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Google Workspace Essentials

Google Workspace Essentials
Formerly G Suite Essentials

Overview

What is Google Workspace Essentials?

Google now offers Google Workspace Essentials (formerly G Suite Essentials), providing a solution for users of Outlook or Office whose teams want to use Google Meet and Google Apps without needing to involve a personal gmail account. Google Workspace Essentails…

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Recent Reviews

Needs no training

10 out of 10
February 03, 2022
Incentivized
I have used Google Workspace Essentials at almost all the jobs that I've done over the last three years. I like using it because I'm …
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Awards

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Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://workspace.google.com/essentials

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Starting price (does not include set up fee)

  • $8 per month per user
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Product Details

What is Google Workspace Essentials?

Google Workspace Essentials Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Google now offers Google Workspace Essentials (formerly G Suite Essentials), providing a solution for users of Outlook or Office whose teams want to use Google Meet and Google Apps without needing to involve a personal gmail account. Google Workspace Essentails includes Google Slides, Sheets, and Docs, as well as Google Meet, Google Drive, Forms, Sites, and Keep, in a bundle minus a gmail account. Basic Essentials supports (via Meet) meetings with up to 150 participants, and Google Drive with 100GB per user and 2TB pooled. The Enterprise edition supports 250 participants in a meeting, as well as up to 100k viewers of a Live Streamed event, and 1TB per user of Drive space (25TB pooled).

Google Workspace Essentials starts at $8.

The most common users of Google Workspace Essentials are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(39)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-15 of 15)
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Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Workspace Essentials for our corporate email, calendar, documents, sheets, etc. It is used by every employee in the organization in our 14 offices. It makes collaboration easier and makes scheduling meetings very easy. It addresses all of our business collaboration and communication needs for the firm as a whole.
  • Easy to schedule meetings.
  • Chat functionality is robust.
  • Google Docs are simple to create and edit.
  • The calendar tool isn't as easy to learn as Outlook.
  • Sometimes Gchat notifications can be obtrusive.
Google Workspace Essentials is well suited to collaboration, especially on creative teams who are editing documents frequently. It makes scheduling meetings pretty simple, although it can be tough to find meeting times with five or more attendees. Google Sheets are easy to share and gate when working on confidential data or projects in progress.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Workspace Essentials for team communication and document storage/management. We use Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Meet in our business.
  • Google Docs & Google Slides are essential to our company as we are remote. Multiple people can work on the documents at one time.
  • Easy to share and store files in Google Drive.
  • Google Calendar is amazing, it integrates seamlessly with other Google products and it's our company's primary calendar tool.
  • Google Sheets has limited capabilities compared to excel. Such as how you maneuver pivot tables, filtering, etc.
  • On Google Docs, sometimes if they are multiple people working at one time, you can get shifted around on the doc. For example, if someone made a big edit that took up space, it will shift my content down. I wish you could lock the area you're editing so it doesn't move or get affected by other changes on the doc while you're editing.
Google Workspace Essentials is truly the easiest way to collaborate on business items/content. Our company is fully remote, so we rely on Google Workspace Essentials to collaborate on projects and access documents, etc. For proposals, multiple team members can work on the same document simultaneously. There is also an "editing" feature in addition to the "comment" feature that allows you to suggest edits to any text or item on the doc. We leverage this tool a lot when QAing content.
Robin Anderson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our business uses Google Workspace for internal and external communications, along with calendaring and managing staff email accounts. We love having the ability to instant message important information fast and secure with our team members. Additionally, having the ability to organize folders and subfolders helps us stay organized and on task.
  • Instant Messaging.
  • Calendaring and calendar integrations.
  • Ease of organizing important content in folders and subfolders.
  • The ability to contain multiple emails in one thread.
  • The workspace could be less busy - more simplified.
We've noticed that more and more companies are using Google Workplace. This is a plus for our company as most of the employees we have hired are familiar with your platform so it makes it easier to onboard a new employee. Our experience with Google Workspace has been very positive and haven't been any scenarios where the platform has been less appropriate.
Tania Gallegos | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Workspace Essentials is how our company ensures the productivity and visibility of our remote team. Google Workspace Essentials also allows bringing the team together by allowing us to work on and share documents, sheets, and/or presentations in real-time. One of the big issues Google Workspace Essentials has solved for our operations, and the HR department is being able to keep track of where each document goes. Being able to see who manipulated the document and how and when has been a big plus when it comes to making decisions based on what our team has worked on.
  • Sharing documents
  • Visibility on last changes
  • Document tracking
  • Google Sheets makes us want to say Excel who?
  • Make it easier to configure to desktop
  • Alerts when shared documents are being deleted
If your company team works remotely and you want to simplify team meetings, Google Workspace Essentials will do just that.

