Offers Great Value for an All-in-One Platform That Can Grow with Your Business
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Google Workspace is our primary platform for email communication (Gmail), cloud storage (Drive), and internal video conferencing (Meet). Additionally, we use Google Voice for certain roles or functions to help facilitate SMS 2FA, Sales team communications, and avoid tying business functions to personal contact info. Google Workspace also offers an excellent suite of general productivity tools that serve most of the use-cases for our users which saves us costs for comparable tools like Microsoft 365, and keeps the user experience seamless across the extended product suite (Drive, Meet, etc.). The Gemini offering included in our plan has also proven beneficial for incorporating AI into our daily use and extending automation capabilities through platforms like Atlassian, Intercom, and Zapier. I have found Gemini to be helpful for cutting down on time to research issues, quickly analyze data, and break down complex ideas. Overall, Google Workspace has allowed us to consolidate many tools into one platform with an effective set of granular controls available to satisfy compliance and security requirements. The pricing can feel a little convoluted depending on the size of your business, and especially with how AI or Google Cloud Platform seems to keep changing.
Pros
- Google Workspace offers a very straightforward, yet decently customizable email platform for our workforce. It can be reasonably integrated with various third-party platforms to enhance productivity on many different fronts (i.e. calendar, video conferencing, sales data connector, etc.)
- Having access to Google Drive within our Google Workspace plan is very helpful for centralized cloud storage and management capabilities to organize our company data. The permissions structure is also very flexible to allow for compliance with least privileged access.
- We were able to significantly reduce costs on our portfolio of different video conferencing by consolidating primarily to Google Meet usage. While it may not offer as many bells and whistles as other tools, it covers the essential bases and effectively incorporates Gemini Notes to help capture post-meeting action items.
Cons
- For administrative settings, it can sometimes be cumbersome to navigate or find the correct area, pane, setting, or what have you. While it isn't as bad as other big name competitors, they could certainly improve on the administrative settings descriptions and navigation to avoid falling into the same feeling of archaic tool that is oozing with tech debt from bygone years.
- There have been a few occasions where one setting supposed supersedes another, but still works or causes a conflict despite what documentation states. I suppose that is to be expected to some degree considering what all Google Workspace endeavors to control.
- It can be annoying to take time in hunting down a feature or product setting only to discover it isn't enabled for your plan/tier, even though documentation doesn't clearly or readily mention it. It would be nice to have documentation that clearly enumerates what is or is not available for each plan/tier, or simplify the feature offerings instead of making them more complicated.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
