November 25, 2019 | Reading time 11 minutes

Google Workspace vs Office 365 – Which is Right for Your Business?

You have two options: Microsoft Office 365 and Google Workspace (G Suite). Which service is right for your business?

In this article, we compared them in terms of price and features to find out. We hope that our Google Workspace vs Microsoft Office comparison will help you to decide which one fits your business better!

Google Workspace vs Office 365 Full Comparison

We are going to compare these two giants by the main criteria for businesses: price, features, storage, and infrastructure.

Pricing

When comparing Google Workspace vs Office 365 Pricing, the choices are not always so black and white. It often comes down to the services and subscription levels that businesses are looking to buy into for their particular use case and business need.

Each public cloud vendor displays advantages depending on the particular subscription level and features needed. Different businesses will be looking for different things depending on their respective use case, budget, and potentially existing public cloud affiliations. For many organizations, it will come down to the right balance of pricing and features for the price that will determine the public cloud SaaS offering that best suits their needs.

When simply looking at the comparing Google Workspace vs Office 365 pricing, Google Workspace is cheaper. Let’s compare the plans offered by each and the respective pricing.

Google Workspace (G Suite) – Basic ($6 USD/user/month), Business ($12 USD/user/month), Enterprise ($25 USD/user/month)

Microsoft Office 365 – E1 ($8 USD/user/month), E3 ($20 USD/user/month), E5 ($35 USD/user/month)

As you can see, Google provides the cheapest of the two for their entry-level plan and also is less expensive for their top tier Enterprise offering. Microsoft is a bit pricier for its entry-level E1 package and is more expensive by $10 a month per user than Google for its top tier E5 offering which is quite significant if looking at a large number of users.

While pricing is certainly important, features are also the other major part of the equation. What about more technical Google Workspace vs Office 365 comparison?

Google Workspace vs Office 365 Features Comparison

As shown in the last section, Google Workspace is the cheaper offering when compared to Office 365 in the entry-level tier and the top tier offerings. However, when comparing the entry-level subscriptions from both vendors, in terms of features, Microsoft certainly has an edge in the amount of storage provided for the price when compared to Google. What are the key differences between the Office 365 E1 subscription and the Google Workspace Basic subscription?

Storage: Entry-level Subscriptions

In Microsoft’s E1 subscription, users get 1 TB of cloud storage per user in the subscription, while in the Google Workspace Basic subscription, users get 30 GB of storage per user. In terms of email storage, in the Office 365 E1 subscription, users get 50 GB of storage. It is important to understand the way the Google Workspace storage works is the overall “cloud storage” listed by Google includes both file storage and email storage. This is an even bigger win for Microsoft in the entry-level subscription offering in that the 30 GB offered by Google is for both cloud storage and email. Microsoft’s 50 GB of email storage is in addition to the 1 TB of cloud storage that is dedicated to file storage.

For those organizations that are comparing entry-level subscriptions in either Office 365 or Google Workspace, Microsoft seems to hold the advantage here in terms of sheer storage offered for the price. The price is $2 higher than the entry-level Google Workspace subscription, however, it offers roughly “34 times” the storage of the Google Workspace offering which is quite a margin, even considering the $2 difference.

Storage: Middle and Top-tier Subscriptions

Google’s Google Workspace fairs more strongly in their middle and top-tier subscriptions. They offer unlimited cloud storage for both the “Business” and “Enterprise” plans. This means organizations have unlimited storage on both file storage and email storage in the Google Workspace ecosystem.

Microsoft offers unlimited cloud storage for file storage, however, it only offers 100 GB for email storage in both the “E3” and “E5” subscriptions. This is quite a variance when comparing email storage with Google Workspace which is unlimited. Also, the E3 subscription is $8 more expensive than Google Workspace’s Business subscription tier and the E5 subscription is $10 more expensive than the Google Workspace Enterprise subscription.

One thing to note, however, the 100 GB limit in the Office 365 subscriptions for email is actually quite a bit of storage from an email perspective and most user mailboxes will most likely not come close to this limit. The more important size limit would be from a file storage perspective and not email. However, each business will need to weigh these factors and take the limitations into consideration when making a decision between Google Workspace vs Office 365.

