G Suite, also known as Google Workspace, is a suite that includes powerful tools for business in order to increase productivity and to enable collaboration amongst the users. The platform contains many applications like Gmail, Google Sheets, Google Drive, Calendar etc that are helpful for organizations to manage their work. With G Suite, you don’t need to install any desktop applications like you need to do in Microsoft. Rather, you can work and access these applications on cloud. Because of the cloud availability of the documents, you can access these on any device, even when you are travelling and can share them with your colleagues seamlessly. It also allows multiple users to work in parallel on the same document and also to provide real time reviews and comments by peers.
To use Google workspace, you need to purchase the subscription. This comes in four types of packages : Business starter, standard, plus and Enterprise. Lets briefly describe each of them and check which plan will suit for which type of business:
Business Starter :
This plan is priced at 6 dollars per user per month. This is a kind of starter pack which comes with a full pack of applications and 30GB of storage for each user. This plan is good for you if your business requirements fulfill the following conditions :
- You own a very small business with less than 5 people, or you are a freelancer
- You want an email address which in on your own domain.
- You don’t work with large files and don’t require a huge amount of storage for your documents.
- You don’t need to archive your mails or chats.
Business Standard :
This plan is priced at 12 dollars per user per month, This is double of the price of starter plan. It also provides 12 TB of storage for every user each month. You should opt for this plan in the following cases :
- You own a small to medium sized business.
- You want email and chats archiving, along with all the benefits of business starter plan.
- You want ample storage space and don’t want to run out of the storage, should the situation appear.
- You don’t need advanced security and admin controls.
- It is important for you to easily sync and share files.
- You want to use Google Hangouts for video conferences and will have less than 150 participants on the call.
Business Plus :
This plan is priced at 18 dollars per user per month. This provides all the benefits of business standard plan, along with more security and admin controls. You should opt for this plan in the following cases :
- You need for advanced security and admin features and controls.
- You need storage upto 5TB per user.
- You need to use Google hangouts for large meetings with around 500 participants.
Business Enterprise :
This plan includes all the features of business plus, in addition to more administrative controls. You should opt for this plan in the following cases :
- You own a large business.
- You have large teams and are thus are in need of more security and admin controls.
- You need advanced security features like device management rules, data loss prevention and security key management.
- You need to integrate with third party email archiving tools like Mailstore.
Now that we have gone through the different types of plans available in G suite, one more advantage of G suite is that you don’t need to purchase the same kind of plan for all the users in your company. For example, you can purchase Enterprise plan for a small number of users for which the features provided are necessary and for others, you can go with standard or starter plan, as the need arises. Also, there are some special plans available for non-profit organizations and schools too. The plans can be billed monthly or annually and you may be able to avail some discounts too if you opt to bill it annually.
After considering all the above, you may be confused between G suite and Microsoft Office. The starter and standard plans of Google workspace are more affordable than Microsoft. Also , you get a complete suite of office productivity tools and fir amount of storage. Therefore, you can choose the appropriate G Suite plan catering to your business needs