Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace? Deciding After the 2026 Hikes

On 1 July 2026 Microsoft raised the list price of Business Standard from $12.50 to $14 per user per month. Four months earlier, on 17 March 2026, Google folded Gemini into every Workspace Business and Enterprise plan and lifted prices by $2–4 per user. The mid-tier plans from both vendors now sit in the same band.

Which leaves the question small businesses have leaned on for years — “which one is cheaper?” — without an answer. The decision moved elsewhere.

What actually changed in 2026

	Microsoft 365	Google Workspace
Increase took effect	1 July 2026	17 March 2026
Entry plan	Business Basic $6 → $7	Starter ₺71.20
Mid plan	Business Standard $12.50 → $14	Standard ₺142.40
Top SMB plan	Business Premium $22 (unchanged)	Plus ₺223.70
What came with it	+50 GB mailbox storage, time-of-click URL protection in Outlook, expanded Copilot Chat	Gemini included in all Business plans

Google figures are the annual-plan list from the Türkiye pricing page, VAT excluded; Microsoft figures are global list prices.

One detail on the Microsoft side gets missed regularly: an existing subscription stays on the old price until its first renewal after 1 July. If your annual commitment ends in November, you see the increase in November, not today. And Business Premium being left untouched is not an accident — Microsoft deliberately kept the plan that bundles Defender and Intune attractive.

When price levels out, what decides?

Two real differences, and neither is technical. Both come down to habit.

Desktop Office. Business Standard installs Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint on the machine. Google’s answer is the browser. Docs and Sheets have come a long way, but they don’t replace desktop Excel. In finance, accounting or reporting-heavy teams this single point settles the decision.

How storage works. Microsoft gives 1 TB per user with no pooling. Google Business Standard comes with 2 TB pooled; a ten-person team gets a 20 TB shared pool and nobody has to police who used what. For teams with few users but heavy files — agencies, architecture practices, video production — Google’s model is noticeably easier to live with.

AI effectively levelled out this year. Gemini now sits inside Workspace plans, and Microsoft widened Copilot Chat across its Business plans. Full M365 Copilot remains a separate, expensive add-on; we covered the licensing side of that separately.

In Türkiye, the exchange rate rewrites the table

Google publishes its Türkiye list in Turkish lira. Microsoft’s partner (CSP) price list is dollar-denominated — even when your invoice is issued in lira, the amount tracks the rate on the day you pay.

The practical consequence: you cannot lock a twelve-month licensing budget on Microsoft, and you largely can on Google. In a 40-user company, a 15% move in the exchange rate turns into a six-figure lira swing on the annual licence line. Nobody raises that line in the budget meeting. Everybody raises it when the invoice lands.

Against that, Microsoft’s annual-commitment pricing is visibly cheaper than paying monthly. It doesn’t remove currency exposure, but it compresses the repricing to one point a year.

On KVKK — Türkiye’s data protection law, roughly the local counterpart to GDPR — there’s no meaningful difference between the two. Both process data outside Türkiye, so cross-border transfer obligations apply identically. “Moving to Google creates a KVKK problem” is wrong, and so is “Microsoft has no problem.”

Nobody prices the migration

Licence deltas get modelled carefully; the labour of moving almost never does. On a 40-user migration, mailboxes, calendars, shared drives, distribution groups and mobile device profiles add up to weeks of work. Then add the time users spend relearning where everything is.

A rough threshold: if annual licence savings don’t clear twice the migration cost, the move isn’t worth making. In a year where prices converged this hard, very few small businesses clear that bar. If you’re already on Microsoft and your accounting team lives inside Excel macros, switching purely because of a price rise usually costs more than it saves.

One more thing people skip: whichever you pick, the provider is not obliged to back up your data. The shared responsibility model works the same way on both sides.

Frequently asked questions

We’re on Microsoft 365 — should the price rise push us to Google? Almost never. The gap closed at the mid tier while migration cost stayed put. If you want savings, start with plan optimisation instead — in most companies, users who don’t need Standard are sitting on Standard.

We’re starting fresh. Which one? If the team depends on desktop Excel and on .xlsx exports from Turkish accounting and ERP software, Microsoft. If it works entirely in the browser and revolves around file sharing, Google. There’s no middle path; running both doubles the administration.

Can we run a mix of the two? Technically yes, in practice it hurts. Calendar sharing and file permissions don’t flow cleanly between the two systems. It only makes sense in genuinely split company structures.

Should we sign a long commitment now to avoid the increase? On the Microsoft side you can’t pull your renewal back before 1 July — that date has passed. What’s still available is moving to an annual commitment at your renewal date and recovering the monthly-billing premium.

Don’t make this call without looking at your licence inventory first. Working out which plan each user actually needs saves more money, in most companies, than the price rise costs. Get in touch and we’ll review your current subscription against real usage data.