Comparison
Google Workspace vs Microsoft 365
Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 both cover mail, files and meetings at broadly similar list prices, so the decision turns on 3 things: whether your documents are genuinely collaborative or heavily formatted, whether staff need offline desktop apps, and how much admin time you can spend on the tenant each month.
| Entry list price | Business Starter £5.75 / $7 vs Business Basic at a comparable seat price |
|---|---|
| Storage model | Workspace pools storage across the tenant; 365 allocates per mailbox and per site |
| Documents | Docs wins on simultaneous editing; Word wins on complex formatting and print fidelity |
| Offline desktop apps | 365 includes installed Office apps; Workspace is browser-first with offline mode |
| Admin surface | One Workspace console; 365 spans Entra, Exchange, SharePoint and Purview consoles |
| Seat cap | Workspace Business editions stop at 300 users; Enterprise editions have no cap |
Decide on behaviour, not on feature tables
Feature comparison tables are almost useless for this decision because both platforms cleared the functional bar years ago. Mail works. Video calls work. Files sync. What differs is the working pattern each platform assumes. Google assumes several people editing one living document in a browser. Microsoft assumes a document that one person owns, formats precisely and circulates as a finished artefact.
So the honest question is what your organisation actually does all day. A design or professional-services team drafting proposals together is faster on Docs. A team producing court bundles, statutory accounts or print-ready reports fights Docs constantly and should stay on Word. Neither answer is a platform failure; they are different assumptions about what a document is.
- Collaborative drafting, review cycles and comment threads favour Workspace
- Precise pagination, templates, track changes and print fidelity favour Microsoft 365
- Heavy Excel modelling with macros or Power Query favours Microsoft 365
- Mobile-first, browser-first and BYOD estates favour Workspace
- Regulated archive requirements need a per-platform check rather than a general answer
Admin overhead is the cost nobody quotes
Workspace concentrates administration into a single console with org units and groups. Microsoft 365 spreads the equivalent controls across identity, mail flow, files and compliance portals, each with its own model. For an organisation without a dedicated administrator, that difference matters more than any per-seat figure, because unmanaged tenants drift into insecure defaults.
We measure this during discovery as monthly admin hours rather than as a preference. A 60-seat tenant with joiners and leavers most months, external sharing and mobile devices takes materially less time to run well on Workspace, which is why smaller organisations without in-house IT tend to land there.
| User lifecycle and permissions | 2–4 hours on either platform |
|---|---|
| Security and policy review | 1–2 hours on Workspace, 3–5 hours across 365 consoles |
| Licence and billing hygiene | 1 hour on either, if anyone actually does it |
What a switch costs to execute
A platform change is not a licence change. Mail, files, calendars, permissions and identity all move, desktop clients need reprofiling, and any workflow bolted onto the old platform has to be rebuilt or retired. That is the part that swamps the licence arithmetic in year one.
Our fixed per-mailbox price makes the execution cost knowable before you commit, which is the only way to compare it honestly against the licence saving. If the saving does not cover the switch inside two years and the working pattern does not favour the destination, staying put is the right answer and we will say so.
Running both, deliberately
Split estates are common and are not automatically a mistake. A firm can run Workspace for the whole organisation and keep a small Microsoft 365 group for the people producing formatted deliverables, provided mail delivery is authoritative in one place and file ownership is unambiguous.
What fails is an accidental split: two tenants, two directories, mail routing nobody documented and files in both. If you are going to run both, design it, write down which platform owns which artefact, and review it twice a year.
What we see that others don't say
Every switch we have quoted where the stated reason was licence cost turned out to save under 15% of annual spend, while the migration itself cost between 6 and 14 months of that saving; the defensible reasons to move are collaboration behaviour and admin overhead, not the price list.
What this doesn't cover
- This page compares the platforms for organisations of roughly 10 to 500 seats; enterprise licensing agreements and public-sector frameworks change the arithmetic.
- We do not resell Microsoft 365 and do not migrate away from Workspace as a service line, so treat the comparison as advice rather than as a neutral market survey.
- Regulated retention and eDiscovery obligations need a per-jurisdiction assessment; neither platform is inherently compliant.
- Licence prices move; check both vendors' current list prices in your own billing currency before deciding.
Questions we get asked
- Is Google Workspace cheaper than Microsoft 365?
- At list price the comparable tiers are close enough that cost is rarely the deciding factor. The larger cost difference is administrative time, because Workspace concentrates configuration in one console while Microsoft 365 spreads it across several.
- Can Google Workspace open and edit Office files?
- Yes. Docs, Sheets and Slides open and edit .docx, .xlsx and .pptx files directly, and can save back in those formats. Complex formatting, macros and advanced Excel features are where the fidelity gap shows.
- Should we switch just to cut licence cost?
- Usually no. In the switches we have quoted, licence savings ran under 15 per cent of annual spend while execution cost 6 to 14 months of that saving. Switch for collaboration behaviour or admin overhead, and treat the licence line as secondary.
- Can we run both platforms at once?
- Yes, if it is deliberate. One platform must be authoritative for mail delivery and file ownership must be documented per team. Accidental split estates with two directories and undocumented mail routing are the version that fails.
How this page is verified
Reviewed by Pearl Lemon Cloud migrations desk, Google Workspace migration engineers. Last checked .
- Licence figures are Google's published list prices in GBP and USD as of 2026-08-06, not FX conversions.
- Admin-hour ranges are drawn from Pearl Lemon Cloud discovery findings across tenants of 30 to 120 seats.
- Storage and seat-cap behaviour follows Google Workspace Admin Help documentation as of 2026-08-06.
Sources you can check
Related pages
Want the comparison run against your own estate?
Discovery reports your document types, collaboration patterns, admin hours and licence spend, then states which platform fits and what moving would cost. If staying put is right, that is what the report says.