Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365 is Microsoft’s business email and productivity suite, built around Outlook for email and calendar, Word, Excel and PowerPoint for documents, and Teams for video meetings and chat. Like its direct competitor, Google Workspace, it gives a business professional email on its own domain, administered from one dashboard, rather than a free personal account.

The two products solve the same problem in largely the same way, and picking between them usually comes down to which tools a team already knows, or which ecosystem the rest of a business’s accounts already sit in. A business already running its analytics and ad accounts through Google often finds it simpler to keep email there too, and the reverse is true for a team already standardised on Microsoft’s tools.

One detail worth knowing: Microsoft 365 licences are commonly sold through resellers rather than bought directly from Microsoft, which is not the case by default with Google Workspace. That can mean the price on an invoice does not match Microsoft’s own published rate, sometimes by a wide margin, without it being obvious why.

Why it matters to you

If your business is billed for Microsoft 365 through a reseller or an agency, it is worth knowing what Microsoft actually charges directly, per mailbox, so you can tell whether the number on your invoice is a fair reflection of that or carries an unexplained markup. A charge described only as “Microsoft” on a bundled invoice, with no breakdown of how many mailboxes or which plan, is not something to accept without asking for an itemised version.

It also matters when deciding where new email should live in the first place. Choosing between Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace is a real decision worth making deliberately, not one to leave to whichever provider a previous developer happened to set up.

How I set it up

Whichever platform a client is on or moving to, I make sure the account itself is created and billed in the business’s own name, paid directly to Microsoft or Google rather than routed through a reseller invoice that obscures the real cost. That keeps accounts in the business’s name true for email the same way it applies to every other account I set up.

Before recommending a move between the two, I look at where the rest of a client’s accounts already sit, since consolidating email into whichever ecosystem already holds Analytics, Ads or a shared calendar usually saves more friction than the mailbox itself would suggest.

What it looks like in practice

Whichever one a business ends up on, the day-to-day experience is Outlook or Gmail on your own domain, a shared calendar, and video meetings that work the way most people already expect. The part worth actually checking, at least once, is the invoice: what the plan actually costs at the provider’s own published rate, and whether that matches what you are being billed.