Both do email, documents and chat well. The decision turns on desktop Excel, who manages your Windows machines, and what switching would actually cost.
Feature comparisons between these two have been obsolete for several years. Both do email, calendars, documents, spreadsheets, chat, video and storage to a standard that is well past adequate for almost any business. If you are choosing based on a feature matrix, you are choosing based on the least relevant information available.
Three things actually decide it.
One: does anyone's core job depend on desktop Excel?
This is the first question because it is the only one that can end the conversation on its own.
Google Sheets is a capable spreadsheet and it is genuinely better than Excel at some things, particularly live collaboration and pulling data from the web. What it is not is a replacement for a finance team's model with twelve years of structure, an add-in from their actuarial software, and macros somebody wrote in 2011 that nobody fully understands but which produce the board pack.
If that describes anyone in your organisation, you are on Microsoft 365, and the rest of the analysis is confirmation. The same applies in a narrower way to desktop Word in legal and professional practices where document formatting, track changes across firms, and styles inherited from precedent banks matter in a way that web editors still handle imperfectly.
If nobody's job works that way, this constraint does not bind and you have a real choice.
Two: who manages your Windows laptops?
Microsoft 365 Business Premium includes Intune, which manages Windows, macOS, iOS and Android from one console. If you have a fleet of Windows laptops, you need something that does that job, and if you choose Google you will buy it separately.
That changes the cost comparison materially, and it is the single most common omission in side-by-side pricing. Compare like with like: Workspace plus a device management tool plus whatever you use for conditional access, against Business Premium.
Conversely, if your estate is Chromebooks and phones, Google's management is native, free in the relevant tiers, and simpler. An organisation running Chromebooks that buys Microsoft 365 for the email has bought a management problem.
Three: what does switching actually cost?
If you already have one of these, this is the question that usually settles it, and the honest answer is that migration costs more than the licence difference for several years.
The mail and file migration itself is a solved problem with mature tooling, and it is not where the cost is. The cost is in:
Retraining, which is a week of reduced productivity across the entire organisation and a long tail of individual frustration that shows up as support tickets for four months.
The things built on top. Every macro, script, add-in, automation, form, approval workflow and integration that points at the current platform has to be found and rebuilt. Nobody has a list of these. They surface when they break.
Integrations with other systems. Your CRM, practice management system, HR platform and finance system each have an authentication and a document integration pointing at one of these platforms. Check each one.
A migration between these two is a six-month project with a nine-month tail, and it is worth it when there is a strategic reason. "The other one is slightly cheaper" is not a strategic reason.
Three questions, in order
Where each one is genuinely better
Worth saying plainly, because partisan comparisons help nobody.
Google is better at simplicity. Fewer administrative surfaces, fewer licence SKUs, fewer ways to configure something wrongly. For an organisation without dedicated IT staff this is a real and under-rated advantage. Real-time collaborative editing is also still smoother, and the admin console is more legible.
Microsoft is better at depth. Compliance tooling, retention, eDiscovery, information barriers, and conditional access are more capable and more granular. Device management across a mixed fleet is stronger. And in regulated industries, the specific control you are asked to demonstrate is more likely to exist as a named feature.
Microsoft is worse at coherence. There are multiple admin centres, overlapping products with confusingly similar names, and a licensing model that requires study. The flexibility that makes it powerful is the same flexibility that lets you misconfigure it.
Google is worse at the desktop. This is a deliberate strategic position rather than a failure, and it only matters if it matters to you.
Running two
Occasionally the right answer, usually after an acquisition, and it is more viable than it used to be. Calendar interoperability and document interchange both work acceptably.
What does not work is running two identity systems indefinitely. If you are going to be on both platforms for more than a year, federate identity to one of them and make a decision about the other on a timeline. Two directories is where the security gaps live, because the offboarding process will eventually only cover one of them.
The short answer
If you have desktop Office dependence or a Windows fleet, Microsoft 365, and spend your energy on configuring it well rather than on re-litigating the choice. If you do not, Google Workspace is simpler to run and you will spend less time administering it. If you already have one and nothing is actually wrong, keep it and spend the migration budget on something that changes an outcome.