Google Workspace Essentials is not suited or rather not necessary for really small in-office teams. However, in general, it solves all issues that Microsoft Office can solve, and I would highly recommend it as it is easy to learn.
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It has worked well for us through the years. Recently, in my experience, we have had more and more issues syncing between users and integrating with other products. Now it appears the platform is going to be subscription only. We will not be continuing to use, in my opinion, a lesser product AND pay more. Until the past year or two, I have been a HUGE fan of Google Workspace Essentials. I would have highly recommended it until recently.
  • Convivence
  • Price (until recently)
  • Recent price hike
  • Integration
  • Email sync time
We used it consistently for 12 years, but recent price increase and service decreases mean we will no longer be using it and I cannot in good conscience recommend it to anyone anymore. Two or three years ago, my review would have been glowing, but, in my opinion, the product and price have gone down significantly since then.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Workspace Essentials for emails, calendars, and documents creation and sharing. The tool is easy to use as a lot of people are familiar with the layout from their private accounts. The only piece I miss in the package is an IM communicator that could replace Slack as an everyday channel.
  • Emailing
  • Calendar events
  • Video meetings
  • Layout of folders on drive could be improved
  • IM communicator could be better
I believe this set of tools can match the needs of a great range of companies, regardless of their size and industry. The biggest win for our company was having in one place the following combination of tools: email + calendar + meet. That meant that the person that schedules a meeting could use the company emails taken directly from the mailbox, add the meeting in their calendars, and automatically have a "meet" link added to the invite. Then, everyone logs into the meeting using their email credentials. This made the communicating process during pandemic way smoother.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it as a sign-in provider, as a mail provider, and also as a security provider for DLP. I love the simplicity of the admin side the OAuth in other services is so easy to use and so easy to manage if you want to remove your account permissions.
  • Emails.
  • Calendar.
  • Sign-in.
  • I can’t think of something.
It is well suitable for starters and startups with the easy to setup and easy to manage.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Overall, Google Workspace Essentials is a reliable network drive that allows users to share content and update it for work purposes. Sometimes it can be time-consuming in that it doesn't always sync in real-time the way that you would need it to, but in the end, it will do the syncing if you have enough patience. Moving files and folders around can sometimes feel as if it's taking too many steps to accomplish, but I can't think of an easier way right now. It does the job in the end.
  • Allows for easy access to documents for purposes of sharing
  • Allows for easy downloads of files/folders
  • The Word/Excel sheets are compatible with how you use it offline
  • Syncing sometimes has issues. There is sometimes a delay.
  • Uploading docs sometimes has issues. It stalls when you are uploading two or more docs simultaneously.
The other day I had a folder filled with many files/docs on my PC that needed to be uploaded into Google Workspace Essentials. To upload one at a time was going to be time-consuming, so I tried uploading several at a time, but then I don't know if there was a bandwidth problem, but the uploading stalled. I had to reduce it down to two docs per upload, which was better than one at a time but still time-consuming.
February 08, 2022

Easy to use

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it for email and calendar management, use the drive for all document creation and sharing, the chat as the main app for team communication and use the meeting feature as the meeting app for the meetings we set and record them.
  • document sharing
  • calendar events/meetings schedule
  • Search engine. Specially in Drive
  • Security.
  • Support. Sometimes the partner where you buy the system needs to contact Google and it is a annoying that you can't contact google directly.
It is easy to deploy and has several plan alternatives that can adapt to specific company needs. Very intuitive to use and is ideal for companies that need a lot of document sharing.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Workspace is a great all-in-one resource for the busy solopreneur from email to file storage at is instrumental in my business and I use it on a daily basis.
  • Email and communication
  • File Storage
  • Folder Management
  • data security
  • customer relation management
  • large file sharing
Email communications and file storage are great for the operations of a small business. The sharing of large creative files is harder to managed and share.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Workspace essentials for almost all of our everyday office work. We use most modules in the solution including meet, sheets, slides, and also docs. For seamless synching of documentation in the cloud and also to conduct business activities google Workspace is a godsend and we have started using the solution almost every minute of every day. I would highly recommend the solution as it contains pretty much anything that a business of small, medium or large scale might require. It is also molded to fit the needs of seamless documentation synch and sharing. So, if you work in a collaborative team like ours and need that capability then you are all set. We also take advantage of the superior call qualities and meeting capabilities of the Google meet meeting solution. That is also recommended from my side for internal and client meetings as most of the world have gone virtual these days.
  • Scheduling and calendar management is great
  • Google meet call qualities are awesome
  • Synch and share of documentation is great.
  • Great cloud storage facility
  • Record option to be there in Google meet
  • ability to share documents outside google accounts need to be looked at
  • Improvement in conversion to MS office based documents and converting those documents to googles format needs a little work.
  • Will be good to have a pdf to word converter and vice versa
I will state this with 2 basic examples, When I require documentation to be edited by many editors then Google workspace is the way to go. It provides the best synching capabilities and also sharing capabilities.

