Google Workspace enables teams of all sizes to connect, create and collaborate. It includes productivity and collaboration tools for work: Gmail for custom business email, Drive for cloud storage, Docs for word processing, Meet for video and voice conferencing, Chat for team messaging, Slides for presentation building, and shared Calendars.
$6
per user/per month
Google Workspace Essentials
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
Google now offers Google Workspace Essentials (formerly G Suite Essentials), providing a solution for users of Outlook or Office whose teams want to use Google Meet and Google Apps without needing to involve a personal gmail account. Google Workspace Essentails includes Google Slides, Sheets, and Docs, as well as Google Meet, Google Drive, Forms, Sites, and Keep, in a bundle minus a gmail account.
Basic Essentials supports (via Meet) meetings with up to 150 participants, and Google Drive with…
Since our company is structured around Google Workspace at the moment, it is well suited for our entire workflow. I do have concerns though, for when it comes time for our company to have our own intranet built and how well the data migration will be from Google Workspace to that intranet that gets built.
I will state this with 2 basic examples, When I require documentation to be edited by many editors then Google workspace is the way to go. It provides the best synching capabilities and also sharing capabilities. In case of meeting conduction through google meet a notes section would be awesome for personal notes and the capability to record the meetings would also help a ton to improve the productivity of all users
It's terrific to have a suite of products that is built to work together, rather than having to piece tools together.
The email and calendar are the tools I use most often together. I use Gmail through Apple Mail rather than in the browser, and it works great. Also really easy to access and use my calendar.
I use the other suite of features both for my own company internally and to share files with clients. Super easy to use and share.
A single Google Workspace user should be able to have more than one Google Voice phone number (ideally)
At times, Google Meet seems a little clumsy (but I think they're about to address that with the new release...It may or may not be better. Who knows? :))
Some screen layouts are a tad clumsy, but they are sufficiently malleable that once one gets the hang of it, one can customize the environment quite a bit.
A viable (for small business), relatively-inexpensive, virtual desktop that would include/could include a Windows license or, at least close-to-perfect emulation.
It would be great if there was accommodation for those who send out a great deal of mail in a given day. Not everyone who does that is a spammer. Although, by Google standards, and relative to some others, Google allows for sending out a good bit of mail, for those who do mass volumes and would prefer not to have their own mail server, it would be good if Google could find a way to accommodate them.
There is no better solution for cloud storage and real time collaboration. The amount of features included in G Suite is unmatched and out of other things we’ve tried over the years, nothing comes close to being as great of a tool.
Now that our department has used G Suite Essentials for close to 2 years, I can't imagine not using it. It has proven to be a very practical tool for sharing files / folders on a shared drive. It also makes it easy to modify and update content. It is user friendly and the interface is simple.
On the user end, it's great, probably some of the most user friendly products out there. On the admin side, it can get a little more arcane, but it's still better than a lot of other services. At worst I wrangle some CSVs to perform mass changes, but it's a far cry from the days of Powershell scripts or purely manual entry.
Google Workspace is very easy to use. Even the advanced features are also rendered with an intuitive user interface. Opting into new features is easy, with a clear indication of whether they cost extra or free. Communications about new features as well as security threats are easy to understand and follow up on.
I have not had to use much support for G Suite, but I imagine it would be a great service, as is everything else that Google provides. I've searched for questions through the help center, and that was easy to use and easy to find. I'm sure I would have no complaints.
We selected Google Workspace for it's ease of use and clean UI. Microsoft Office granted does have a lot of features and may be more advanced in certain areas (Excel vs sheets), however for the range of functions we need, google workspace provided the necessary features for an affordable price. In particular Outlook compared to Gmail is more outdated and clunky, and I have found more issues with Outlook's deliverability in the past than I do with Gmail. Meet is also much more modern and clean, with useful features like record and Gemini that feel much cleaner than Teams. I have also found that inviting external users (ones that don't use the same workspace as you) is much easier through google meet than teams calls. Drive also has a much cleaner UI, and easier to adopt than OneDrive.
Google Workspace Essentials is more robust than Dropbox with the other features that are available. Google Workspace Essentials is very comparable to Microsoft 365, and we ultimately went with Google because at the time, it was free/priced better than MS, and now we have lots of legacy files already stored on Google servers, so a switch would be too time-consuming. We went with Google Workspace Essentials over OpenOffice because of the email features of using Google.
