Google 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 Entra ID
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Microsoft Azure Active Directory or Azure AD) is a cloud-based identity and access management (IAM) solution supporting restricted access to applications with Azure Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) built-in, single sign-on (SSO), B2B collaboration controls, self-service password, and integration with Microsoft productivity and cloud storage (Office 365, OneDrive, etc) as well as 3rd party services.
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 …
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 …
Google Workspace is really pretty much the only other primary competitor. And again, Microsoft has just been the standard for so many years and it was in place at the organization when I was first brought on at the beginning of my tenure. And so it didn't seem logical to switch …
Microsoft Entra ID is really the only solution for a full Microsoft shop. I've had some experience with Google Workspace, and although it has it's advantages, Microsoft Entra ID really feels like a true business solution.
Microsoft Entra ID offers the same or very similar services to the other products but in a package that is familiar and recognizable to everyone. It enjoys better community support and world-class security and reliability.
So G Suite and I mean I've used on-Prem Active Directory. Those are really the competitors Jam for the Mac side of things, but that's a whole other story. Microsoft is the leader in that atmosphere for sure.
Entra ID is more intuitive than G-Suite mainly
because Windows Server users and admins will already find the UI and workflows familiar. API access and management is easier to access and work with. Documentation is more comprehensive too, in my experience. Entra ID also appears …
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.
Overall, the Microsoft Entra ID platform is best utilized by people looking to have one platform that manages all interactions between other platforms. The Microsoft Entra ID platform allows for a seemless SSO integration, and can also integrate with Intune for MDM. Additionally, and probably the most easy to understand integration, is the integration with Active Directory, and controls associated with that.
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.
Application integration is really good for single sign-on and managing identity overall. The correlation with Active Directory on-prem is really good, so we can manage it in a single place. It's easy to manage the users and integrate other Microsoft products. It is the base of everything else.
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.
I'm not quite sure what they could do to improve, but I guess they can make it more user-friendly. It's very directed at admin staff, and perhaps there could be some better self-service features so that the admins don't have to do everything. We can let the users do some more of the work. Perhaps that'd be a good one.
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.
MSFT Entra ID has been essential for managing our geographically dispersed team. We're confident that it will scale with us as grow, and we'll be able to take advantage of additional security and ID management features as they become necessary. Being able to centrally manage our user access from anywhere with a small support team is such a relief.
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.
Because there are things you can improve somewhere. Sometimes you set up something that the Microsoft Manager doesn't work with. It could be a security boundary. And then let me say the basic security boundary is not set up as we would like, though. I think it's a better approach to set it up at a different level to be highly secure, and then we can change it whenever we need it because not many people are aware of some of the functionality. A user can create a security group and create the Microsoft Entra ID. Guests can invite guests in the beginning, which is extremely hard to track later, especially if we have pre-tier and we do not send the diagnostics data anywhere else. But within the enterprise environment, it's quite okay because most companies don't go with the security defaults because we do have a premium license. So probably, I hope we are sending data somewhere else. This is why nine. Maybe information about new changes or new functionality that are coming could be better. Because when we have to go to the Microsoft admin portal to get the message information, which is extremely hard because most admins don't do that. And there are lots of notifications. So going through them and identifying the risk and overall functionality, especially the new ones, is extremely hard.
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.
I have not needed to engage support for anything at this time. I have been able to find the answers either online or in a knowledgebase. I tried to skip the question but it would not let me, so I rated a 9 based on other interactions with Microsoft support I have had
Make sure you use a good partner. Our implementation was a bit longer and more problematic than we expected. Our partner got it done, but, in my opinion, some of their inexperience and staffing issues were evident.
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.
We've done stuff with Okta for Identity and Duo. Those would probably be the two big ones that I would say that people would recognize and stuff. There's some other smaller players we've talked to, but those are the two big ones that we play with. We're still using it. So, because it was integrated into everything we've already done, it just made it almost indispensable.
Microsoft Professional Services' technical knowledge is appreciable as consultants design the solution as per customer requirements. Mapping of features per user specifications and assisting Customer IT engineers to implement so they can manage and administer the services.
So I would say all of that, especially when we look at deploying our Federation, or I would say our SSO stuff now, helps out tremendously with that. When we deploy applications to specific users, we can control that. That's a great option as well. So I would say we got a good ROI on that.
