Microsoft 365 vs Google Workspace in Kenya: Same Price Now

Price used to separate these two. It no longer does. On 1 July 2026 Microsoft moved Business Basic to USD 7 and Business Standard to USD 14 per user a month, which put Microsoft 365 on the numbers Google Workspace already listed for Starter, Standard and Plus: USD 7, 14 and 22 on annual terms. Business Premium is the 22. Same three numbers.

So Microsoft 365 vs Google Workspace in Kenya now turns on three other things: how much mail your people keep, who needs Word and Excel installed, and what the companies you deal with run. CloudSpinx sets up, migrates and runs both suites for Kenyan organizations through our business email and collaboration practice, and we checked the third question in DNS before writing this, against 53 domains taken from the Nairobi Securities Exchange's list of listed companies.

What Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace cost per user

The same at all three matching tiers on annual terms, and both business ranges stop at 300 users. Month to month, both charge a fifth more, USD 8.40, 16.80 and 26.40 on either suite, which is the 16% Google's pricing page says a one-year commitment saves. These are the US dollar lists. Google's excludes tax, and Microsoft's pages do not say either way.

If you already pay Microsoft, look at your renewal date before you look at anything else. Existing customers keep the old price until renewal, and Microsoft's licensing announcement puts the step at 16% for Basic and 12% for Standard. A budget built on last year's invoice is short by exactly that.

Microsoft also sells Basic without Teams at USD 5.40, for a business that meets on something else.

At USD 7, storage decides it

This is where the suites differ most, and where people choose on the wrong thing. Google's Starter adds 30 GB per license to a pool, and that pool is not a mailbox. Google's storage FAQ for admins says it is "shared between Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos", so mail, attachments, files and photo backups all draw on one pool, sized at 30 GB a license. Fifteen people on Starter share 450 GB for everything.

Microsoft's Basic gives every user a 100 GB mailbox, after the 2026 update added 50 GB to the business plans, and 1 TB of OneDrive on top of it. What it does not give you is installed Office.

Running out on Google is quiet, and that is the catch. Mail keeps arriving when the pool is full. Once the organization is 25% over, or has been over for 14 days, nobody can add a file to Drive or create a new Doc or Sheet until someone deletes something.

So find one number before you choose: the size of your largest mailboxes today. If a few people already sit near 30 GB, on Starter they have used up their own share and every new message spends a colleague's, while Basic gives each of them more than three times that in the mailbox alone. Send us those sizes and the headcount through the quote form and we will tell you which entry tier fits, free.

At USD 14, installed Excel or 2 TB

Here the storage argument flips. Google's Standard puts 2 TB per license into the pool. Microsoft's Standard keeps the 100 GB mailbox and the 1 TB of OneDrive and adds the desktop apps. The question becomes whether anyone needs Excel installed, and the usual answer is the finance lead whose workbooks carry VBA macros, which Excel for the web cannot run.

Usually that is a few people, not the whole office, and that is where the two suites stop costing the same. Microsoft lets you mix business plans in one tenant; its FAQ counts the 300-seat limit "across the family of business plans". Google sells more than one edition into an organization only through "a Google sales representative or partner", according to its help page on multiple editions. Without a rep or partner, plan on one edition for everyone.

At USD 22 both suites sell management and compliance on top: Intune and Purview on Microsoft's side, advanced endpoint management, Vault and eDiscovery on Google's. That is a security decision, separate from which suite.

Which suite do Kenya's listed companies run?

Microsoft, by a distance. NSE's listed-companies page links a website for most companies. After dropping duplicate cards, cards with no link or a link to someone else's site, and the two companies listed from outside Kenya, those links come to 53 distinct domains, and we read the public mail records of each one. Five publish no usable MX record. Of the other 48, 31 run on Microsoft's Exchange Online: 25 point their mail straight at it, and 6 put a filtering gateway (Mimecast or Proofpoint) in front of it, which their autodiscover record gives away. Three run Google Workspace. Two run Zoho.

Read that for what it is. The population is the corporate end of the market, so it tells you nothing about what a ten-person firm runs. It also does not mean mail from Google struggles to reach a bank: SMTP does not care which suite sent the message, and whether it lands turns on SPF, DKIM and DMARC alignment and the sender's reputation, not on the suite. What it hints at, and mail records cannot prove, is what the other side expects once the work goes past email: a Teams invitation, a shared workbook, a contract coming back with tracked changes. If most of your revenue comes from corporates, banks and state companies, that tilts you toward Microsoft. If it comes from consumers and other small firms, it does not.

When neither suite is the answer

Neither has a region in Kenya. If a contract or a regulator requires the mail to stay in the country, the honest answer is a mail server you own, hosted here, and the suite comparison stops mattering.

Headcount flips it too. Per-user pricing grows with every hire, and for organizations whose staff mostly need mail and little else, our Zimbra cost comparison puts the crossover somewhere between 50 and 150 mailboxes. Below about 50 mailboxes with no residency requirement, one of these two suites is the right answer and self-hosting is not.

Twenty people, four on desktop Excel: the bill on each

An example, worked at list price before tax. Twenty staff, four of whom need installed Excel, everyone else on mail and browser documents.

On Microsoft, four Business Standard licenses and sixteen Business Basic come to USD 168 a month, USD 2,016 a year, and every mailbox is 100 GB.

On Google, without a partner, you have two choices. Everyone on Standard is USD 280 a month, paying for 40 TB of pool to get nothing the four Excel users need. Everyone on Starter plus four Microsoft 365 Apps for business licenses at USD 10 each is USD 180 a month, and now you run two vendors and two admin consoles. A partner-arranged mix of sixteen Starter and four Standard, at list price, brings Google back to USD 168, with no installed Office in it.

Same list price, three different bills. The one you get depends on who needs desktop Office and how big the mailboxes already are, which is why we ask for both before naming a suite.

If you are five people moving off Gmail addresses, you do not need us: buy Starter or Basic and follow the vendor's DNS wizard. Past that, send the headcount, who needs desktop Office, your largest mailbox sizes and the suite you are on today through the scoping form on our email page, or on WhatsApp at +254 713 403 044. We send back the license mix and one monthly figure for each suite, including when the answer is a server of your own, free and with nothing to sign. Whichever suite wins, we handle the move with you.