Bottom line: Google Workspace Business Standard with Gemini costs £11.80 per user per month and bundles AI into every seat. Microsoft 365 Business Standard plus Copilot costs £25.50 per user per month — more than double. Copilot wins on depth inside Excel and Outlook. Gemini wins on price, context window size, and the fact that every user gets AI without a separate purchase. For a small UK team that lives in Google apps, the maths is straightforward. For a team locked into Microsoft, the Copilot premium buys genuine time savings — but only if your people actually use it daily. Trial both for two weeks before committing.
The Price Gap Is Bigger Than You Think
Both Google and Microsoft now sell AI-powered productivity suites aimed at small teams. Both promise to draft emails, summarise documents, build spreadsheets and answer questions about your files. Both charge per user per month. But the way they charge is different, and that difference matters when you are running a team of 5 to 25 people on a fixed budget.
Google Workspace Business Standard costs £11.80 per user per month on an annual plan (ex VAT). Gemini AI features — including the side panel assistant in Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Drive — come bundled in at no extra charge. Every user on your plan gets AI. No add-on, no separate licence, no minimum seat count beyond one.
Microsoft 365 Business Standard costs £9.40 per user per month. Copilot is a separate add-on at £16.10 per user per month, with a promotional rate of £13.80 running until March 2026. Total per seat with Copilot: £25.50 at full price, £23.20 on the promo. You also need every Copilot user on at least a Business Standard or Business Premium licence — Basic does not qualify.
For a 10-person team, that works out to £1,416 per year for Google versus £3,060 for Microsoft with Copilot at full price. The gap is £1,644 per year — and that is before the July 2026 Microsoft price rises take effect.
What Changes in July 2026
Microsoft confirmed in December 2025 that global pricing for Microsoft 365 rises from 1 July 2026. UK customers face the same percentage increases on sterling prices. At the same time, Microsoft is restructuring its licensing into new Copilot bundles — the days of buying Copilot as a standalone £16.10 bolt-on are ending. The new bundles fold AI into higher-priced licence tiers.
Google is making its own changes. From 1 March 2026, Workspace customers who want higher usage of advanced AI features — including advanced image generation, video creation with Veo 3.1, and deep reasoning with Gemini 3 Pro — need to buy the AI Expanded Access add-on. Standard AI features (the side panel, Help me write, meeting notes) stay included in Business Standard at no extra cost.
The practical effect for a small UK team: Google's base AI offering stays bundled and usable without an add-on. Microsoft's AI offering gets folded into pricier bundles. The cost gap is likely to widen, not narrow.
Where Each AI Earns Its Keep
Copilot's strength is depth inside Microsoft apps. In Excel, it writes formulas, builds pivot tables, spots anomalies in data and generates charts from natural language prompts. In Outlook, it summarises long email threads, drafts replies and prioritises your inbox. In Teams, it takes meeting notes and generates action items in real time. In Word, it drafts documents from prompts and rewrites sections to match a given tone. If your team spends its day inside these four apps, Copilot saves real time on repetitive tasks.
Gemini's strength is breadth and context. Its 1-million-token context window — compared to Copilot's roughly 32,000-token limit — means it can process an entire folder of documents, a 200-page report, or a full quarter of email history in a single prompt. In Google Docs, it drafts and rewrites. In Sheets, it generates formulas and analyses data. In Gmail, it drafts replies and summarises threads. In Meet, it takes notes and generates summaries. It also powers custom automations through Workspace Studio, included in Business Standard.
The gap between them is not about which AI model is smarter. Both use frontier models — Copilot runs on GPT-4-class models from OpenAI, Gemini runs on Google's own Gemini 3 Pro. The gap is about where the AI sits relative to your daily workflow and how much context it can hold in one go.
