Picture a 20-person professional services firm — an accounting practice, a small law firm, a marketing agency. No dedicated IT staff. A mix of personal Gmail accounts and one shared Microsoft 365 subscription that somehow became the default. And a decision looming: standardize on something, or keep limping along.

Here’s the honest answer, and then the nuance.

The recommendation

The compliance gap is the decisive factor for regulated industries. M365 Business Premium at $22/user/month gives you Intune for device management, Defender for Business, Azure AD P1 for Conditional Access, and Purview for data protection. Google Workspace has a compliance story, but it requires more configuration and third-party tools to reach the same posture. For a firm that handles client financial data or legal matters, that gap matters.

The second factor is Office app parity. If your team uses Excel seriously — financial models, complex reporting, pivot tables — the web version of Excel in Sheets will cause daily friction. For light spreadsheet use it’s fine. For a 20-person firm doing serious work in Excel, it’s a recurring problem.

When Google Workspace wins

With that said, M365 is not universally right. Google Workspace is clearly the better fit when:

• You’re a design or creative agency — Google’s real-time collaboration is genuinely better for document-heavy creative workflows
• You’re a nonprofit — Google for Nonprofits provides free Business Starter access, and the budget savings are real
• Your team is tech-forward and browser-first — if everyone lives in Chrome and prefers Google Docs’ simplicity, fighting that preference has a real productivity cost
• You’re already deeply integrated with Google Analytics, Ads, or GCP — a unified Google identity simplifies admin and SSO

The migration reality

One of the biggest objections to standardizing on M365 is migration complexity. Here’s the honest picture: for a 20-person firm with no shared server infrastructure, migration is a weekend project if planned properly. Microsoft provides free tooling (MMAT) that handles email, contacts, and calendar from Gmail to Outlook in bulk. The bigger work is usually decommissioning old personal accounts and getting 20 people to change their habits — but that’s a people problem, not a technical one.

The migration is also cheaper than the ongoing cost of running a mixed environment. Every additional month of mixed accounts is additional security risk (personal accounts with no IT oversight), additional support overhead, and additional confusion about which account is “official.”

The “we’ll just run both” trap

There’s a legitimate temporary use case for running both during a planned migration, or in an M&A scenario where you’ve acquired a team on a different platform. But “we couldn’t decide” is not a reason to run both.

Make the call based on your work type, your compliance needs, and — honestly — what your team will actually adopt. Then standardize, migrate cleanly, and be done with it.