Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace Now Cost the Same. Stop Shopping on Price.

Microsoft 365 Business Standard and Google Workspace Business Standard both cost $14 per user per month on an annual plan, or $16.80 billed monthly. I did not round those to make a point. Check Microsoft's own pricing page against Google's published rates and the two numbers match to the penny at the tier most small businesses actually buy.

That match is new. Microsoft raised Business Standard from $12.50 to $14 per user per month on July 1, 2026, a roughly 12 percent increase, according to a breakdown of the change. Google did not undercut it. The two biggest productivity suite vendors on earth are now charging identical rates at the tier that matters for most of my clients.

My take: if you are picking a suite for your business right now, stop shopping on price. It no longer discriminates between these two. Pick on what your team already knows and what security tier you actually need, because that is where the real cost, and the real gap between these products, actually lives.

The honest case for switching anyway

There is a real argument for treating this as a clean decision even if you already run one of these. If you are a new company with no legacy files, no Excel macros, no line-of-business software wired into Outlook or a Windows domain, you carry no switching cost to weigh against a better fit. In that world, Google's advantages are concrete: 2 TB of pooled storage per user against Microsoft's 1 TB at the same Standard tier, confirmed on Google's own pricing page, plus real-time collaborative editing that a lot of teams find more natural than SharePoint-backed file sharing in Office. If your staff already lives in Gmail and Docs from prior jobs, onboarding cost on Google is close to zero. That is a defensible reason to pick Workspace on its merits, not out of habit.

Why most businesses should stay put

Most small businesses are not choosing fresh, though. They are deciding whether to abandon something they already run, and that is where the math turns against switching. One cost breakdown works through a 20 person team: saving $2 a month per user nets $40 a month total, an amount that gets wiped out fast if the switch costs the team even a single day of confusion sorting out email, file permissions, and client documents. A separate comparison frames it annually: for a 50 person team, the platform cost gap usually lands at a few hundred dollars a year, well under what a migration costs in IT and consulting time alone. Neither source needed a horror story. The arithmetic alone kills switching on price when the price is already tied.

This is the part price war headlines miss. Competition between Microsoft and Google on list price is real, and I give it credit. It is the exact kind of pressure that keeps software costs from drifting up unchecked, and small businesses have quietly benefited from it for years without anyone regulating it into existence. But price parity at the base tier does not mean the products converged. It means the vendors matched each other's number and moved the actual competition somewhere else: security.

Where the real gap sits

Microsoft 365 Business Premium runs $22 per user per month on an annual plan and adds a named, specific bundle: Defender for Office 365 Plan 1, Defender for Business, and Intune Plan 1, covering phishing and business email compromise defense, endpoint threat protection, and device management with remote wipe. Google's equivalently priced Business Plus tier gives you 5 TB of storage and broader device management controls, but nothing branded and specific in the way Microsoft names its security stack. If your business has remote staff, company issued laptops, or client data you would have to explain losing in a breach notification letter, that gap is the actual decision. The $14 sticker everyone quotes is not.

The practical move

Do not run a bake-off between two suites priced identically. Audit what you are actually protecting, price the Premium or Plus tier that matches that risk, and only seriously entertain a full platform switch if you are starting clean or your current vendor's support has genuinely failed you. I have this conversation with clients constantly, usually after they find out their Microsoft 365 setup has been running on Business Basic for three years with none of the security tier they thought they had. If you want someone to check what tier your business is actually on and whether it fits what you are trying to protect, that is exactly what we do at Mojo IT. Get in touch and I will look at it myself.