Google Workspace for Small Business UK (August 2026)

Almost everything ranking for Google Workspace for small business UK is written by somebody who resells it. That is not a scandal, resellers know the product, but it does mean the honest version is hard to find: what it costs a real small business, what moving to it is like, and what is annoying about it a year in.

I run Glide Marketing, a UK marketing agency, on Google Workspace. Five seats, mostly Business Standard, and the bill lands around £50 a month. Here is the version I would have wanted before I switched.

What we pay, and for what

Five seats: me, Matt, Abbie, Amber and a shared support@ address.

That last one matters more than it sounds, because you pay per user, not per address. A role address like support@ can either be its own seat, which is what ours is, or an alias sitting on somebody's existing account. Getting that decision right across a team is most of your bill.

UK list prices, verified on Google's UK pricing page on 30 August 2026:

Google also shows 16 percent off for a one-year commitment.

Standard is the one most small businesses want. Not because of the storage, though 2 TB against 30 GB is a large jump, but because shared drives start there. Shared drives are what stop your company's files living inside one person's account and leaving with them. On five Standard seats we have never come near a storage limit.

Moving off Microsoft Exchange

This is the part I would tell any other founder about, because it is the bit I got wrong for years by not doing it.

We were on Microsoft Exchange. Moving to Google Workspace is one of the best decisions I have made for the business. Work became more enjoyable, more reliable, and less like a thing I had to fight.

The migration itself took a day. Not a weekend, not a phased rollout, a day. My folders came across. My labels came across. My history came across. The thing I had been quietly dreading, that I would land on the other side with a flat inbox and years of filing to rebuild, did not happen.

I followed a guide I found online rather than paying anyone. I could not recite the exact steps back to you now, which is the most honest thing I can say about how difficult it was: it was not memorable enough to remember.

If Exchange is the reason you have not moved, it is a much smaller obstacle than it looks from where you are standing.

What we use beyond email

All of it, more or less. Gmail, Drive, shared drives, Docs, Sheets, Meet.

Meet is the quiet standout. I have used most of the alternatives and Meet is the one that simply works. No client on the call fighting a download, no plugin, no five minutes lost at the start of a meeting. For an agency where a bad first two minutes on a call is a real cost, reliability beats features.

We also use Google Cloud alongside it for development work, which is smoother when the identity layer is already Google.

I barely touch Gemini, which surprises people given how much of my work is AI. I use Nano Banana Pro occasionally and that is about it. My AI work happens elsewhere, and I will come back to why.

The four things I would change

Resellers do not write this section, so here it is.

Google Tasks could be much better. It is the weakest thing in the suite by a distance, and it sits right next to the tools I use most.

Google Chat deserves to be pushed harder. It is capable of replacing Slack or Discord for a team our size, it is already included in what we pay, and it integrates with everything else we use. The problem is adoption, not the product. If Google promoted it properly, and if enough teams used it that suggesting it did not feel odd, the whole suite would be close to complete. As it stands we pay for Chat and use something else, which is a strange outcome.

The AI agents in Gemini are not there yet. If Gemini could do what a proper agent does, the suite would go from very good to a straight hundred out of a hundred for me. That is the gap between using Google for work and using Google for the work I find most valuable.

Gemini CLI needs better tooling wrapped around it to match Claude Code. The models are strong. What is missing is the thing wrapped around them. Until that lands, my building happens outside Google, which is why Gemini barely features in my day despite paying for it.

None of these stop me recommending it. They are the honest list of what I would fix if someone asked.

Setting it up for clients

We recommend Google Workspace to clients at Glide and we migrate them across, so my view is not only that of somebody paying five bills.

Two jobs come up constantly. One is moving a business from one Google Workspace account to another, usually after a rebrand or a company restructure. The other, and the more common one, is moving somebody off a personal Gmail address onto a proper business account on their own domain.

That second one is worth naming plainly. If you are running a real business from yourname@gmail.com, the address is doing quiet damage every time you send a quote. Moving to a custom domain is cheap, it takes a day, and it changes how a prospect reads your email before they have read a word of it.

Who it suits, and who should skip it

Get it if you have a domain and more than one person, or you have any intention of hiring. The per-seat cost is small next to the cost of company files sitting in a personal account when somebody leaves.

Starter is enough if you genuinely only need email on your own domain and you are one or two people who do not share files. Be honest about how long that will stay true.

Skip it if your business lives in Excel and Windows-specific software. Microsoft 365 is the better fit and I would not try to talk you out of it. I moved the other way and would not go back, but that is a preference, not a proof.

The verdict

I have almost nothing bad to say about it, and I have written enough honest reviews on this site to know how rare that sentence is from me.

It is five seats, roughly £50 a month, and it is the layer everything else at Glide sits on. The Exchange migration took a day and I have not thought about email infrastructure since, which is the highest compliment I can pay a piece of business software.

Set your business up on Google Workspace through my link. Start on Standard unless you are certain you will never want a shared drive.

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Mike McDonnell, Founder of Glide Marketing