Google Workspace or Microsoft 365: what each business plan includes, at Irish prices

From each vendor's Irish page in October 2026, per user per month, before VAT. Google's figures are for its Annual Plan, a one-year commitment billed monthly, with the price on its Flexible Plan, which has no commitment, in brackets. Microsoft's are for an annual subscription paid yearly, which renews automatically; its page showed no price for the monthly options it also sells.

Both run business email on your own domain with calendars and contacts, and both work with Outlook: Google's comparison of its Business editions lists Microsoft Outlook and IMAP mail clients on all three, once the domain is verified.

On Google, the storage figure is per user but shared: Google calls it flexible pooled storage, shared across the organisation, and its edition comparison lists it as email, document and photo storage. On Microsoft, mail and files are kept apart. Each user mailbox has 100 GB on Basic, Standard and Premium, with an archive of 50 GB on Basic and Standard and one that can grow to 1.5 TB on Premium, and each person has 1 TB of cloud storage in OneDrive. Microsoft's plans share a team's files through SharePoint team sites, which have a storage allowance of their own; how SharePoint storage is counted.

Addresses such as info@ need no paid user on either. Google's pricing page says group aliases such as sales@ and support@ are included and don't count as users, and Microsoft's mailbox limits say a shared mailbox needs no licence of its own, up to 50 GB.

Microsoft 365 Business Standard and Premium include the desktop versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, and Microsoft's table gives up to five PCs or Macs, five tablets and five mobile devices. Business Basic has the web and mobile versions only. Google's editors are Docs, Sheets and Slides, which Google lists as working across computers, phones and tablets, with offline access and with Office files.

Google Meet takes 100 participants on Starter, 150 on Standard and 500 on Plus, and saves recordings to Drive from Standard up. Teams takes 300 on all three Microsoft business plans, with recordings on each. Google gives 24 hours as the longest meeting, and Microsoft gives Teams a limit of 30 hours.

Both now include an AI assistant. Google lists Gemini in Gmail on every plan, and in Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive, Meet and Chat from Standard up. Microsoft sells Standard and Premium as plans with Copilot, with Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. Before switching Copilot on, what to check under the GDPR.

In the EEA Microsoft also sells each plan without Teams, for less: on the same Irish page, Business Basic without Teams was €4.67 a user a month, Standard €17.58 and Premium €24.94. Microsoft Teams or Slack compares the two for a business deciding what to talk in.

Both are run from an admin console, and both offer two-step sign-in on every plan. Google's pricing page lists 2-Step Verification and its Advanced Protection Programme on every plan, Vault for keeping and searching data on Plus, and endpoint management that steps up from fundamental to advanced on Plus. Microsoft's table lists multifactor authentication for work accounts on all three of its plans, and Business Premium adds device management and further protection for email; what Business Premium adds for security sets that out plan by plan.

Having two-step sign-in on the plan is a start. Making it required for every account, and keeping a record that shows it, is in two-step sign-in on Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.

Microsoft's data residency pages quote its Product Terms: for a tenant provisioned in the European Union, Microsoft stores mailbox content, SharePoint site content, OneDrive files and Teams chat messages at rest only within the EU. For where a particular tenant's data is, Microsoft points to the Data Location card in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Google lets Business Standard and Business Plus set one data region for the whole organisation, for the data the setting covers at rest: the United States, Europe or no preference, under Data, Compliance, Data regions in the Admin console. Business Starter is not among the editions that can set one. Google also notes that choosing a region doesn't improve performance, and that people outside the region can see more delay, for example when editing shared files across regions.

Each vendor documents moving to itself. Google's import tool copies without deleting or changing anything at Microsoft, and Microsoft's file migration leaves the original files in Google Drive.

To Google: the data import tool in the Google Admin console copies email, calendars and contacts from Exchange Online for up to 1,000 users at a time, and files, folders and permissions from OneDrive for up to 500. Every user needs a Google Workspace account and licence first, because the tool creates none. Outlook folders arrive in Gmail as labels, Teams meeting links come across without becoming Google Meet meetings, and the default method leaves out calendar permissions and event attachments.

To Microsoft: the Exchange admin center moves mail and rules, calendars and contacts from Google Workspace in batches, once every user has been set up in Microsoft 365. Rules arrive switched off, and shared calendars, event colours, room bookings and automatic replies are not migrated. Files move separately, with Migration Manager, which exports Google's own files to Office formats, copies only the latest version of each file unless it is set to copy history, and does not carry file-level permissions unless that is set as well.

Mail starts arriving at the new provider when the domain's MX record points to it. Microsoft's instructions are to set up every user before changing the MX record, and say that existing mail stays with the old provider until it is migrated. The SPF record changes too: Google's entry is include:_spf.google.com and Microsoft's is include:spf.protection.outlook.com, and Microsoft says to add its entry to the existing record, keeping one. Each provider's DKIM key comes from its own admin console. The full set of records for each is in our guides to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, and the email security check shows which provider your domain's records point to.

Cancel the old subscription last. Google says that once a Workspace subscription is cancelled, users' data is deleted and can't be restored, and says to download any data you want to keep before cancelling. Microsoft says that after cancelling, the data stays available to administrators in a limited function account for 90 days. Leaving an annual plan early costs money on both: Google charges the remaining balance of the contract, and Microsoft gives no refund on an annual subscription paid up front, which makes the renewal date the natural time to move.

From what each vendor's own pages include: