Google Free Mail vs Google Workspace (Business Mail)

Having a free Gmail account is sufficient for personal use. After all, who cares if your email address has the @gmail.com domain? If you’re a consumer, the people who are going to see that are your friends and family. Of course, you’ll get to use any of the apps Gmail has to offer like Docs and Sheets, and still have access to and full ownership over your files and everything you create which can reside within the cloud.

Sounds like an excellent deal, right? Unfortunately, it’s not if you’re running a business. Gmail and every one of its apps aren’t designed with the enterprise setup in mind. Businesses got to look professional. They have to possess full control over everything created by their employees and need full security which is why Google Workspace is arguably the right option. Yes, it means paying for the service which starts at just RM20 per month has a huge benefit.

Professional image

There are many benefits of using Google Workspace for a business. Perhaps the foremost significance is that the professional image that Google Workspace allows a corporation to portray to the general public. A customer is more likely to try to do business with a corporation that has an actual business email address than with a corporation that doesn’t. In other words, customers want to ascertain a business email address that appears professional, instead of one that appears almost like their mother’s email address.

Google Workspace offers any business the power to use a custom domain for its email addresses, like @companyname.com, instead of the typical @gmail.com. This really strengthens a company’s brand image.

Collaboration

The main reason you should consider Google Workspace over Gmail is collaboration. You can definitely work on the same document simultaneously with your colleagues with a regular Gmail account but that’s pretty much where the similarity ends with Google Workspace. Google Workspace was built from the ground up with the main purpose of productivity and collaboration. 

Take Google Meet for example. Anyone with a Gmail account can create a video meeting, invite up to 100 participants, and meet for up to 60 minutes per meeting for free. However, Google Workspace users get additional features such as 24-hour meeting length, intelligent noise cancellation, international dial-in numbers, meeting recording, live streaming, and administrative controls.

Apart from that, there’s Spaces which is a dedicated place to organize people, topics, and projects in Google Workspace. On a regular Gmail account, you are limited to just Google Chat with typical chat features. 

Administration

Aside from a professional-looking email address, a corporation using Google Workspace also has full control over all business email accounts. If an employee leaves the company, he/she won’t be allowed to take his/her email address with them. Your admin will have full ability to vary employee passwords and control access to all or any company email accounts.

Google Workspace makes it easy to create multiple aliases for any email account. Yes, that means an individual can have multiple email addresses like john.doe@companyname.com, j.doe@companyname.com, or johndoe@companyname.com.

Group email addresses also are easy to set up. This way, you’ll have one email address that will route emails to multiple people, which is convenient for email addresses associated with marketing, support, sales, or customer service.

In terms of document management, it’s essential that companies have full control over all company-related files. When using Gmail, employees who create company files have ownership of these files. This could cause problems when they leave the company. With Google Workspace, every file is owned and controlled by your company admin. This is applicable to files created in Google Docs, Google Slides, and Google Sheets, albeit those files were created by individual employees.

Should an employee leave the company, your admin can easily change access privileges for the files. They can also require mandatory backup of all files by every employee to the company’s Google Drive. Plus, file sharing is far easier, with full control over the access level for every individual employee.

Storage

Regular Gmail comes with 15 GB of storage space. This includes all email accounts and all storage utilized in any of the Gmail apps. Unfortunately, this is often not enough space for business use, which is why Google Workspace comes with 30 GB of space for Business Starter and unlimited cloud storage for Enterprise.

Support

When you’re running a business and something goes wrong, you would like a support team that will guide you through the problem. That’s why Google Workspace offers customer support via email, phone, and live chat. If you’re using Gmail, you won’t have any customer support.

With these benefits and such a little financial investment, it is sensible for any business owner or company to decide on Google Workspace. After all, smooth operation, full control, and peace of mind are critical to running a business in today’s digital world.