Roughly twice a year, an owner asks us whether they should move off Google Workspace onto Microsoft 365. Sometimes the question runs the other direction. Almost always, the reason given is a single specific thing: a spreadsheet that will not behave, a vendor who only sends Office files, a board member who says everyone serious uses the other one.
We are not going to tell you which platform wins, because after years of running both for clients, we do not think one does. They are both mature, both secure when configured properly, and both perfectly capable of running a small or mid sized business. What we can do is lay out where each is genuinely stronger, what a move actually costs once you count the parts nobody quotes you, and the handful of questions that decide it honestly. Then you can make the call with your eyes open.
Where Each One Is Actually Stronger
Marketing pages are useless here, so here is what we see in practice.
- Google is stronger at browser first simplicity. Everything works the same way on every device because everything is the same web app. New employees figure it out faster. There is one version of a document, not a file that also exists in three inboxes. Teams who genuinely co-author, meaning two people typing in the same doc at once, tend to prefer it.
- Google is stronger at team file ownership. Shared drives are owned by the team rather than a person. Google’s admin documentation notes that a shared drive supports up to 100 groups and up to 600 members, reaching a maximum of 50,000 individual members through mixed membership types, according to Google Workspace Admin Help as published in 2026. The practical benefit is that files do not silently belong to whoever created them.
- Microsoft is stronger at deep desktop work. If your business lives in complicated Excel models, heavy Word documents with tracked changes and legal formatting, or industry software that expects Office to be installed, this is not close. The desktop applications are more capable than any browser equivalent, and it is not a matter of taste.
- Microsoft is stronger at breadth of bundled tools. The suite includes a lot of adjacent apps, which is either a genuine advantage or a source of confusion depending on how disciplined you are. It also has a deeper set of Windows device management capabilities, which matters if your staff is on Windows laptops.
- Both are strong at the fundamentals. Both offer solid identity controls, multifactor authentication, mobile device management, and data retention options at business tiers. If someone tells you one platform is secure and the other is not, they are selling something. Configuration matters far more than the logo.
What a Migration Actually Costs
The quote you get covers the technical move. The technical move is the cheap part.
Microsoft’s own overview for switching from Google Workspace lays out a nine step sequence: sign up, prepare the tenant and validate that you own the domain, set up security policies, add the domain, install the apps, migrate everyone’s email and calendar items, connect the domain so mail starts routing, use Migration Manager to move the file data, and finally discontinue Google Workspace while keeping your domain. Personal Drive content lands in OneDrive and shared Drives land in team sites. That is a real, documented path, and it works.
What the sequence does not show you is the friction underneath it. Microsoft’s Migration Manager documentation states that you need Google account credentials with Read access to any Google user account you plan to migrate, and it explicitly notes that file size limitations and unsupported files exist. Native Google Docs and Sheets get converted, and conversion is rarely perfect on anything with complex formatting, embedded scripts, or clever formulas.
Then there is everything outside the two vendors. Your CRM, your accounting package, your e-signature tool, your booking system, your scanner that emails PDFs to the office: each one authenticates against your current platform and each one needs reconnecting and retesting. In our experience this list is always longer than the client’s first estimate.
And the largest cost is not on any invoice. It is thirty people being slower for a month. Not helpless, just slower, hunting for the button that used to be somewhere else. Multiply a modest productivity dip across your whole staff for four to six weeks and compare it to the license difference you were trying to capture. That comparison, more than any feature chart, is the one that weighs time against money honestly.
The Case for Staying Put
Here is our mildly contrarian position: most businesses considering a switch would get more value from spending the same money and attention on the platform they already have.
Almost every organization we assess is using somewhere around a third of what it already pays for. Sharing is configured loosely because nobody revisited it after the first year. File structure grew by accretion. Half the staff never learned the features that would save them an hour a week. Nobody has reviewed which plan tier they are on since the day they signed up.
Fixing those things is cheaper than migrating, faster than migrating, and carries a fraction of the risk. It also produces the exact outcome people usually want when they ask about switching, which is that work should feel less annoying. Worth remembering too that both platforms are cloud services, and cloud services can and do have outages. Neither move buys you immunity from that.
The Questions That Actually Decide It
If you want a real answer, work through these in order. The first one that produces a strong yes usually settles it.
- Does a system you must use require one platform? Industry software, a franchise requirement, or a large customer’s compliance rules can decide this outright. Check before you evaluate anything else.
- Where does the daily work happen? If your team spends its day in heavy spreadsheets and formatted documents, that pulls one direction. If it spends its day in a browser, in shared docs, and in a CRM, that pulls the other.
- What are you managing devices with? A mostly Windows fleet and a mostly Chromebook or Mac fleet lead to different answers about which management tooling fits your reality.
- Who administers this, and what do they know? A platform your person can competently secure beats a platform they will misconfigure. This one gets undervalued constantly.
- Is the complaint about the platform or about how it was set up? Be brutally honest here. “We cannot find anything” is almost never a platform problem.
The Bottom Line
Switching platforms for one feature you will use twice a year is a bad trade. You will pay for it in a month of confusion, a stack of reconnected integrations, and a file conversion cleanup nobody enjoys. Switch when a real constraint forces it, when the daily work genuinely fits the other platform better, or when your device and identity strategy points somewhere your current suite cannot follow.
Otherwise, take the money you were going to spend on a migration and spend it on cleaning up what you have. Both vendors change plan contents, tooling, and migration capabilities over time, so verify the current state of both before you commit either way.
We support businesses on both platforms across Denton County, which means we have no stake in your answer beyond it being the right one. If you want a straight assessment before you decide, we are happy to give you one. Contact us today.
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