Google Workspace is an enabler for your business to attain results faster. Google’s office collaboration suite empowers your employees to do more and boosts the collaboration across teams and distances. Once you are convinced Google Workspace is the right fit for your organisation, you need to make a decision on which licence to pick. In this post, I’ll explain the different licenses and the related Google Workspace pricing.
The different Google Workspace licences
Google Workspace’s licensing model is very transparent and doesn’t include any hidden cost. Google Workspace has a total of four different licences: Business Starter, Business Standard, Business Plus and Google Workspace Enterprise.
Some might pick the cheapest license, others might choose the middle one just because it seems right. That’s of course not the right basis to make your decision and that’s why we want to highlight the different licences plus the reasons why to choose one or another. Out of our experience with Google Workspace customers I’ll explain why you should or shouldn’t pick a specific licence.
Google also offers this handy licence comparison, but we feel that often this list can be overwhelming and doesn’t contain enough comprehensible information to make an informed decision based on your organisation’s needs.
G Suite Basic
G Suite Basic is, as the name suggests, the most basic license. With G Suite Basic your business has access to most G Suite applications, as highlighted in the picture below.
G Suite Basic is the right licence for very small businesses that don’t really have the need to set up shared file structures like on a file server. That’s because the major difference with other licenses is that G Suite Basic doesn’t contain Shared Drives (previously called ‘Team Drives’).
Shared Drives have the ability to replace a file server / Sharepoint-like environment. This is something which My Drive, the Cloud storage included in the G Suite Basic license, doesn’t have.
G Suite Basic also has a limitation of 30GB of storage, which is sufficient for small businesses, but will not be sufficient for midsize companies.
Pricing of G Suite Basic
With the G Suite Basic license you pay €5.20 / account / month.
G Suite Business
G Suite Business offers the same functionalities as G Suite Basic, but adds a whole bunch of features and applications that are needed for most organisations. We can say that G Suite Business is actually the entry level licence for mid sized organisations.
You can see all the applications and features included in the G Suite Business license in the picture below.
All of these might not be known by everyone, so let me highlight the most important differences with the G Suite Basic license in terms of features and applications that are included in the Business license.
Included Features
- Shared Drives gives you the ability to replace file servers, Sharepoint, Dropbox and Box environments.
- Unlimited storage across all applications
- Data regions give you the ability to make sure you data stays in Europe
- Additional audit logs such as the Drive audit log and the Devices audit log give you more insight into what’s happening in your G Suite environment
Included Applications
- Cloud Search gives you the ability to search across your entire G Suite stack, with this Enterprise Search engine your company’s information across devices, applications and people gets easily findable
- Appmaker is a rapid development tool giving you the ability to create small internal applications with ease
- Google Vault lets you retain, hold, search & export data to support your organisation’s archiving and eDiscovery needs
Pricing of G Suite Business
With the G Suite Business license you pay €10.40 / account / month
G Suite Enterprise
G Suite Enterprise is the most elaborated G Suite licence there exists. The important question we often get is: what’s the difference between G Suite Enterprise and G Suite Business?
The biggest differences lay in video conferencing and security features that cannot be easily overlooked. When picking your G Suite licence as a midsize or large enterprise, you need to ask yourself whether the following features are needed for your organisation:
Security features
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- Security dashboard: Get insights into external file sharing, visibility into spam and malware that targets users within your organisation. The dashboard includes metrics to demonstrate the security effectiveness of your business in a single, comprehensive dashboard
- Investigation tool: Identify, triage, and take action on security and privacy issues in your domain. Perform organisation-wide bulk actions to delete malicious email. Examine file sharing to spot and stop potential data exfiltration. With this tool you can also execute upon the “right to be forgotten” rule of GDPR
- Security health recommendations: Stay ahead of threats with the quick start guide, which provides recommended security settings and gives customised advice on security best practices for content, communication, mobility and user security
- Data loss prevention rules: With the data loss prevention rules in Gmail and Google Drive you can proactively make sure sensitive data doesn’t leave the company
Video conferencing features
- Ability to dial-in into a video conference with a local phone number in over 40 countries and expanding
- Host video meetings with up to 100 participants (which is increasing soon to 250)
- Ability to record video meetings and directly save them in Google Drive
- Ability to stream meetings (view-only) to 100K people in, and soon also outside, the organisation and track who attended
- Ability to optimise bandwidth utilisation in video conferencing with Hangouts Meet (coming soon)
- Hangouts Meet dial-out: call a participant from the meeting room (coming soon)
Pricing of G Suite Enterprise
With the G Suite Enterprise license, you pay €23.00 / account / month
With the above comparison, the most important differences between the Google Workspace licenses for businesses should be more clear. The best way to go about choosing a license for your organisation is to first clearly define your business needs, then aligning these with the capabilities of the different G Suite licenses.
If you’re not sure on which license or pricing to choose for your organisation, just contact us, as our Google Workspace experts are always happy to help!
Interested in G Suite, but still have questions about which license would best fit your organisation? Just drop us a line, we’ll get in touch.