If you’ve ever tried to research this comparison online, you’ll have noticed that almost every article is written by a Microsoft partner, a Google reseller, or a tech publication that makes money from affiliate clicks. This one isn’t. We work with both platforms, we don’t resell either, and our only interest is helping you make the right call for your business.

Here’s the honest version.

Why this decision matters more than it looks

Most businesses treat this as a software choice. It’s actually an infrastructure choice. Whichever platform you pick, your email, documents, calendar, video calls, file storage, and increasingly your security tooling all run through it. Switching later is genuinely disruptive — weeks of migration, retraining, and the inevitable things that go wrong. It’s worth getting right the first time.

The platforms at a glance

Microsoft 365 is the incumbent. Most Australian businesses — and almost all of their accountants, lawyers, and suppliers — run on it. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams. If your staff have worked anywhere before, they already know these tools.

Google Workspace is the challenger. Gmail, Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet, Drive. It’s browser-first, very good at real-time collaboration, and has a loyal following — particularly in tech, education, and businesses that started after about 2015.

Both are mature, reliable, and more capable than most businesses will ever fully use.

Where Microsoft 365 is stronger

Compatibility. If you regularly exchange documents with clients, suppliers, accountants, or lawyers — and the answer is almost always yes — Microsoft’s native formats are the safe default. Google Docs opens .docx files fine, but complex formatting, tracked changes, and macros don’t always survive the round trip. If document fidelity matters to your work, this is a real consideration.

Desktop apps. Microsoft 365 includes full installed desktop applications, not just browser versions. For people doing heavy work in Excel or Word, the desktop apps are meaningfully more capable.

Teams and telephony. If you want to consolidate your phone system into your productivity platform, Microsoft’s Teams Phone integration is more mature than anything Google currently offers.

Familiarity. This isn’t trivial. Retraining staff costs money and causes friction. If your team knows Outlook and Excel, there’s real value in staying there.

Where Google Workspace is stronger

Real-time collaboration. Google’s co-editing experience is still ahead of Microsoft’s. Multiple people editing the same document simultaneously, with no version conflicts and no “someone else has this file open” errors, is genuinely smoother in Google’s ecosystem.

Browser-first simplicity. No desktop app to install, update, or troubleshoot. Everything runs in the browser, on any device. For businesses that are fully cloud-native and don’t need offline capability, this is a genuine operational simplification.

Gmail. This is subjective, but Gmail’s search and filtering capabilities are excellent, and many people find it easier to manage high email volumes in Gmail than Outlook.

Price at the entry level. Google’s Business Starter tier is slightly cheaper than Microsoft 365 Business Basic at comparable feature sets, though the gap narrows quickly as you move up the tiers.

The things that are roughly equal

Security at the business tier is comparable on both platforms. Both offer multi-factor authentication, mobile device management, data loss prevention, and audit logging. Both are compliant with Australian privacy requirements when configured correctly. Neither is inherently more secure than the other — security outcomes depend far more on configuration and user behaviour than the platform choice.

Storage is effectively unlimited on both at the mid-tier plans. This used to be a differentiator; it no longer is.

Video conferencing (Teams vs Meet) is close enough that it shouldn’t drive the decision.

The question that usually settles it

What does the rest of your ecosystem run on?

If your accountant sends you Excel files with formulas, your lawyer sends Word documents with tracked changes, and your industry software integrates with Outlook — Microsoft 365 is almost certainly the lower-friction choice, regardless of which platform you might personally prefer.

If you’re a newer business, fully cloud-native, doing most of your document work internally, and your team is already Gmail-native — Google Workspace is worth serious consideration.

What we actually see in practice

The majority of Australian SMEs we work with are on Microsoft 365, and most of those are there for good reasons — compatibility, familiarity, and the breadth of the platform. A meaningful minority are on Google Workspace and happy with it, typically businesses that made a deliberate choice early and built their workflows around it.

The businesses that struggle are the ones that ended up on a platform by accident — because it came with the laptop, or a previous IT provider set it up — and have never properly evaluated whether it’s the right fit.

The bottom line

If you’re starting fresh with no strong reason to go one way: Microsoft 365 is the lower-risk default for most Australian small businesses. The compatibility argument alone is usually decisive.

If you’re on Google Workspace and it’s working well: stay. The grass isn’t greener and migration costs are real.

If you’re on Microsoft 365 and it feels expensive or overcomplicated: the answer is usually better configuration, not a platform switch.

If you’re not sure what you’re even paying for or whether it’s set up correctly, that’s worth sorting out. Get in touch and we’ll give you a straight read on where you stand.