An email address at your own domain is the cheapest professional upgrade most small businesses can make. The choice of who runs it matters less than people think, and the setup behind it matters more.
What you are buying
Both are subscriptions charged per person per month. Each person gets a mailbox at your domain, a calendar, cloud storage for files, video calls and a set of office apps. You also get an admin console, which is the part a free account does not have: you decide who has an address, you can reset a password, and when someone leaves you can close their account and keep their email.
Neither sells email on its own at the entry level. You are buying a small office suite with email in it, and the email is the reason most small businesses buy it.
The prices, side by side
Google’s prices were checked on its UK pricing page in October 2026. Microsoft’s are those its UK plans page listed at the end of August 2026, the most recent we could confirm, and they had gone up since the spring, so check the page before you buy. All are per user per month, excluding VAT.
| GOOGLEWorkspace | MICROSOFT365 for business | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry plan | Business Starter, £5.90 | Business Basic, £5.40 |
| Storage on the entry plan | 30 GB per person, pooled across the team, shared by mail and files | 100 GB mailbox, plus 1 TB of file storage per person |
| Desktop office apps | None; Docs and Sheets run in the browser | Not on Basic, which is web and mobile only |
| Next plan up | Business Standard, £11.80, with 2 TB per person | Business Standard, £10.80, with desktop Word, Excel and Outlook |
| Top small-business plan | Business Plus, £18.40 | Business Premium, £16.90 |
| Paying month to month | Higher; the prices above need a one-year commitment, which Google says saves 16% | Higher; Basic is £6.48 and Standard £12.96 without the annual term |
| Maximum users on these plans | 300 | 300 |
The annual terms are worth reading closely. Google’s quoted prices assume a one-year commitment, billed monthly. Microsoft’s yearly prices are an annual subscription that auto-renews. In both cases you are agreeing to twelve months, not to one. Google’s billing help is explicit about what that means on its side: you can add people during the term but only remove them at renewal, and cancelling early still charges the rest of the year.
Microsoft also sells cheaper versions of each plan without Teams, its chat and video app: in August 2026, Business Basic without Teams was £4.20 a month on the yearly plan. If you never use Teams, that is money back.
Google is currently advertising introductory discounts for new customers. Those end after a few months, so compare the price you will pay in month four.
How to choose
The honest answer is that either will be fine for a business of one to twenty people, and the deciding factor is usually habit.
Choose Google Workspace if you and your staff already use Gmail, work mainly in a browser or on phones, and share documents rather than send attachments. It does fewer things than Microsoft’s suite, and for a small team that is often a point in its favour.
Choose Microsoft 365 if anyone in the business needs the desktop versions of Word or Excel, if your accountant or your largest customer sends spreadsheets with macros, or if you already use Outlook. Note that the entry plan does not include the desktop apps, so the fair comparison for an Office user is Microsoft Business Standard against Google Business Starter.
On storage, Microsoft’s entry plan is more generous: a 100 GB mailbox per person against Google’s 30 GB per person, which in Google’s case also has to hold everyone’s files. A sole trader who keeps every attachment for ten years will notice. Most small teams will not.
What you need before you start
You need a domain, and you need access to its DNS settings, which live wherever the domain is managed. If someone else holds the login, sort that first. There is a separate piece on who owns your domain.
Then four DNS records. Both providers walk you through adding them, and they are worth understanding in a sentence each.
- MX tells the rest of the internet where to deliver email for your domain. It is the record that actually moves your mail to Google or Microsoft.
- SPF is a published list of the servers allowed to send email as your domain. If your website’s contact form or your booking system sends email on your behalf, it needs to be on this list too.
- DKIM adds a digital signature to each message you send, so the receiving server can check it came from you and was not altered on the way.
- DMARC tells receiving servers what to do with a message that fails those checks, and where to send reports about it.
These are not optional extras any more. Google’s rules for anyone sending to Gmail require every sender to set up SPF or DKIM, and anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day to have SPF, DKIM and DMARC. A small business will not reach that volume, but the same records are what keep ordinary email out of spam folders, so set all four up on day one.
The alternatives
Zoho Mail is the usual third option. Its Mail Lite plan offers 5 GB or 10 GB per person, billed annually only, with no monthly option. It also has a free plan for up to five users on one domain, with 5 GB each, though that plan does not support IMAP, POP or ActiveSync, so you cannot connect it to the mail app on your phone or computer in the usual way, and it is only offered in some regions. Zoho is cheaper than either of the big two, and you give up the office suite and some polish for it.
A mailbox bundled with your hosting or domain is the cheapest option and often the weakest. These are frequently small mailboxes with basic spam filtering, and moving away from them later means moving your email history. It can be enough for a sole trader with low volume. Check the storage limit and whether you can export your mail before relying on it.
Why not a gmail.com address
A free Gmail or Outlook.com address works, and plenty of tradespeople run their business on one. The objections are practical rather than snobbish.
It belongs to a person, not the business. If an employee sets it up and leaves, the login goes with them. On Workspace or Microsoft 365, the account belongs to your organisation and an administrator can reset it.
It does not match your website. A customer who finds you at your own domain and then gets a reply from an unrelated free address has a reason to pause.
You cannot move it. Your domain can move to a different email provider and keep the same address. A gmail.com address can never leave Gmail.
It cannot carry your DNS records. SPF, DKIM and DMARC are set on a domain you control. On a free address, you rely entirely on the provider’s reputation.
The short version
Pick Google if you work in the browser, Microsoft if you need desktop Office. Compare the annual price you will pay after any introductory offer, and check whether you are committing to a year. Set up MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC on the first day, and make sure your website’s forms are included in the SPF record.
If you would like to know whether your current domain’s email records are set up properly, our free audit of your website checks them alongside everything else. For the wider picture of what a website costs to run, see how much a website costs in the UK and what you are actually buying.
If you want someone to look at your own website, the free review tells you the three things we would change first.
