e.g. notes that I saved that were also attended by someone in Acme Company). Searches can also be saved and pinned for repeat use to quickly access the information you need when you need it.

Knowledge management screenshot

Working in Google Docs provides few meeting-specific benefits and would require unreliable manual workstreams to achieve the same kind of connected meetings, notes, and tasks alignment that Hugo not only provides on a functional basis but also optimizes for through product and email-led triggers that encourage best practices for meeting management. 

Switching from Google Docs to Hugo

At Hugo, we believe that meetings are the heartbeat of your team’s culture and alignment. We’ll help you get started creating an internal meeting experience that will facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing whether your team is remote or hybrid.

Our dedicated customer success team can help you confidently move your team onto Hugo, with minimal disruption to your business. Start for free or request a custom demo.

What are customers saying?

PlayRomir Bosu

Hugo solves visibility, ensures we start and finish meetings on time, stick to an agenda and collaboratively prepare before the meeting.

Romir Bosu
Clubspeed
PlaySummer Stewart

After using Hugo it was really hard to imagine taking notes outside of Hugo again.

Summer Stewart
Toolio
PlayMichelle Su

I felt like I came to Hugo meetings a lot more prepared and a lot less stressed. We've really kicked disorganization out of our meetings.

Michelle Su
Jostle
Run efficient meetings, come to a decision, and get back to work
Have productive meetings your team can be proud of with a clear meeting agenda for every event in your calendar.
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