Google Workspace vs Microsoft 365 for Canadian Businesses (2026 CAD Pricing)

The short answer

Pick Microsoft 365 if your office lives in Word and Excel attachments, runs Windows laptops you want to manage centrally, or answers questionnaires that ask where data is stored. Pick Google Workspace if your team works in the browser, shares live documents instead of attachments, and would rather have one simple admin console. Both are mature, both cap their business plans at 300 users, and both cost about the same. The expensive mistakes are rarely in the choice. They are in the cutover: MX records, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and the website contact form that quietly stops sending.

If you already know the answer and only need the move done, skip to the cutover. If you are weighing the decision against a bigger IT plan, that is a short IT consulting conversation, not a sales call.

2026 CAD prices, side by side

These are the list prices on Microsoft’s Canadian business pricing page and Google Workspace’s Canadian pricing page on 26 September 2026, per user per month, before GST, HST or PST. Microsoft’s figures are the “paid yearly” price. Google’s annual plan is billed monthly with a one-year commitment; its flexible plan costs about 20% more and can be cancelled in any month.

Two details change the math more than the sticker price does. First, Microsoft 365 Business Basic has no desktop Office apps. If your staff open Excel files with macros from a bank or an accountant, Basic is the wrong plan no matter how cheap it looks. Second, storage works differently. Google pools storage across the organization, so a ten-person office on Business Standard shares 20 TB. Microsoft gives each person 1 TB of OneDrive and a 50 GB mailbox, plus shared SharePoint storage for team files.

What our hosting clients actually run

We host websites for the businesses on our hosting-client wall. We keep websites and email on separate platforms on purpose, so each client’s mail can live wherever suits them. On 26 September 2026 we looked up the public DNS records — MX, SPF and DMARC — for every client domain on that wall. About 15% publish no MX record and do not receive mail at that domain. Here is where the rest send it.

• Microsoft 365: about 40%. The largest single platform among our clients.
• Other mailbox providers: about 40%. Registrar mailboxes, Zoho, Titan, forwarding rules, and mail that still lives on an old web host. These work until someone leaves, a password leaks, or a mailbox fills up on a Friday.
• Google Workspace: about 15%.
• Security gateways: under 10%. A filtering service such as Mimecast sits in front, so the mailbox behind it is not visible from DNS.

The DMARC numbers are the ones to worry about. SPF is published on more than 90% of them. But about 55% publish DMARC with p=none, which only asks receiving servers for reports, and about 30% publish no DMARC record at all. Only about 15% tell receivers to quarantine or reject mail that fails authentication. For the rest, a phishing email that claims to come from the owner’s address still has a fair chance of landing. Google and Yahoo tightened their rules for bulk senders in 2024 and Microsoft followed for Outlook.com in 2025. Receivers keep getting stricter, and a migration is the natural moment to catch up.

We do not name which client uses which platform. The named example on this site, Judi Wang CPA, shows the part that matters more than the mail app: we set up Active Directory with role-based access and secure file shares, standardized every staff account, and cover onboarding, email and backups as ongoing support. For an accounting practice, identity and device policy matter more than which mail app people open.

Where your data lives: the Canadian question

Canadian privacy law does not ban storing business data outside Canada. PIPEDA, and BC’s PIPA for provincially regulated organizations, make you accountable for personal information wherever it goes and expect you to be open about it. The pressure to keep data in Canada usually comes from somewhere else: a client contract, a cyber-insurance questionnaire, guidance from a professional regulator, or a public-sector customer.

Microsoft 365 makes a written commitment. Under Microsoft’s Product Terms data residency, a tenant provisioned in Canada keeps Exchange Online mailbox content, SharePoint sites, OneDrive files, Teams chat messages and stored Copilot interactions at rest in Canada, in data centres in Toronto and Quebec City. An administrator can confirm it in the Microsoft 365 admin centre under Settings, Org settings, Organization profile, Data location. A tenant that was created in another geography does not move automatically; moving it takes the paid Advanced Data Residency add-on.

Google Workspace offers data regions on Business Standard, Business Plus and higher editions, but the choices are the United States, Europe, or no preference, according to Google’s own help page. There is no Canadian option. For most small businesses that is fine. If a questionnaire literally asks “is our data stored in Canada?”, it is not.

This is not legal advice. If a regulator or contract is driving the question, get the actual requirement in writing first. It is usually narrower than people assume.

Where each suite wins

Microsoft 365 wins when

• Files arrive and leave as Word and Excel attachments: banks, government forms, lawyers, accountants, engineers.
• The company owns Windows laptops and wants to manage them centrally. Business Premium includes Intune and Defender for Business, so fleet management does not need a separate product.
• Somebody asks in writing where your data is stored.
• You already run Windows Server or Active Directory, or you plan to join laptops to Entra ID.

Google Workspace wins when

• Your team collaborates in live documents rather than emailing versions around.
• People work on Chromebooks, Macs, or whatever they bring, and the browser is the office.
• You want pooled storage and one admin console that an office manager can run without an IT person.
• You want AI features without a second licence, since Gemini is included in every Business plan.

The part nobody budgets: the cutover

Choosing takes an afternoon. Moving takes a week of small, careful DNS changes. Most of the damage we see after an email move is not in the mailboxes. It is in everything else that used to send mail as your domain.

• MX and TTL. Lower the MX record’s TTL to 300 seconds a couple of days early, so the switch spreads quickly and a rollback is still possible.
• SPF. One SPF record per domain, one include: per service that sends as you, and no more than 10 DNS lookups in total, or receivers stop evaluating it.
• DKIM. Turn on signing in the new admin console and publish the key. Neither suite signs mail with your own domain until you do.
• DMARC. Start at p=none with a reporting address, read two weeks of reports, then move to p=quarantine.
• The website. Contact forms, WooCommerce receipts and password-reset emails must send through authenticated SMTP on the new suite. About three out of four WordPress sites we host run an SMTP plugin for exactly this reason. A site that still sends with PHP’s mail() is how you end up with password-reset emails that never arrive.
• Printers, scanners and apps. Scan-to-email and older line-of-business apps often have the old mail server typed into a settings screen nobody remembers.

We wrote up the DNS side in more detail in Changed your DNS? Check your email. If forms are already failing after a move, that is a form and email delivery repair, not a rebuild.

What we recommend today (26 September 2026)

This is the recommendation Metro Vancouver IT stands behind as of this date, using the prices checked above:

• Office on Word, Excel and Windows, 3 to 50 people: Microsoft 365 Business Standard at C$19.00 per user per month on an annual plan.
• Same office with company-owned laptops, or client financial or health records: Microsoft 365 Business Premium at C$29.80. Remote wipe, disk-encryption policy and conditional access matter the first time a laptop goes missing.
• Browser-first team that shares live documents: Google Workspace Business Standard at C$18.40 on an annual plan, or C$22.00 month to month while you decide.
• Mailboxes only, no Office apps: Google Business Starter (C$9.20) or Microsoft 365 Business Basic (C$9.50). Choose by which admin console you would rather live in.
• Either way: run a two-person pilot before buying annual licences for everyone, keep the website on its own hosting, and do not skip DKIM and DMARC.

Our part is the migration, the DNS, the security baseline and support afterwards. One-off work falls under IT support at our published rate of $90 CAD/hour, with a time estimate before we start. If you would rather have Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace administration covered every month, that is part of managed IT services, and here is what managed IT costs in Vancouver.