Almost every business that asks me this question has already made the decision and wants to know if it was right. Usually it was. The suites have converged enough that the document editing is a wash, and the thing that actually separates them is everything around the documents.
So skip the feature grid. What you’re really choosing is a place for your email, your files, your staff accounts, and the controls over the devices those accounts sign into. The word processor is the least important part of the decision.
Microsoft 365
The subscription model is the first thing to be clear on, because people still confuse it with a one off purchase of Office. You pay monthly or annually per person, and updates, security patches and support are included rather than being the reason to buy a new version.
Microsoft currently publishes four plans for business:
- Apps for business. The desktop apps, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, plus 1 TB of OneDrive storage per user. No hosted email.
- Business Basic. Hosted email with a 50 GB mailbox on your own domain, the web versions of the apps, Teams, 1 TB of OneDrive per user, and online meetings for up to 300 people. No desktop apps.
- Business Standard. Basic plus the installed desktop apps.
- Business Premium. Standard plus the security side: phishing and ransomware protection, encryption to control access to sensitive information, and management of the iOS, Android, Windows and macOS devices that connect to your data.
One licence covers the apps on five mobile devices, five tablets and five PCs or Macs per person, which is more generous than most people realise and stops the “can I put it on my home laptop” conversation.
Premium is the plan I’d point most small businesses at, and the reason has nothing to do with the apps. It’s the device management. Being able to wipe company data off a phone that walked out the door is the feature you’ll be glad of exactly once, and that once will matter.
Worth knowing if you’re reading older guides: Yammer is gone, and the equivalent is now Viva Engage.
Google Workspace
Google’s Business editions cover organisations of 1 to 300 users, in three tiers:
- Business Starter, with 30 GB of pooled storage per user.
- Business Standard, with 2 TB of pooled storage per user.
- Business Plus, with 5 TB of pooled storage per user.
Above 300 users you move to the Enterprise editions, which are priced separately.
The word “pooled” is the change most comparison articles have missed. Storage is no longer a fixed allowance locked to each mailbox. Each licence contributes to a total that everyone draws from, so one person with a huge Drive doesn’t get cut off while nine colleagues sit on empty accounts. It also means you manage storage as one number rather than 30 small ones.
Starter’s 30 GB is genuinely tight for a business that keeps files in the cloud, and it’s the most common reason a Workspace customer ends up upgrading. If you’re pricing Starter, price Standard next to it and be honest about how much you actually store.
Workspace suits businesses that live in a browser, have no Windows servers to speak of, and do a lot of real time co-editing. The collaboration in Docs and Sheets is still the better experience, and anyone who says otherwise hasn’t used it lately.
WPS Office and the free alternatives
WPS Office is free to download and gives you Writer, Spreadsheet, Presentation and PDF tools across Windows, Mac, iPad, iOS, Android and Linux. It opens and edits Microsoft Office files, and the PDF handling is better than you’d expect from something that costs nothing.
Be clear about what it is. It’s a document editor, not a business platform. There’s no business email on your own domain, no central staff accounts, no way to enforce multi-factor authentication or manage devices, and nothing for an administrator to control when someone leaves.
That makes it a reasonable answer for a sole trader who needs to edit documents and not much else, or for a machine in a workshop that occasionally opens a spreadsheet. It’s not an answer for a business with staff, because the parts it doesn’t have are the parts that keep you out of trouble.
Five questions that decide it
- Where does your email live now, and who controls that domain? Moving email is the expensive part of any change. Everything else follows it.
- What software do you actually run the business on? If your accounting, practice management or job management system only integrates properly with one suite, that’s your answer and the rest of this article is academic.
- How much do you store, and how fast is it growing? This is where storage tiers stop being a footnote.
- Do you need to control the devices, or only the accounts? If staff use their own phones for work email, you need device management, and that narrows the field quickly.
- Who administers it? A suite nobody in the business can configure is a suite you’ll pay someone else to touch every time a person joins or leaves.
What the day to day actually looks like
Whichever you pick, the ongoing work is the same and it’s unglamorous. Over the twelve months to 18 August 2026 our service desk handled 38 requests about licences and subscriptions from 18 different businesses: someone joining, someone leaving, a plan that no longer fits, a renewal nobody had diarised.
That’s the real cost of a productivity suite. Not the monthly fee, the administration around it. Businesses that assign licences carefully and remove them the day someone leaves spend almost nothing on this. Businesses that don’t pay twice, once in wasted licences and once in accounts that are still live months after a person has gone.
My honest take
For most small and medium businesses in South East Queensland, Microsoft 365 Business Premium is the one, because the security and device management come in the same bill rather than as three more products to buy and connect.
Google Workspace is the better call if you’re browser based, have no Windows estate, and your team genuinely works in the same documents at the same time. WPS Office is fine for a sole trader and wrong for anyone with staff.
One thing to do this week: open your licence list and count how many assigned accounts belong to someone who still works there. That number tells you more about whether your suite is working than any comparison table will.
If you want a second opinion before you commit to a move, have a chat with us.