As of 6 Nov 2026, the panel rates Google Workspace 2.5/5 and Microsoft 365 Business 3/5 in Business Email & Office Suites. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 0 of the 6 judges pick Google Workspace and 6 pick Microsoft 365 Business. Google Workspace scores higher on 2 of 7 criteria (Pricing transparency and European sovereignty). Microsoft 365 Business scores higher on 5 of 7 criteria (Migration, open standards & exit, Calendar, contacts & office apps, Mail, domains & deliverability, plus 2 more). Provenance — Google Workspace: Rest of world; Microsoft 365 Business: Rest of world. Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made.
Microsoft 365 Business holds the higher mean on five of seven criteria: mail and deliverability 7.0 to 5.7, calendar and office 7.5 to 6.0, migration and portability 7.0 to 4.3, administration and identity 6.3 to 5.2, security and compliance 6.5 to 5.8, with six judges leaning its way on mail, calendar and office, and migration. Elsewhere the benches split: security three lean Microsoft 365 Business to three ties, administration four lean to two ties, sovereignty 4.7 versus 4.5 with two judges leaning Google Workspace, one leans Microsoft 365 Business, three tie. Google Workspace is ahead on pricing transparency, 6.8 to 5.8, five judges leaning its way with one tie. Its privacy policy states servers operate worldwide; Microsoft 365 Business pages state customer data continues to be transferred outside the EU Data Boundary in limited circumstances. Judge totals, where published, run 5.1–5.7 for Google Workspace and 5.9–6.6 for Microsoft 365 Business.
Choose Google Workspace if
You need euro prices published for the three business tiers before committing: pricing transparency means run 6.8 versus 5.8, with five judges leaning Google Workspace and one tie.
Your budget process requires billing options beyond annual: the Microsoft 365 Business verdict states annual billing only shown, while pricing transparency leans five judges to Google Workspace, none to Microsoft 365 Business, with one tie.
Your evaluation weights pricing transparency and sovereignty above the other criteria: those are the two means favoring Google Workspace (6.8 to 5.8 and 4.7 to 4.5), with five and two judges leaning its way respectively.
Your data-protection review screens out pages stating outbound transfers: Microsoft 365 Business pages state customer data continues to be transferred outside the EU Data Boundary in limited circumstances, and the sovereignty bench leans two judges Google Workspace, one Microsoft 365 Business, three tie.
Choose Microsoft 365 Business if
You need documented per-plan mail limits and quarantine for your team: mail and deliverability means run 7.0 versus 5.7, with six judges leaning Microsoft 365 Business.
You are moving mail from another platform and want documented entry paths: migration and portability means run 7.0 versus 4.3, six judges leaning Microsoft 365 Business; the Google Workspace verdict found no public information on what its Migrate tool carries over.
Your staff spend the day in Word, Excel and PowerPoint: calendar and office means run 7.5 versus 6.0, six judges leaning Microsoft 365 Business, with the verdict scoring calendar and office 7 to 8.
Your administrators manage identity for many users: administration and identity means run 6.3 versus 5.2, four judges leaning Microsoft 365 Business and two tied.
You must show documented retention to auditors: security and compliance means run 6.5 versus 5.8, three judges leaning Microsoft 365 Business with three ties, and the verdict records retention documented deeply.
Read this comparison as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.
The Small Firm Owner
Runs a tax and accounting firm of twelve in Lower Saxony. Every member of staff lives in Outlook, the shared "kanzlei@" mailbox is the busiest address in the office, and the meeting room is booked by shouting across the corridor. Wants mail on the firm's own domain that arrives, a shared calendar and address book on every phone, a move from the old provider that does not lose a single client thread, and a per-user price that is still the price in the second year.
