For years this comparison came down to a couple of dollars a seat. It no longer does. Microsoft raised Business Basic from $6 to $7 and Business Standard from $12.50 to $14, which means that on an annual commitment the two suites now cost exactly the same at every tier: $7, $14 and $22 a user a month. Price is off the table. What is left is a set of differences that actually matter, and one of them is worth $21 a seat a month on its own.
The tiers, side by side
| Tier | Google Workspace | Microsoft 365 |
|---|---|---|
| Entry | Business Starter — $7, 30GB per user | Business Basic — $7, 1TB per user, web and mobile only |
| Standard | Business Standard — $14, 2TB per user | Business Standard — $14, 1TB, full desktop apps |
| Top SMB tier | Business Plus — $22, 5TB, Advanced endpoint management | Business Premium — $22, Intune Plan 1 + Defender for Business |
All prices are per user per month on an annual commitment. Google runs a 10% new-customer promo ($6.30 and $12.60) but it covers only the first 20 users for 12 months, so budget the list price. Microsoft’s monthly-billing rate is 20% higher: $8.40, $16.80 and $26.40.
AI is now the biggest cost difference by far
This is where the two have diverged completely, and it dwarfs everything else in this article.
Google bundled Gemini into every Workspace tier at no extra cost. It is now a tier differentiator rather than a separate purchase. Business Starter gets limited access — Gemini in Gmail and Vids only, with none in Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive, Meet or Chat. Standard and Plus get expanded access across all of those apps.
Microsoft still sells Copilot separately at $21 a user a month. There is an $18 promotional rate running from 1 July to 31 December 2026, but read the footnote: annual commitment required, and the promotional price applies to the first year only. There are also bundled SKUs — Business Standard with Copilot at $23.50 and Business Premium with Copilot at $32.
Do the arithmetic for a ten-person team wanting AI in their documents. Workspace Business Standard: $1,680 a year, AI included. Microsoft Business Standard plus Copilot: $4,200 a year. That is a $2,520 annual gap on identical headline pricing — and it is the single most important number in this comparison.
Storage works differently, not just in size
The headline numbers mislead here. Google’s storage is pooled across the organisation; Microsoft’s is fixed per user.
A ten-seat Workspace Standard tenant has a 20TB shared pool, not ten separate 2TB boxes — so one person with an enormous video archive can use far more than their notional share. Microsoft gives every user 1TB of OneDrive and that number does not change between Basic, Standard and Premium. If your storage need is lopsided, Google’s model suits you. If it is even, Microsoft’s 1TB at the $7 tier beats Google’s 30GB by a wide margin — and that 30GB gap is the strongest argument against Business Starter for anyone who keeps files.
Desktop apps: the entry-tier trap
Microsoft Business Basic does not include installed desktop Office apps. It is web and mobile only. People assume $7 buys them Word and Excel on the laptop, discover it does not, and upgrade to Standard. Desktop apps start at $14, or $10 for Apps for Business, which has no email or Teams at all.
Google is web-first at every tier, which is a design position rather than a limitation — but if someone on your team does serious financial modelling, pivot-heavy analysis or Power Query work, desktop Excel is genuinely more capable than Sheets and this decision is already made for you.
Meetings: Google gives you more people for the same money
| Google Meet | Microsoft Teams | |
|---|---|---|
| Participants at $7 | 100 | 300 |
| At $14 | 150 | 300 |
| At $22 | 500 | 300 |
| Max meeting length | 24 hours | 30 hours |
| Recording | Standard and above, saved to Drive | Max 4 hours or 1.5GB, kept 20 days by default |
Teams caps at 300 participants on every Business tier — 1,000 requires an Enterprise plan. Google Meet reaches 500 at Business Plus, the same $22. Note also that Microsoft’s cloud recordings are deleted after 20 days by default, which catches people out.
Teams Live Events retires on 30 June 2026, replaced by town halls — worth knowing if your webinar workflow depends on it.
Device management: not the like-for-like it looks
Both top tiers are $22, which invites a false comparison. Microsoft Business Premium bundles Intune Plan 1 and Defender for Business — full device management plus endpoint threat protection for up to 300 users. Google Business Plus offers Advanced endpoint management, which is real but is not an equivalent: Google has no bundled endpoint-detection analogue at this tier.
We are not going to put a dollar figure on “what Google would cost to match Premium”, because the honest answer is that it usually means Enterprise, which is quote-only. But if you issue managed laptops and want endpoint security in the same bill, Business Premium at $22 is unusually good value and Google does not have a clean answer to it.
The EU Teams settlement, and buying without Teams
Microsoft settled the European Commission’s Teams-bundling case on 12 September 2025, committing for seven years to minimum price gaps between suites with and without Teams. The practical result is that you can now buy the suite without Teams: $5.40 for Basic, $10.79 for Standard and $18.79 for Premium on annual billing.
If your team already lives in Slack, that saves roughly $38 a user a year on Standard and removes an unwanted chat platform. Very few comparisons mention this option exists.
If you are thinking about switching
Both vendors provide migration tooling, and Microsoft documents its limits far more honestly than Google does. Microsoft’s Google-migration tool moves mail, rules, calendar and contacts — but not Google Drive, and it drops vacation auto-replies, meeting-room bookings, shared calendars and Gmail labels-as-tags. Messages are capped at 35MB by default and contacts at three email addresses each.
One trap worth knowing: the tool is unaware of retention and archival policies, so anything those policies removed is reported as “missing”. That looks like data loss and is not. Microsoft advises disabling retention policies before migrating.
Google offers a default import path for 1–1,000 users and an advanced one above that, covering email, calendars and users — but publishes no comparable list of what it drops. Assume something will be lost and test with one mailbox first.
A straight recommendation
- You want AI in your documents: Google Workspace, and it is not close. Gemini is included; Copilot is $21 a seat on top.
- You issue managed laptops: Microsoft Business Premium. Intune plus Defender at $22 has no clean Google equivalent.
- Someone does heavy Excel work: Microsoft, from Business Standard. Sheets will not do it.
- Small team, browser-based, lots of shared editing: Google Workspace Standard. Avoid Starter unless 30GB a user genuinely covers you.
- You already use Slack: buy Microsoft without Teams and pocket the difference.
What we would not do is migrate an established team on price. That argument is gone — the two now cost the same — and the migration cost, retraining and broken links will outweigh any saving for years.
Chat is the other half of this decision. We compared Slack, Teams and Discord — including the Slack free-plan rule that quietly deletes your history.
On the meetings side specifically, Zoom vs Meet vs Teams covers the recording and participant limits that decide it.
All prices verified against the vendors’ own pricing pages in September 2026, on annual-commitment billing. Microsoft raised two of these tiers during 2026 — check before you commit a team.
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