365 or Google Workspace

A question for the general public and Tom.

Looking at moving my domain away from my old Zoho free plan to either 365 Business Basic or Google Workspace Starter. Only a couple accounts for now as I’m just getting my own gig started.

Since the price is basically the same (although I can get 365 BB without Teams for a few dollars cheaper a month), what is everyone’s consensus on which to go with. I know it’s a highly debated topic so I’m just curious what everyone else is using? I do network installs, maintenance, and repair so I need to easily be able to send info to clients.

What would you choose; and @LTS_Tom , if you were starting over what would you choose?

  • 365
  • Google
  • Other (see comment)
0 voters

Toss an coin and take your pick

All got good and bad points - not wrong or right answer down to user preference

One nice thing with Google is they have great spam filtering. My CNWR email is office 365 and it gets a ton of spam even though we are using MImecast.

2 Likes

Just curious, are you unhappy with Zoho? I’ve had a pretty good experience with them and their paid options are a bit cheaper than Google/Microsoft.

I wouldn’t say I’m unhappy - just looking for something that more people are used to for when I start having people join my team. Since most people are used to either 365 or Google it just makes sense to go with one of them.

If you have M365 you can start using Entra ID as your IDP so you can have SSO into other services.

I actually just migrated email for my domain from Google Workspace to O365. I’ve had it in Google Workspace since like 2015 or so, and chose Google at the time because I was working as a tier 2 desktop support tech and thought I was “familiar” enough with O365 and wanted to learn the GSuite side of things.

However, I never really used any of the features of Gsuite/Google Workspace other than email and logging into some select 3rd party services with that account via SSO because I was hesitant to get too far invested in anything and it being difficult to migrate to a different solution, so I just kept my files in Google Drive under my personal account and have paid $20/yr for 100 GB of storage for several years now.

Every single job I’ve had since college has been a Microsoft/O365 shop (aside from one brief stint at a large company that was using Lotus Notes lol), and in my current job I am our organization’s primary Exchange admin. This responsibility, in addition to never having used Google Workspace in an enterprise environment, led me to migrate my domain to O365 a few weeks ago. I work in Azure/Entra enough throughout the day to know of some other things I might like to set up with my account and had never even looked into it with Google, so I felt like it was time to make the change. I may migrate back to Google again in the future as pricing changes with O365 along with AI being shoehorned into everything leads to paying more for features I don’t want or use, though.