Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace: which one for a small business?

Both are excellent. You will not pick wrong by much. But one will fit how your team actually works, and switching later is painful, so choose on purpose.

The question that usually decides it

Does your team live in Excel and Word, or in a browser? Accountants, engineers, anyone building serious spreadsheets, anyone exchanging formatted documents with lawyers and government: Microsoft 365. Teams that collaborate live in documents, work from phones, and never open a desktop app: Google Workspace.

Email

Equal for most people. Outlook is heavier and more powerful; Gmail is lighter and faster to search. Both handle your own domain (you@yourcompany.ca), both have strong spam filtering, both need SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up properly or your mail will land in junk. That setup is the part most small businesses skip.

Files and documents

Google Drive and Docs win for real-time collaboration and simplicity. OneDrive and SharePoint win for permissions, large libraries and anything that must open perfectly in Excel. If you share files with clients who use Office, Microsoft saves friction.

Meetings and chat

Teams is a full phone-and-meetings system that can replace a desk phone. Google Meet and Chat are simpler and perfectly fine for most meetings. If you want one app for calls, chat and meetings, Microsoft.

Security

Both are secure when configured. Microsoft 365 Business Premium includes device management and advanced protection that a company with laptops to control should want. Google's is simpler to run. The non-negotiables are the same on both: multi-factor authentication for every account, no shared logins, and a tested backup that isn't just the recycle bin.

Cost

In Canada, both start around the price of a coffee a week per user and go up with security and storage tiers. The difference in licence cost is rarely what decides it. The difference in setup and support is.

What we see go wrong

• Buying the cheapest plan and discovering it has no desktop Office or no device management when you need it.
• Mixing both: Gmail here, Teams there, files in three places.
• Nobody owns the admin account; the person who set it up has left.

Our take

Trades, construction, clinics and anyone exchanging documents with the outside world: Microsoft 365, usually Business Standard or Premium. Agencies, startups, remote-first teams: Google Workspace. Either way, set up security on day one, decide where files live, and write it down. We run both for clients and migrate between them without losing mail.