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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Google Workspace

    Score9.1 out of 10
    N/AGoogle Workspace enables teams of all sizes to connect, create and collaborate. It includes productivity and collaboration tools for work: Gmail for custom business email, Drive for cloud storage, Docs for word processing, Meet for video and voice conferencing, Chat for team messaging, Slides for presentation building, and shared Calendars.

    $6

    per month per user

    Microsoft Azure

    Score8.5 out of 10
    N/AMicrosoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.

    $29

    per month

    Pricing
    Google WorkspaceMicrosoft Azure
    Editions & Modules
    Business Starter
    $6
    per user/per month
    Business Standard
    $12
    per user/per month
    Business Plus
    $18
    per user/per month
    Enterprise
    Contact sales team
    Developer
    $29
    per month
    Standard
    $100
    per month
    Professional Direct
    $1000
    per month
    Basic
    Free
    per month
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Google WorkspaceMicrosoft Azure
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details—The free tier lets users have access to a variety of services free for 12 months with limited usage after making an Azure account.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Google WorkspaceMicrosoft Azure
    Considered Both Products
    Google
    Chose Google Workspace
    Google Drive [(formerly G Suite)] is so much better for collaboration than Microsoft Office. But Office is still used by so much of the world, it's necessary as well. Having Azure Active Directory for Windows is a nice addition to an onsite active directory, and offers many …
    Incentivized
    Chose Google Workspace
    Google Workspace [(formerly G Suite)] shares many features with it's alternatives. Ultimately, we chose Google Workspace, for now, due to it's superior spam filtering and the feedback we receive from our employees on ease of use using the tools. In addition, the 3rd party …
    Incentivized
    Chose Google Workspace
    It is the most intuitive and user-friendly tool vs. its competitors. It is likely to be cheapest since it lacks some important features.
    I'd say that is far better than MS SharePoint and Office 365. But if you use a desktop version of Office, then you are far more capable than …
    Incentivized
    Microsoft
    Chose Microsoft Azure
    Azure is more user friendly and provides much required scalability and flexibility.
    Incentivized
    Chose Microsoft Azure
    We actually utilized multiple cloud stacks, depending upon the customer environment and need. Those that heavily used MS products (Office on-prem or 365), Teams, etc, found it a better fit, with easier integration, for their needs.
    Incentivized
    Chose Microsoft Azure
    We have settled with Microsoft Azure considered its effective administration and the ability to data visualization and analysis, together with the top-notch security/stability.
    Incentivized
    Chose Microsoft Azure
    Nowadays it is too hard to say why and how one cloud service is better than the other. IT is probably the question that combines a lot of different aspects like price, functionality, how it looks, ease of administration, size of the infrastructure. As for me, it is more …
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    97%
    Would buy again
    58 Answers
    92%
    Would buy again
    34 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    54 Answers
    94%
    Delivers good value for the price
    31 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    95%
    Happy with the feature set
    57 Answers
    95%
    Happy with the feature set
    35 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    96%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    43 Answers
    89%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    24 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    96%
    Implementation went as expected
    46 Answers
    94%
    Implementation went as expected
    34 Answers
    Features
    Google WorkspaceMicrosoft Azure
    Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
    Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Google Workspace and Microsoft Azure
    Feature
    Google Workspace
    -
    Ratings
    Microsoft Azure
    8.4
    27 Ratings
    2% above category average
    Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime00 Ratings8.126 Ratings
    Dynamic scaling00 Ratings8.725 Ratings
    Elastic load balancing00 Ratings8.624 Ratings
    Pre-configured templates00 Ratings8.225 Ratings
    Monitoring tools00 Ratings8.326 Ratings
    Pre-defined machine images00 Ratings8.424 Ratings
    Operating system support00 Ratings8.926 Ratings
    Security controls00 Ratings8.626 Ratings
    Automation00 Ratings8.224 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Google WorkspaceMicrosoft Azure
    Small Businesses
    Google Workspace Essentials
    Score9.4 out of 10
    IBM Cloud Object Storage
    Score9 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Apache OpenOffice
    Score9.3 out of 10
    IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
    Score8.7 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Microsoft 365 Business Premium
    Score9 out of 10
    SAP on IBM Cloud
    Score9 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Google WorkspaceMicrosoft Azure
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.3
    (121 ratings)
    8.7
    (96 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    10.0
    (5 ratings)
    10.0
    (17 ratings)
    Usability
    8.5
    (12 ratings)
    8.3
    (36 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    6.8
    (2 ratings)
    Support Rating
    2.2
    (12 ratings)
    9.0
    (27 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Google WorkspaceMicrosoft Azure
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Google
    Google Workspace does offer several different plans that can match well with the stage of your business. As your business grows, the higher plans can provide the better tooling or expanded features/products to scale with your needs. It would probably become very complicated to swap over to, if you are deeply embedded with another competitor. But, it could be a nice platform to consolidate several disconnected systems under one roof.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    Azure is particularly well suited for enterprise environments with existing Microsoft investments, those that require robust compliance features, and organizations that need hybrid cloud capabilities that bridge on-premises and cloud infrastructure. In my opinion, Azure is less appropriate for cost-sensitive startups or small businesses without dedicated cloud expertise and scenarios requiring edge computing use cases with limited connectivity. Azure offers comprehensive solutions for most business needs but can feel like there is a higher learning curve than other cloud-based providers, depending on the product and use case.
    Read full review
    Pros
    Google
    • Google Calendar...amazing. I don't need to ask team members when they're busy anymore and play this game of bouncing times back and forth. All I need to do is enter their email address and it shows my calendar and theirs side by side and then select the day and time I find that works best for the both of us.
    • I actually prefer Google Meet over Zoom. Zoom bogs down my computer and I find their UI overcomplicated for what it actually does. Google Meet is simple and does practically everything Zoom does without needing to pay any extra money.
    • Sheets integrates with our CRM (Copper) so it's perfect for us. Being able to export information out of our CRM into sheets and then create pivot tables from that data makes our lives a million times better.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • Microsoft Azure is highly scalable and flexible. You can quickly scale up or down additional resources and computing power.
    • You have no longer upfront investments for hardware. You only pay for the use of your computing power, storage space, or services.
    • The uptime that can be achieved and guaranteed is very important for our company. This includes the rapid maintenance for security updates that are mostly carried out by Microsoft.
    • The wide range of capabilities of services that are possible in Microsoft Azure. You can practically put or create anything in Microsoft Azure.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Google
    • Pricing is a little bit higher than other services
    • The cost of each email inbox costs the same whether you want just email or all of the features. For example, we wanted a support email address that we could setup our support desk with. The cost of that added account is the same as the account I use with all of the features.
    • They removed their free tier for small organizations like mine and restricted the free tier from adding new domain names. This was likely due to abuse, but everyone lost the privilege of the free service.
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • The cost of resources is difficult to determine, technical documentation is frequently out of date, and documentation and mapping capabilities are lacking.
    • The documentation needs to be improved, and some advanced configuration options require research and experimentation.
    • Microsoft's licensing scheme is too complex for the average user, and Azure SQL syntax is too different from traditional SQL.
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Google
    There is no better solution for cloud storage and real time collaboration. The amount of features included in G Suite is unmatched and out of other things we’ve tried over the years, nothing comes close to being as great of a tool.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    Moving to Azure was and still is an organizational strategy and not simply changing vendors. Our product roadmap revolved around Azure as we are in the business of humanitarian relief and Azure and Microsoft play an important part in quickly and efficiently serving all of the world. Migration and investment in Azure should be considered as an overall strategy of an organization and communicated companywide.
    Read full review
    Usability
    Google
    Google Workspace is incredibly intuitive and user friendly. It's easy to adopt through simple features, for example the prompts to enable Gemini on each call for note taking is reliable, and helps to stop you forgetting to use the feature. The main reason for a strong rating is the consistency and reliability, whilst there's definitely areas for improvement, for example additional calendar features (sharing), or deeper functionality in sheets. The level that it provides means that anyone adopting it will be able to take full use of features within a day or two. Gmail, calendar and the documentation suite contain all the basic features for a small / medium business to run at a high level day to day, with minimal downtime or learning curves.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    As Microsoft Azure is [doing a] really good with PaaS. The need of a market is to have [a] combo of PaaS and IaaS. While AWS is making [an] exceptionally well blend of both of them, Azure needs to work more on DevOps and Automation stuff. Apart from that, I would recommend Azure as a great platform for cloud services as scale.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Google
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Google
    My experiences of getting support have been positive. Calling in is not overly difficult, but it does require getting a PIN. The knowledge of those responding to the calls has been impressive. I have managed to work with them to fix two Google bugs that I had identified. These bugs required a some technical expertise and the support staff were able to understand the issue and forward the concerns to the appropriate persons. The first bug was fixed with 24 hours. The second bug took a little longer, but it was also more complicated to reproduce.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    We were running Windows Server and Active Directory, so [Microsoft] Azure was a seamless transition. We ran into a few, if any support issues, however, the availability of Microsoft Azure's support team was more than willing and able to guide us through the process. They even proposed solutions to issues we had not even thought of!
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Google
    nothing to say
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    As I have mentioned before the issue with my Oracle Mismatch Version issues that have put a delay on moving one of my platforms will justify my 7 rating.
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Google
    There are lots of competitors to various tools in Workspace, like Meet versus Zoom. However, Microsoft is the other big competitor I can think of for Google Workspace as a whole. To me, at least, the strength of Workspace is how easy it is to share and collaborate with others. For items that I only need for myself and can keep on my own computer, I typically rely on Microsoft Word, Excel, etc. For items that I need to share, I turn to Workspace a lot. Being able to collaborate in real-time and not having to send documents back and forth is so amazing, and such a time saver. And I love that Workspace is also a built-in tool with Dropbox now.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    As I continue to evaluate the "big three" cloud providers for our clients, I make the following distinctions, though this gap continues to close. AWS is more granular, and inherently powerful in the configuration options compared to [Microsoft] Azure. It is a "developer" platform for cloud. However, Azure PowerShell is helping close this gap. Google Cloud is the leading containerization platform, largely thanks to it building kubernetes from the ground up. Azure containerization is getting better at having the same storage/deployment options.
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    Google
    • Zero to no time managing tools allows us to focus on work saving us time and money
    • Google Workspace allowed us to seamlessly transition to a fully remote workforce when the Coronavirus pandemic started - no lost time or productivity.
    • Easily able to extend our workspace and add features, e.g. Voice, saving us time implementing other services.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • For about 2 years we didn't have to do anything with our production VMs, the system ran without a hitch, which meant our engineers could focus on features rather than infrastructure.
    • DNS management was very easy in Azure, which made it easy to upgrade our cluster with zero downtime.
    • Azure Web UI was easy to work with and navigate, which meant our senior engineers and DevOps team could work with Azure without formal training.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
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