If you are starting a business in the UK with 5 to 20 people and need email, documents, video calls, and cloud storage, your two realistic options are Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 Business. Both work. Neither is free of annoyances. The right choice depends on whether your team already thinks in Google Docs or Word, whether you need desktop Office applications, and how much you care about paying for things you will never use. Here is what each one actually costs when you add up everything — not just the headline price on the website.
The Headline Prices in Pounds
Google Workspace has three plans relevant to UK startups. Business Starter at £5.90 per user per month (annual commitment) gives you Gmail with a custom domain, Google Drive with 30 GB per user, Google Meet with up to 100 participants, and the full Docs, Sheets, and Slides suite. Business Standard at £11.50 per user per month bumps storage to 2 TB per user, adds recording in Google Meet, and increases meeting capacity to 150. Business Plus at £17.25 per user per month gives you 5 TB per user, 500-person meetings, and Vault for e-discovery.
Microsoft 365 Business also has three tiers. Business Basic at £4.60 per user per month gives you web and mobile versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, plus Exchange email, OneDrive with 1 TB per user, and Teams. Business Standard at £9.60 per user per month adds the desktop Office applications — the ones you download and install. Business Premium at £16.90 per user per month layers on Intune device management, Azure Information Protection, and Defender for Business.
All prices are annual commitment, excluding 20% VAT. Monthly billing adds roughly 20% to both platforms.
What You Actually Pay for 10 People
Monthly Cost for 10 Users Including VAT (£)
Total monthly cost for 10 users on each plan including 20% VAT, based on annual commitment pricing.
Source: Google and Microsoft UK pricing pages, February 2026
The headline prices above are per user, per month, before VAT. Here is what 10 users actually costs per month including VAT.
Google Workspace Business Starter for 10 users: £5.90 times 10 equals £59, plus 20% VAT brings it to £70.80 per month. That is £849.60 per year. Business Standard for 10 users: £11.50 times 10 equals £115, plus VAT brings it to £138 per month, or £1,656 per year.
Microsoft 365 Business Basic for 10 users: £4.60 times 10 equals £46, plus VAT brings it to £55.20 per month, or £662.40 per year. Business Standard for 10 users: £9.60 times 10 equals £96, plus VAT brings it to £115.20 per month, or £1,382.40 per year.
At face value, Microsoft 365 Business Basic is the cheapest option. But it does not include desktop Office applications — you only get the web versions. If your team needs Word and Excel installed on their laptops, you need Business Standard, which is closer to Google Workspace Business Standard in price.
The Extras That Push the Bill Up
Neither platform's advertised price covers everything a startup needs. Here is what catches people out.
Domain registration: Both platforms require a custom domain for business email. Google offers free domain connection but you still need to own the domain. Budget £10 to £15 per year from Cloudflare, Namecheap, or 123 Reg.
Additional storage: Google Workspace Business Starter's 30 GB per user fills up quickly if your team shares large files. A design agency or video production firm will hit that limit within months. Upgrading to Business Standard (2 TB per user) costs an extra £5.60 per user per month. Microsoft 365 Business Basic and Standard both include 1 TB per user from the start, which is more generous for the base tier.
Archive and compliance: If you need email archiving for legal or regulatory reasons, Google charges extra for Vault (included from Business Plus at £17.25) while Microsoft includes basic archiving in all Business plans through Exchange Online Archiving.
Device management: If you need to manage company laptops and phones remotely — wiping a lost device, enforcing password policies — Microsoft includes Intune in Business Premium (£16.90) while Google requires an add-on or a separate MDM solution that typically costs £3 to £8 per device per month.
Video conferencing upgrades: Google Meet recording requires Business Standard or above. Microsoft Teams includes recording in all paid plans, but transcription and intelligent recap features require a Copilot or Teams Premium add-on.
Email migration: If you are moving from a free email provider (Gmail personal, Outlook.com, or your hosting company's webmail), both platforms offer migration tools — but neither is painless. Google provides a data migration service in the admin console that pulls email from IMAP sources. Microsoft offers a similar tool through the Exchange admin centre. For a 10-person startup with years of email history, budget half a day of someone's time to set up and monitor the migration. If you are moving from one platform to the other (Google to Microsoft or vice versa), expect a full day and at least one round of troubleshooting missing folders or calendar entries.
Training and transition time: This cost never appears on a pricing page but it is real. Switching a team from personal Google accounts to Google Workspace is relatively smooth — the interface is familiar. Moving a team from Google to Microsoft (or the reverse) typically costs two to three days of reduced productivity per person while they learn the new filing structure, find the equivalent features, and rebuild their muscle memory. For a 10-person team at an average day rate of £200, that is £4,000 to £6,000 in lost productivity that nobody budgets for.
The July 2026 Microsoft Price Rise
UK businesses need to be aware that Microsoft announced price increases taking effect from 1 July 2026. Business Basic and Business Standard plans are expected to rise by 12 to 17 per cent. If you sign an annual commitment before 30 June 2026, you lock in current pricing until your renewal date in 2027.