Google Workspace
Microsoft 365 Business
This judge's pick
Criterion by criterion
Mail, domains & deliverability
Google Workspace
Custom-domain mail is confirmed, with IMAP documented, send-as aliases with per-address signatures, delegation across the organisation (read, send, delete, contacts), server-side rules and forwarding, and phishing and spam protection that blocks more than 99.9% of attacks. Delegation covers our shared kanzlei mailbox style of working. But we found no public information on Outlook connectivity (MAPI or Exchange ActiveSync), on SPF, DKIM, DMARC or catch-all — and my whole staff lives in Outlook.
Microsoft 365 Business
The mailbox side is strong for our firm: Exchange Online brings quarantine that admins and users manage, multi-engine anti-spam and anti-malware on all plans, Exchange ActiveSync policies for the phones, shared mailboxes with their stated sizes and licensing, out-of-office replies and server-side rules, and message, attachment and storage limits spelled out per client, with S/MIME signing and encryption available. For mail on our own domain, however, we found no public information on custom-domain DNS set-up, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MTA-STS or DANE, catch-all or plus addressing, or the delivery reputation of the outbound infrastructure.
Calendar, contacts & office apps
Google Workspace
The bundle includes Calendar, Meet, Chat, Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides with interoperability with Office files on all plans, shared drives per plan, video meetings up to 24 hours, and appointment booking from the Standard plan — that is the core of what a twelve-person office writes and plans with. We found no public information on free/busy lookup, room and resource booking, CalDAV or CardDAV sync to phones, or Outlook calendar sync, which is exactly the shared-calendar-on-every-phone question I need answered.
Microsoft 365 Business
This is the office our twelve people already live in: conference room management and calendar sharing, federated sharing with calendar publishing, the global address list and offline address book, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook for desktop, web and mobile, 1 TB of OneDrive per user, Teams and more than ten further apps in the bundle. Room-booking approval, delegated calendar access and co-editing in the browser are not spelled out on the pages we read, which keeps it a notch below the top mark.
Security, encryption & compliance archiving
Google Workspace
Two-step verification, encryption in transit, S/MIME at Enterprise, and Vault to retain, archive and search data with eDiscovery from the Plus plan are stated, and the Cloud Data Processing Addendum is incorporated into the agreement — the archive matters most for a tax office. We found no public information on GoBD-compliant archiving, legal hold, a transparency report on authority requests, or certifications such as ISO 27001 with their scope, and encryption at rest is not stated on the captured pages either.
Microsoft 365 Business
The compliance side is what I would want behind a Kanzlei: retention labels and policies across Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams, legal holds with stated limits, records with proof of disposition for up to seven years, data loss prevention, S/MIME and Purview message encryption, phishing, spam and malware protection, deleted-item recovery, and archives growing to 1.5 TB. But we found no public information on certifications such as ISO 27001 or BSI C5, GoBD-compliant archiving, statements on TLS or encryption at rest, enforced two-factor sign-in or passkeys, or a transparency report on authority requests.
Administration, identity & partner management
Google Workspace
An admin console is documented — administrators apply data region policies by organisational unit and can view status reports — and endpoint management is listed per plan, with Secure LDAP, security center, context-aware access and access transparency at Enterprise, plus Standard, Enhanced and Premium support tiers. We found no public information on single sign-on as such, SCIM provisioning, exportable audit logs, reseller accounts for managing several customers, or stated support response times.
Microsoft 365 Business
Whoever runs our IT gets the Microsoft 365 admin center, the Exchange admin center and remote PowerShell, provisioning of users, groups and teams by script or through the Graph REST API, full integration with Microsoft Entra ID with group policies and conditional access, ActiveSync device policies, usage reports and a Message Center for announcements. We found no public information on single sign-on explicitly, SCIM provisioning, remote wipe, exportable audit logs or partner accounts managing several customers, and no support response times — only sales phone and chat hours and developer forums.
Migration, open standards & exit
Google Workspace
A Google Workspace Migrate tool for data migration is available from the Standard plan, IMAP is documented, email account migration is an explicit API use case, and users can export a copy of their contents and delete their whole account — a real door in and out for our client correspondence. We found no public information on whether the tool moves whole organisations with calendars, contacts and permissions from Exchange or Microsoft 365, on coexistence during the move, on CalDAV and CardDAV access, or on a stated data-return period after cancellation.