Head-to-Head Feature Comparison
| Capability | Google Gemini (Workspace Standard) | Microsoft 365 Copilot | --- | --- | --- | Monthly cost per user (GBP, ex VAT) | £11.80 (AI included) | £25.50 (£9.40 base + £16.10 Copilot) | AI in email | Gmail side panel + Help me write | Outlook drafting + thread summary | AI in documents | Docs drafting + rewriting | Word drafting + tone adjustment | AI in spreadsheets | Sheets formulas + analysis | Excel formulas + pivot tables + charts | AI in presentations | Slides generation | PowerPoint generation from Word docs | AI in meetings | Meet notes + summaries | Teams notes + action items | Context window | ~1 million tokens | ~32,000 tokens | Custom automations | Workspace Studio (included) | Copilot Studio (extra cost) | UK data residency | EU/EEA data regions | UK tenant data residency | Minimum seats | 1 | 1 (but Copilot needs Standard+ base) |
Annual Cost for a 10-Person UK Team
| Line item | Google route | Microsoft route | --- | --- | --- | Productivity suite | £11.80 x 10 = £118/month | £9.40 x 10 = £94/month | AI assistant | Included (£0) | £16.10 x 10 = £161/month | Monthly total | £118 | £255 | Annual total | £1,416 | £3,060 | Annual saving with Google | £1,644 | — |
That £1,644 annual saving covers roughly 14 months of an extra Workspace seat, or pays for a decent training budget to get your team using the AI properly.
The Data Residency Question
For UK businesses handling client data, the storage location matters. Microsoft 365 UK tenants store data in UK data centres — confirmed UK data residency. Google Workspace Business Standard stores data in EU/EEA data regions, which currently includes the UK for data adequacy purposes under the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement. Both meet GDPR requirements, but if a client contract specifies UK-only data residency, Microsoft has the clearer answer.
This is worth checking before you commit. Ask your data protection lead (or your accountant, if you do not have one) whether your contracts or sector regulations require UK-specific data residency. For the majority of small UK teams, EU/EEA residency is fine. For regulated sectors — legal, financial, health — read the small print.
The Satisfaction Numbers
Research from early 2026 found that 82% of Google Workspace users report that AI features provide genuine value in their daily work, compared to 66% of Microsoft 365 Copilot users. The gap is not about capability — it is about accessibility. When AI is bundled into every seat, everyone uses it. When AI costs £16.10 extra per head, teams tend to buy it for three or four people and the rest go without. The tool only saves time for the people who have it.
This is the hidden cost of per-seat AI add-ons. The £16.10 is not just a line item — it creates a two-tier team where half your people have AI help and the other half do not.
The Verdict for a Small UK Team
If your team already uses Google Workspace, stay there. Gemini is included, the context window is larger, and the annual cost is less than half. Use the saving to invest in training so your people actually adopt the AI features rather than ignoring the side panel.
If your team already uses Microsoft 365, the question is whether the Copilot add-on justifies £1,932 per year for 10 people (at the promo rate) or £3,060 (at full price from April 2026). If your team lives in Excel and Outlook and uses Teams for every meeting, the answer is probably yes — but only if you roll it out to everyone, not just the senior staff.
If you are starting fresh and choosing a platform, Google Workspace Business Standard is the better value proposition for a small UK team in 2026. You get a full productivity suite with AI included for less than the cost of the Microsoft base licence plus Copilot.
And whichever you choose: trial it with five users for two weeks, measure the actual time saved, then decide. The wrong choice is signing an annual contract based on a demo.
Quick Checklist Before You Commit
1. Confirm which productivity suite your team currently uses — switching platforms costs more than the licence difference 2. Check whether your contracts or sector require UK-specific data residency (Microsoft wins here) 3. Ask your team where they spend the first two hours of each day — that tells you which AI saves the real time 4. Calculate total per-seat cost including the base licence, not just the AI add-on 5. Run a two-week trial with five users on real work, not demos 6. Track actual time saved per person per day during the trial — anything under 15 minutes is not worth the spend 7. Check whether the July 2026 Microsoft price restructure changes the maths for your team 8. Review Google's AI Expanded Access add-on pricing if your team needs advanced features beyond the standard Gemini capabilities 9. Confirm both platforms meet your GDPR obligations and any sector-specific compliance requirements 10. Set a 90-day review — cancel or downgrade if adoption is below 60% of your team using AI features at least three times per week