For a 10-person startup on Microsoft 365 Business Standard, a 15% increase would push the monthly cost from £115.20 (inc VAT) to roughly £132.48 — an extra £207 per year. Not a dealbreaker, but worth factoring into your first-year budget if you are comparing prices in mid-2026.
Google Workspace prices also increased in March 2025, so neither platform is immune to annual adjustments. The lesson: lock in annual billing whenever possible, and budget a 10% contingency for price rises at renewal.
What Changes When You Grow from 5 to 20 People
Annual Cost Scaling: 5 to 20 Users on Mid-Tier Plans (£)
How annual costs scale from 5 to 20 users on Google Workspace Standard and Microsoft 365 Business Standard, including VAT.
Source: CTC analysis based on published UK pricing, February 2026
The cost maths shift as you add staff. Here is a scenario that plays out in practice.
You start with 5 people on Google Workspace Business Starter. Monthly cost: £35.40 inc VAT. Twelve months later, you have 12 staff and two of them are designers sharing 50 GB files. You upgrade everyone to Business Standard because the per-user storage model does not allow mixing tiers within a domain. Monthly cost jumps from £35.40 to £165.60 — a 368% increase driven by 7 new users and a forced plan upgrade.
The Microsoft equivalent: start with 5 on Business Basic at £27.60 inc VAT. At 12 people, your finance director insists on desktop Excel (the web version cannot run their macros). You upgrade to Business Standard for everyone. Monthly cost goes from £27.60 to £138.24 — a 401% increase.
The common thread: plan upgrades driven by one or two power users force the entire organisation up a tier. Both platforms offer the ability to mix plans, but the admin overhead of managing different plan tiers for different users adds complexity that a 15-person startup does not want. In practice, founders tend to put everyone on the same plan, which means the pickiest user sets the cost for the whole team.
Collaboration and Day-to-Day Experience
Google Workspace is built around real-time collaboration in the browser. Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides save automatically, version history works without friction, and simultaneous editing works without thinking about it. The trade-off is that Google Sheets is not Excel — it cannot run VBA macros, its data handling ceiling is lower, and accountants trained on Excel find it frustrating.
Microsoft 365 in the browser has improved dramatically, but the desktop applications remain the primary experience. Co-authoring works in Word and Excel Online, but the desktop apps occasionally create sync conflicts when two people edit the same file. SharePoint as a file storage layer is more powerful than Google Drive but significantly harder to organise — new users find its folder structure and permissions model confusing.
For a startup where everyone is under 35 and grew up on Google Docs, Workspace is the path of least resistance. For a startup in financial services, legal, or accounting where Excel proficiency is a job requirement, Microsoft 365 is the only serious option.
Security and Admin at Startup Scale
At 5 to 20 people, you do not need enterprise security. But you do need basics: two-factor authentication, the ability to remove a leaver's access quickly, and a way to recover accidentally deleted files.
Both platforms include two-factor authentication at all tiers. Google Workspace makes it easier to enforce — the admin console is clean and well-documented. Microsoft 365 admin centre is more powerful but also more cluttered, and the sheer number of settings can overwhelm a founder who doubles as the IT department.
User offboarding — removing a departed employee's access and preserving their files — works differently. Google Workspace lets you transfer a user's Drive files to another user and then delete their account. Microsoft 365 converts the account to a shared mailbox (preserving email) and requires manual file transfer from OneDrive. Neither process is difficult, but Microsoft's involves more steps.
For startups handling sensitive data, Microsoft 365 Business Premium's Intune and Defender bundle offers genuinely better security tooling than anything in Google Workspace's business tiers. But at £16.90 per user per month, you are paying for enterprise-grade protection that a 10-person marketing agency probably does not need.
One area both platforms handle poorly at the business tier is backup. Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 both protect against accidental deletion for a limited retention period — Google keeps deleted files in the bin for 25 days, Microsoft retains OneDrive files for 93 days. But neither platform provides genuine point-in-time backup by default. If a user overwrites a critical spreadsheet or a ransomware attack encrypts shared files, recovery options are limited without a third-party backup tool. Backupify, Spanning, or Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 typically cost £2 to £5 per user per month — another line item that the headline pricing comparison never mentions.
The Honest Recommendation
For a UK startup with 5 to 20 staff that primarily needs email, documents, and video calls: Google Workspace Business Starter at £5.90 per user per month is the cheapest way to get professional business email and cloud storage that works without fuss. Upgrade to Standard only when storage forces your hand.
For a startup that needs desktop Office applications, works with external firms that send Word and Excel files, or operates in a regulated sector where Microsoft's security tools matter: Microsoft 365 Business Standard at £9.60 per user per month is the right starting point. Skip Business Basic unless you are certain nobody needs desktop apps.
Do not buy Microsoft 365 Business Premium or Google Workspace Business Plus until you have a specific reason — a compliance requirement, a security incident, or an auditor's recommendation. Spending £17 per user per month on security features you are not using is money better spent on automating your invoicing or hiring your next team member.