Infrastructure

Many organizations may already be aligned with Microsoft from an applications perspective. Microsoft has been the de facto standard for enterprise business productivity applications for decades now with the Office suite of apps. Office 365 holds a huge advantage compared to Google Workspace in terms of on-premises applications.

With Office 365, the Office suite of applications can be installed as a full client installation on end-user devices as well as accessed via the web editor in Office 365. The full-blown copies of Office applications are simply more powerful than the Google Workspace “web only” versions of their applications and editors. Additionally, most enterprise end users are very familiar with Microsoft “Office” applications. The Office 365 apps have the same look and feel which provides both familiarity and a user experience that end users are comfortable with. This can be lacking in the Google Workspace ecosystem.

On the flip side, the Google Workspace apps are very web-centric, streamlined, and efficient. They have designed their apps to take advantage of this centralized model and offer an arguably better experience from a web perspective with their very streamlined apps.

Operating System

Google Workspace offers a couple of advantages from an application standpoint in the realm of their mobile applications and operating system support. Since Google Workspace apps are all web-based, they support all operating systems that can access their platform from a web browser. This is not the case in the Office 365 world with the fully installed applications which are only supported on Windows and macOS.

Collaboration Tools

From a collaboration tools perspective, Google Workspace was built from the ground up as a web-based platform with native collaboration support built-in. Microsoft’s strong suit once again is enterprise applications rather than a web-centric platform, so collaboration is a bit less powerful with Office 365 currently when compared to Google Workspace.

Based on this information, how do organizations looking at Office 365 vs Google Workspace decide on the best platform for their business?

Which One Wins?

When comparing Office 365 vs Google Workspace, they are both very powerful and feature-rich platforms that businesses will most likely find tremendous value when compared to on-premises solutions. However, each organization will have to compare the features included for the price and determine which features are most important for their particular use case.

For those that are already strongly aligned with Microsoft from an on-premises enterprise applications perspective, Office 365 may stand out due to the familiarity of the Office suite of applications included with the subscription and the ability to install both the full installation on an end-user client and access these via the web.

Google certainly holds an advantage in terms of sheer price throughout its subscription structure, offering lower prices for both its entry-level and top-tier plans.

A downside for the Google Workspace entry-level plan is the storage offered which is a bit anemic when compared to the Office 365 E1 plan. Google Workspace exceeds the storage offered by Office 365 in the mid and top-tier subscriptions when compared by offering unlimited storage for both file storage and email.

An extremely important business-critical feature missing in both Office 365 and Google Workspace environments is native backup functionality. To ensure your data is safe, SpinOne offers industry-leading enterprise backup functionality for both Office 365 and Google Workspace environments.

Check out how you can protect your Google Workspace or Office 365 data with robust, versioned, and automated cybersecurity tools.

Try SpinOne for free

Was this helpful?

Thanks for your feedback!
Avatar photo

Vice President of Product

About Author

Davit Asatryan is the Vice President of Product at Spin.AI

He is responsible for executing product strategy by overseeing the entire product lifecycle, with a focus on developing cutting-edge solutions to address the evolving landscape of cybersecurity threats.

He has been with the company for over 5 years and specializes in SaaS Security, helping organizations battle Shadow IT, ransomware, and data leak issues.

Prior to joining Spin.AI, Davit gained experience by working in fintech startups and also received his Bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley. In his spare time, Davit enjoys traveling, playing soccer and tennis with his friends, and watching sports of any kind.


Featured Work:
Webinar:

Contents

How Can You Maximize SaaS Security Benefits?

Let's get started with a live demo

Latest blog posts

Microsoft 365 Security Best Practices and Recommendations 2024

Microsoft 365 Security Best Practices and Recommendations 2024

Micorosft 365 is a business-critical cloud environment that contains terabytes of sensitive information. Protecting this environment from multiple threats is […]

Importance of Backing Up Google Workspace Data Daily

Importance of Backing Up Google Workspace Data Daily

Many organizations today are heavily relying on cloud Software-as-a-Service offerings for business productivity, communication, and collaboration. One of the leading […]

What data can be backed up from Microsoft 365

What data can be backed up from Microsoft 365?

Microsoft 365 services contain business-critical data. However, none of the services has an in-built backup functionality. Unfortunately, your Microsoft 365 […]