Microsoft 365 vs Google Workspace: Which Should You Migrate To?

Choosing between Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace is one of those decisions that feels huge and gets argued on the wrong grounds. Both are excellent. The right answer depends less on which has more features and more on how your organisation actually works. Here is an honest comparison.

Where Microsoft 365 tends to win

• Desktop apps, the full Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint remain the standard for heavy document and spreadsheet work.
• Enterprise features, deep compliance, retention and security tooling.
• Windows and Microsoft identity estates, it fits naturally where you already live in that ecosystem, including Entra ID.

Where Google Workspace tends to win

• Simplicity, less to administer, a gentler learning curve.
• Real-time collaboration, browser-first co-editing that many teams find frictionless.
• Lean, cloud-native teams, organisations without a heavy desktop-app dependency.

Pick the suite that matches how your people already work, not the one with the longer feature list.

The factors that usually decide it

In practice the deciding factors are rarely the apps themselves:

• Identity, what you use for sign-on, and whether you are standardising on Okta or Entra ID.
• Existing tooling, what your other systems integrate with most cleanly.
• Team habits, where your people are already productive.
• Compliance needs, which can tip larger or regulated organisations toward Microsoft 365.

Whichever you choose, migrate it well

The suite matters less than the migration. A botched move, lost mail, broken DNS, frustrated users, sours people on a perfectly good platform. Our zero-downtime migration playbook and our guide to moving file shares to SharePoint and OneDrive cover how to do it cleanly.

If you want help deciding and then executing without disruption, our cloud team does both. Book a free working session.