Microsoft 365 Business
Getting our old mail across is documented properly: cutover, staged and hybrid Exchange migrations, IMAP migration from Gmail, Exchange and Outlook.com, a PST import service by network upload or drive shipping, self-import of contacts, FastTrack specialists and partner help, plus deletion of all associated data when the subscription is cancelled. Two honest cautions for a firm that cannot lose a single client thread: with IMAP only mail folders move and contacts, calendar items and tasks must be handled another way, and mail arriving at the source after migration is not migrated; we also found no public information on open document formats, an organisation-wide export by the admin, or a stated data-return period.
European sovereignty
Google Workspace
Google Ireland Limited is named as controller for users in the European Economic Area, the Cloud Data Processing Addendum is published, and administrators can choose a European Union data region — but only on covered editions (Business Standard and Plus, not the Starter plan), while the privacy policy states plainly that Google operates servers worldwide and data may be processed outside one's own country. The parent is Google LLC in California. We found no public information on named hosting infrastructure, subprocessors and their locations, or certifications such as ISO 27001 or BSI C5 on the captured pages.
Microsoft 365 Business
The EU Data Boundary is documented in real detail — mailboxes on named Microsoft datacentres in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and other EU and EFTA countries, with sign-up location and billing address deciding whether the tenant is in scope — and the captured pages acknowledge limited transfers outside the boundary. But the chain beyond hosting stays dark: we found no public information on the contracting entity or an EU representative, a data processing agreement, the subprocessors or any certifications, and the vendor itself is Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Washington.
Pricing transparency
Google Workspace
Every business tier carries a public per-user monthly price with the regular price after the introductory year spelled out — €3.40 then €6.80 for Starter, €6.80 then €13.60 for Standard, €10.55 then €21.10 for Plus, the offer applying to the first 20 users for 12 months for new customers — alongside pooled storage of 30 GB, 2 TB and 5 TB per person, a 16% saving with a one-year commitment, a 300-user cap on business plans, and all plans billed monthly in euro. That second-year number is exactly what I plan around. What the pages do not state is VAT treatment or prices for add-ons such as the Enhanced and Premium support upgrades.
Microsoft 365 Business
Prices are public per user with VAT treatment stated — Business Basic at 6,07 € Benutzer/Monat on annual billing with auto-renewal and prices zzgl. MwSt., the Standard and Premium offerings shown at 20,36 € and 27,73 € bundled with Copilot Business — and shared mailboxes and conference rooms need no subscription at all, with mailbox and OneDrive storage stated per plan and a 7-day withdrawal right. We found no public information on monthly versus annual billing differences, minimum users or term, or the price of a Standard or Premium seat without the Copilot bundle, so the exact second-year cost of what we need is not computable from these pages alone.
Sovereignty, side by side
Dimension
Google Workspace
Microsoft 365 Business
Legal entity
Not determined
Not determined
Hosting location
Not determined
Not determined
Hosting options
Not determined
Not determined
Open source
Not determined
Not determined
Data processing agreement
Not determined
Not determined
Transfer impact assessment
Not determined
Not determined
Questions about Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 Business
Which is better, Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 Business?
As of 6 Nov 2026, the panel rates Microsoft 365 Business higher: 3/5 against 2.5/5. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 0 of the 6 judges pick Google Workspace and 6 pick Microsoft 365 Business. Which one fits depends on the criteria that matter to you; the table on this page shows both side by side, and each judge’s reading has its own page. Both were scored by the same AI bench under the same rubric, from public evidence only, as the methodology describes.
Is Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 Business European?
Google Workspace is not European by provenance (Rest of world). Microsoft 365 Business is not European by provenance (Rest of world). Provenance is read from each company’s own legal pages: who builds it and who owns it.