It's not apples to apples, but for me, Fastmail is way better than Gmail, DuckDuckGo is as good as Google Search because its privacy features evens out the uneven score from search result quality, and a blend of iWork, markdown and latex is much better for creating documents than Google Docs.
Protonmail. Encrypted, ad free, and no one reading your email.
>Search
Duck Duck Go. Google is actually well past it's prime on this front. Their per-customer result filtering is now so aggressive that the filter bubble they apply to you is now an active impediment to web use. I generally find that I cannot replicate a google search on a different computer with the same search term, and about 20% of the time it is impossible to find the same result on a second computer. DDG's results are much more accurate to your search terms as written.
>Docs
Any desktop office suite, be it libre- of microsoft-. Unless multiplayer documents are a core component of your work (my commiserations if they are), google docs is objectively less capable as a professional grade editing suite than any of the major desktop based options, due to its considerably smaller and web-ui centric feature-set.
We use docs for work. I hate it. I can never find where a document is hiding (is it in drive, docs, associated with which account?). I much prefer a local file structure that I can navigate from the command line.
Some tools break on Firefox at times. There doesn't appear to be any offline mode for me to store and work on my documents locally when I am on the road and don't have a reliable internet connection.
Gmail. I pull into thunderbird via imap. It's just another back-end from my perspective.
Google search had one killer feature that would have me come back a few times a month, but they discontinued it:
Things like “12573238458 bytes / 22 days in Mbps” used to do the unit conversions and print the answer.
Docs’ only killer feature for me is inline comments (and not requiring windows update...). Even atlassian has that now.
I hate the gmail UI, and just access it via ldap; to each their own, I guess.
All the things I mentioned work great on all the platforms that are currently alive, and integrate as much as I’d like via smtp, so there’s that checkbox too.
What's actually better than:
* Gmail
* Search
* Docs
And all of the Integration that works cross platform for all of those.