In case of meeting conduction through google meet a notes section would be awesome for personal notes and the capability to record the meetings would also help a ton to improve the productivity of all users.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are an extremely small, collaborative, cross-departmental team, so it is imperative that, particularly over the course of the pandemic, we have one centralized location where multiple hands can be on multiple projects at the same time. Google Workspace Essentials allows for the exact kind of remote-based, team-centric workflow that we need. Everything is in one place, and the various programs and add-ons all inform one another and help build the consistency and efficiency of our operations.
  • UX design and ease of onboarding/training
  • Suitable for smaller nonprofits at a price point that's unmatchable
  • Impeccable and responsive customer service
  • Collaborative team software for program development
  • I'd love to see a formal integration of an Airtable-like program that expands on something like Sheets to really make project management extremely efficient and robust.
  • I think it would be useful if public-facing pieces like Google Forms were more customizable to our org's brand.
  • Creating some sort of easy-to-manage/integrated CRM, donor management, and marketing software would really change the game.
Anyone starting a nonprofit organization from the ground up could use to sign on to Google Workspace Essentials because it's a gigantic platform with lots of capabilities that can serve as the central hub for so many different components to launching a successful, mission-driven entity. It's extremely affordable, which makes it quite a perk and bonus for nonprofits with limited budgets trying to get their fundraising game going. Specifically, startup nonprofits with small teams and remote working situations are pitch-perfect for the Google Workspace Essentials suite, as it allows for real-time collaborative workflows and feels ideal for less complicated project management.
February 03, 2022

Needs no training

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I have used Google Workspace Essentials at almost all the jobs that I've done over the last three years. I like using it because I'm already very familiar with Google and most of its products, so it doesn't take a lot of getting used to on my end. Also, since Google is so universal, adjusting from one company to another is very easy. Another benefit that I've had so far is that it is very easy to use on my devices, and I do not have to worry about losing anything (time) switching to another device. The best thing for me is the fact that Google has so many products, and everything is synced to my Google Workspace Essentials, so if you're forgetful like myself, you won't have any issue losing track of your work.
  • Able to collaborate with team members in real time
  • Easily keep track of your task on all devices
  • Integrates with most CRMs
  • Additional features to Google Meets
  • Google Hangouts
  • Google Sheets
I'm able to send an email from my CRM and still have access to the email, and still able to keep track of the email in my Google inbox. In my email. I think that they can improve on some of the features of Google Meets. The background features do not work very well. Also, when you send a message in the chat and come off the meeting and reenter, you lose all the chat history.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Workspace Essentials at my company for all email communications, as well as internal/external video conferencing. We have found video conferencing to be clean, effective, and feature-rich. The interface is extremely easy to work with, so we've never had any issues with employees not understanding the platform. As far as email communication is concerned, Google Workspace Essentials is incredibly simple to use as it parallels the personal email experience of many of our employees. The platform integrates well with our CRM, which is a MUST for the sales team. This allows us to communicate with our customers directly in our CRM or directly in our inbox and gives us the ability to manage calendars, tasks, and communication from a single webpage. We are very happy with Google Workspace Essentials!
  • Video conferencing
  • CRM integration
  • Simplicity
  • Task tracking
In my opinion, if you are in sales and your CRM can cleanly integrate with Google Workspace Essentials, it's a no-brainer to use it. I know some CRM products integrate better with other email suites, but the complete offering of Google Workspace Essentials gives you email, video conferencing, tasks, and calendars in one space, so it seems like a clear winner.
David Calvert | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We were early adopters of G Suite in order to take advantage of the email address extensions and shared storage space. Even with the change over to Google Workspace Essentials, and increased fees, we find great value in the ability to use our church web address in our email with the security of Google. We have continued to use Google Docs and other workspace tools for collaboration in staff meetings and in shared storage of files.
  • Email management
  • Shared storage
  • Collaboration
  • Document editing
  • Pricing for services
  • Integration of personal/business accounts
  • Consistent branding (no more name changes!)
Google Workspace Essentials is well-suited for small businesses that want to maintain their brand identity with email addresses that have Google security, and it works well for users who take advantage of the Google platform. It is not as appropriate for folks who have to navigate Microsoft environments or who utilize Dropbox or other shared storage as a central tool. These companies don't play nice together yet.
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