Zoho One vs Google Workspace vs Microsoft 365: the all-in-one suite price war

Run the same 100-person team through all three and the gap isn't close. Google Workspace Business Standard costs that team roughly $14,400/year — before adding Gemini AI, Voice, or AppSheet as extras. Zoho Workplace Professional, covering comparable core productivity apps, lands around $7,200/year for the same headcount. Roughly half.

But "half the price" undersells what Zoho One specifically is trying to do, because Zoho One isn't just email and docs — it's **50-plus business applications** bundled under one per-user price: CRM, accounting, help desk, HR, project management, and the productivity suite, all included. Microsoft 365's real limitation shows up exactly here: CRM, accounting, help desk and HR all sit **outside** the suite as separate products with separate bills, so the headline per-user M365 price never reflects what a business actually spends once those functions are covered somewhere.

| | Effective cost, 100 users/year | What's actually bundled |
|---|---|---|
| Zoho One | ~$7,200 | productivity + CRM + accounting + HR + 45 more apps |
| