Google Workspace explained: Google’s answer to Microsoft 365

Workspace is Google’s suite of productivity software tools, the main competitor to market leader Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365). Formerly known as G Suite, Google Workspace includes well-known apps such as Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and Slides — apps that are also used for free by billions of people globally.

Google has been selling productivity apps to businesses for almost two decades now, having helped pave the way for cloud-based office productivity apps in the 2000s. At a time when most office suites were based on installed desktop software and sold as one-time purchases, Google bundled its popular free web apps with various business services to create a cloud-based office software subscription — a move that would eventually push competitors like Microsoft to adopt a subscription model and develop web versions of their apps.

Google was “very much ahead of the game” at this point and “even 11 or 12 years ago when Office 365 lagged behind what Google was doing with SaaS-based enterprise services,” said Joe Mariano, director analyst and member of Gartner’s Employee Experience Technology team.

The flexibility of Workspace’s cloud-hosted apps was then and continues to be a key draw for business customers, said Mariano: “The proposition is going to a completely SaaS-based set of services,” which allows for “deep interconnectivity” between the various components of the Workspace suite. “Because everything is based in the cloud on the Google Workspace architecture, you see a lot more seamless integration between those services,” he said.

These days, Google’s top priority for Workspace is the integration of generative AI features via its Gemini AI assistant (formerly Duet AI), introduced last year. The company has long been a major player in AI research and began to integrate AI features into its apps well before the recent generative AI boom — smart replies being one early example. With Gemini now available to embed into a range of Workspace apps (for an additional monthly fee), Google promises to save office workers time on tasks like writing emails, summarizing documents, and tracking down information.

In this article:

• What is Google Workspace?
• What happened to G Suite?
• What are the different Google Workspace plans?
• What add-ons are available for Google Workspace?
• What is Gemini for Google Workspace?
• How does Google Workspace adoption compare with Microsoft 365?
• How easy is it to move from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace?
• What are some of the newest Google Workspace features?
• What’s next for Google Workspace?

What is Google Workspace?

Workspace is Google’s suite of cloud-based productivity and collaboration apps, typically sold as a paid monthly subscription to business and enterprise customers.

Apps included in most Workspace plans cover core business productivity and collaboration use cases: email (Gmail), document editing (Docs), spreadsheets (Sheets), presentations (Slides), videoconferencing (Meet), team messaging (Chat), and scheduling (Calendar), to name just a handful of the available apps. Paid add-ons are available too, such as the Gemini AI assistant, Google Voice telephony services, and premium features of the no-code development platform AppSheet.

Workspace apps are accessed via a browser or mobile app, with no native desktop apps, aside from document storage app Google Drive. It’s possible to save and access files without an internet connection, though, once offline access is enabled for Drive. Users can also edit Docs, Sheets, and Slides files offline in the Chrome browser.

Although Google offers many of these same apps to consumers for free, paid Workspace subscriptions include additional features and business services such as a custom email domain, higher storage limits, and shared team storage.  Google also provides a range of security, management, and analytics tools for IT admins in most paid Workspace subscriptions — with more advanced tools available on pricier plans aimed at large enterprise organizations. These range from device management to data retention tools, employee usage analytics, and more.

Not all Workspace plans are paid, however: Google in 2021 expanded the brand to bring some features that were formerly reserved for paid plans, such as smart canvases, to the free consumer versions of its apps under the banner of “Google Workspace for everyone.” Google also offers a limited free version of Workspace for business customers, called Google Workspace Essentials Starter.

The list of available apps in Workspace is somewhat shorter than that of Microsoft 365. “Google Workspace doesn’t reach feature parity with M365; it offers perhaps 60% to 70% of the features,” said J.P. Gownder, vice president and principal analyst on Forrester’s Future of Work team, though he describes the generative AI tools in Gemini for Google Workspace as “robust.”

Providing a more streamlined set of applications can be a good thing for business users, said Gartner’s Mariano. “Google doesn’t build new products, they build new services into their existing products, so it creates a lot less confusion,” he said. Take Gmail, for example. “You can live in your Gmail window all day if you want to: you can start writing new documents from there, you can check your calendar, you can start Chat, you can check Google Drive. The amount of digital friction that cuts back on is very, very significant.”

What happened to G Suite?

Although many business users still think of Google’s app suite as “G Suite,” the old name has gone — the Workspace brand replaced G Suite in 2020.

The switch to Workspace was not the first name change for Google’s bundle of work apps, which has roots back in the mid ’00s. Google Apps for Your Domain was the first iteration in 2006: a free ad-supported suite that included Gmail, Google Calendar, Page Creator (later Sites), and the Google Talk instant messaging app.

In 2007, the company began offering a paid ad-free subscription service aimed at businesses; initially called Google Apps Premier, it was later renamed Google Apps for Business and then Google Apps for Work. In 2016, the company announced its new G Suite brand with great fanfare, only to replace it four years later with the Workspace rebranding.

What are the different Google Workspace plans?

There are numerous payment plans for Google Workspace, targeted at everything from the smallest of small businesses up to large enterprises with hundreds of thousands of employees.

Google Workspace Individual: Aimed at sole traders/entrepreneurs, the Individual plan costs $8.33 per month on an annual basis and provides access to apps such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar, and Meet. The plan includes 1TB of storage and features such as appointment booking, live streaming on YouTube, and custom email layouts, as well as access to support. Custom email addresses are not included, so your address will end in “@gmail.com.”

Business Starter, Business Standard, and Business Plus: Targeted at small and midsize businesses, the three plans have a limit of 300 users and cost from $6 per user a month up to $18 per user a month. The lowest tier, Starter, provides 30GB of storage per user, custom email addresses, and Meet video calls with up to 100 participants.

All three Business plans include access to Workspace apps, but certain features — such as Meet breakout rooms — are available only on the more expensive tiers. Each Business plan includes endpoint management features, but advanced tools, such as Google’s Vault information governance and e-discovery, require Standard and Plus subscriptions.

Enterprise Standard and Plus: Suited to large businesses, there’s no cap on the number of users for the two Enterprise plans. Each user is assigned 5TB of storage, though more can be requested, while the Meet meeting cap is lifted to 1,000 participants.

Enterprise plans offer a wider range of security and management tools than Business tiers, including data loss prevention and advanced security analytics via the Workspace security center. The Enterprise Plus plan is the top Workspace tier, with features such as client-side encryption and advanced data exports. Pricing information isn’t publicly available.

Essentials Starter, Enterprise Essentials, and Enterprise Essentials Plus: These Workspace plans lower subscription costs (or drop them entirely) by removing Gmail. Essentials Starter is a free service aimed at business customers that provides up to 100 users with access to core Workspace apps. There’s little in the way of management features, and there are usage restrictions such as three Meet video call participants at a time.

Enterprise Essentials and Enterprise Essentials Plus — aimed at larger organizations — include premium app features, access to security and management tools, and no limit on the number of users. The Essentials Plus plan offers more storage per user and a wider range of advanced management tools and app features. Google doesn’t publish pricing for its Enterprise Essentials or Essentials Plus plans.

Note: A previous plan, called simply “Essentials,” is no longer available to new customers.

Frontline Starter and Frontline Standard: There are two Workspace editions for staff in roles such as customer service, retail, and manufacturing who do most of their work away from a desk. Both include core Workspace apps and management tools available in the Business editions. The Standard plan includes a wider range of security and admin tools, such as data loss prevention and Google Vault eDiscovery. Google doesn’t publish pricing for its Workspace Frontline plans.

Education Fundamentals, Education Standard, Teaching and Learning Upgrade, and Education Plus: A set of payment plans for teachers and students at K-12 and higher education institutions. As well as access to some core Workspace apps such as Gmail, Calendar, and Meet, the plans provide access to Google’s Classroom learning management software.

Workspace Education Fundaments is free for qualifying institutions, while Education Standard costs $3 per student per year and includes additional security and admin features. Teaching and Learning Upgrade costs $4 per staff member per month for Education Fundamentals and Standard customers; it provides access to extra Classroom and video-communication features. The Education Plus plan is $5 per student per year and includes all the aforementioned features as well as organizational branding and more.

Workspace for Nonprofits, Workspace for Government, Workspace for various verticals: Google offers discounted pricing of its paid products to qualifying nonprofit and government organizations. Workspace for Government can be configured to meet FedRAMP High compliance standards required by US government organizations. Google also offers industry-specific editions of its Enterprise plans tailored for healthcare and life sciences, retail, manufacturing, professional services, and technology firms. Contact Google for pricing.

What add-ons are available for Google Workspace?

There are numerous add-ons for Workspace that, in most cases, require an extra monthly fee on top of core subscription costs. These add-ons provide access to some of the latest Workspace features and can broaden the suite’s functionality significantly, with the potential to increase a customer’s monthly spending at the same time.

Access to Gemini, Google’s generative AI assistant, adds an extra $30 per user a month to Workspace Enterprise subscriptions, for example. Google also provides a business telephony service, Voice, that costs from $10 per user per month for the Starter version up to $30 per user a month for the Premium version.

No-code development platform AppSheet Core is included in most paid Workspace subscriptions, but full functionality requires an additional fee. Similarly, Google Chrome Enterprise provides additional security and management tools over the free Core version for $6 per user per month.

Among the other add-ons is “Chat interoperability” — a free service that lets Workspace Chat users send messages to other collaboration tools such as Teams and Slack.

What is Gemini for Google Workspace?

Gemini is the name of Google’s generative AI assistant; it’s available as a standalone chatbot and can be embedded into various Workspace apps. It’s built on Google’s own Gemini AI models, such as Gemini 1.5 Pro and Imagen 3. The AI assistant was made generally available for business users in August 2023 under the name Duet AI, before switching to the Gemini branding in February this year.

Gemini for Google Workspace is an add-on subscription that gives business users access to premium Gemini features. There are two main versions of Gemini for Workspace: Enterprise and the less expensive Business tier, which launched in February this year.

Until recently, a Gemini for Google Workspace subscription was required for access to both the standalone Gemini app and the embedded version of the assistant. The Gemini app is now included with Workspace business plans, but the ability to interact with Gemini in the Workspace apps still requires a Gemini for Google Workspace subscription.

And in-app use is arguably where the assistant is most useful. Gemini can summarize a lengthy document in Docs, for example, draft an email in Gmail, create images in Slides with Google’s Imagen 3 text-to-video model, and plenty more besides. Google outlines numerous potential business use cases, from marketing professionals generating campaign briefs to HR workers creating job descriptions.

The business versions of Gemini offer many of the same features as the consumer versions of Gemini. One key difference is that Google won’t access data from user prompts to improve its own products and to train its AI models on the paid business versions, according to Google.

Gemini Business is available as a paid add-on across all Workspace subscriptions and costs $20 per user a month. For Gemini Business there’s a cap of 1,000 interactions — where Gemini is directed to summarize an email, or redraft a document, for example — with the AI assistant per user each month.

Gemini Enterprise tier, which costs $30 per user each month, is available as a paid add-on for all Workspace plans, apart from Business Starter and Individual. It includes access to a wider range of features, such as live translated captions and automated note taking in Meet video calls. It also removes the cap on user interactions each month.

Google has also made the AI assistant available to higher education institutions with Gemini Education ($20 per user each month) and Education Premium ($30 per user each month).

Not all Workspace customers require the full list of Gemini functionality for staff, and, for many workers, AI assistants have proved most effective in and around meetings. To cater to these customers, Google launched an add-on “AI Meetings and Messages” that includes access to Gemini features in Meet only, for lower price of $10 per user a month.  

There’s also an “AI Security” add-on, also costing $10 per user per month, that provides access to AI-powered document classification in Google Drive. (The feature is also available in the more expensive Gemini Enterprise subscription.)

How does Google Workspace adoption compare with Microsoft 365?

Although Microsoft has retained its formidable lead in the market, Google has succeeded in establishing Workspace as a competitive office software suite. It’s hard to say exactly how Workspace adoption has fared in comparison with Microsoft 365 and other productivity app suites, but there are some indications.

Google reports 10 million paying customers for Workspace, while Microsoft claims more than 400 million paid commercial seats (end users) for Office 365/Microsoft 365. Google says its figure refers to the total number of organizations of any size that pay for Workspace, rather than the total number of paid seats/users across customer organizations, but this likely includes some extremely small — even one-person — businesses, which makes a comparison difficult.

The other stat that Google provides — of 3 billion users — is less useful, as it mostly relates to consumer use of its free apps. “While billions of consumers use free versions of Google Workspace applications, its use in enterprises remains limited — dwarfed by the popularity of Microsoft 365,” said Gownder.

Financial statements from Google’s parent company Alphabet do little to shed light on Workspace business adoption, as Workspace revenues are part of the “Google Cloud” segment that also includes Google Cloud Platform, Google’s wider cloud computing infrastructure and analytics service. In an earnings call for Alphabet’s most recent quarterly financial statement (Q2 FY24), CEO Sundar Pichai only noted that a 29% year-on-year increase in Google Cloud revenues was due, in part, to “strong Workspace growth.” This growth was mostly down to increases in average revenue per seat, said Pichai — an indication that, like others in the space, Google sees more value in increasing sales with existing customers than expanding its overall customer base.

Nevertheless, Google is gaining ground on M365, said Mariano, albeit slowly. “I do believe we will see continued market growth for Google Workspace,” he said. “Although it’s incremental, we do see that they are getting a little bit of market share every year.”

Google has managed to lure large enterprises such as Verizon and Airbus away from its rival, and, more recently, announced that 250,000 US Army personnel would be given Workspace licenses, a further sign of the suite’s acceptance by large organizations.

“When we look at the Western world, we see that Microsoft and Google are the two dominant players in this space,” Mariano said.

A key driver for business interest in Workspace is the cost compared to M365, said Mariano. Businesses are wary of the rising expenditure on Microsoft’s suite, he said, even if the reality is that, for the most part, businesses are unlikely to see significant savings by switching to Workspace.

“The term that I have heard from multiple IT leaders and CIOs I’ve talked to is the cost increase of Microsoft 365 is not sustainable,” said Mariano. “That is making them think much harder about Google Workspace than they have in the past.”

Gownder also sees Google’s efforts to target Workspace at educational institutions over the years starting to pay off. “Younger cohorts of employees, because they used Google Workspace in school, might have a preference for the suite over the less familiar Microsoft 365,” he said.

Another factor is that, after emerging from a reactive crisis mode during the pandemic, IT leaders are now in a better position to evaluate their workplace app strategy.

“When we look back at the pandemic era, Microsoft feasted: everybody ran to Microsoft, because it’s what they had,” Mariano said. “I think the dust has settled, and a lot of IT leaders and CIOs are looking at what’s left after the fact now and saying, ‘What did we do, and should we be here?’ They’re taking the time to decide what the next five to 10 years are going to look like.”

How easy is it to move from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace?

For many businesses, adopting Workspace will mean migrating users from Microsoft’s business productivity apps. Google provides tools to help customers make the transition.

The Google Workspace Migrate tool lets admins move large amounts of content into a Workspace domain. Workspace Migrate can be used to move data from Microsoft Exchange (2010, 2013, 2016, and 2019), Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint (2010, 2013, and 2016), SharePoint Online, and Microsoft OneDrive for Business. It can also be used to migrate data from cloud storage platform Box, file share systems, and other Workspace domains. Workspace Migrate is available for Workspace Business Standard and Business Plus, Enterprise Standard and Enterprise Plus, and Education Standard and Education Plus.

For smaller migrations from certain Microsoft products, Google has other options: Google Workspace Migration for Microsoft Exchange (GWMME), Google Workspace Migration for Microsoft Outlook (GWMMO), and the data migration service.

Google also introduced a new file migration service in open beta recently that aims to simplify the transfer of files between from OneDrive to Google Drive for up to 100 employees at a time, and promises “minimal disruption” to end users during the process.  

Nevertheless, a full migration from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace is not for the faint-hearted. Such a project can require a “monumental effort” for a large enterprise, said Gownder: “There’s just a lot of complexity to manage, despite the assistive tools Google offers,” he said.

One of the challenges businesses face is that some aspects of the Microsoft 365 suite don’t have a clear destination in Google Workspace. For example, it’s hard to migrate Teams data in a way that makes sense, said Gownder, while Excel has entire programming sequences, macros, and other content approaches that can break when migrating them to Sheets. “Large organizations would want to work with an external consulting partner, and it won’t be a small project,” he said.

What are some of the newest Google Workspace features?

At the top of the agenda for Google is the integration of its Gemini AI assistant across Workspace apps.

One recently launched Gemini for Workspace feature in Meet is “Take notes for me,” which tasks the AI assistant with note taking during a video call, allowing participants to concentrate on their meeting.

Google

A recent update to Gemini in Gmail’s “Help me write” feature — which uses generative AI to draft an email — adds three options to refine the text of an email: Formalize, Elaborate, and Shorten.

Gems are also now available for Gemini users. Similar to OpenAI’s GPT, Gems are customized versions of the AI chat assistant that can be instructed to respond in certain ways: coding partner and writing editor are examples of two pre-built Gems provided by Google.

In terms of the core Workspace apps, one fairly recent addition is “smart chips,” an array of interactive elements you can embed in Docs and Sheets to enhance collaboration. When a co-worker clicks on an embedded chip, they can either see more information, such as the contact details for a person or business, or take an action, such as changing a task’s status via a dropdown menu.

Howard Wen / IDG

Currently under development is a new Workspace app: Vids. This is a video creation app that guides users through the process of producing simple videos for purposes such as sales pitches, employee onboarding, and learning and development. An AI assistant in the app can create a storyboard and suggest background images, for instance, and offers pre-set voiceovers to narrate a video. The app is now in preview in Workspace Labs.

What’s next for Google Workspace?

Although Gemini has been built into a wide range of Workspace apps already, it’s fair to say that Google will continue to focus its efforts on developing the AI assistant for work use.

“I think it’s Gemini, Gemini, Gemini for them right now,” said Mariano.

One AI feature in development is the AI Teammate for Workspace — an AI agent that human workers can interact directly with in the Workspace Chat app. The prototype, unveiled at Google I/O this year, could be used for a variety of purposes — to monitor and track projects, for example.

It remains to be seen whether Google’s investments in Gemini will result in attracting more businesses to the Workspace suite, however. “Google continues to bolster Workspace with AI-based tools, but we are not yet at the point where enterprises are saying they will migrate to Google Workspace because of Gemini,” said Gownder.

One strength for Google could lie in the combination of its Gemini and Workspace apps with its hardware business, with Google’s Pixel phones able to run AI on-device. “That is a competitive advantage for them that we could see grow in the next couple years, as we see what happens with AI,” said Mariano.

It’s not all about AI, though: Another intriguing product in the works is Project Starline, a 3D videoconferencing system that gives users the feeling that they’re in the same room. Google recently announced that it plans to make the system, which it has been developing for several years, commercially available in 2025.