365 or Google Workspace

Business IT/MSP Talk
1

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
2

Toss an coin and take your pick

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

3

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
4

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.

5

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.

6

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

7

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.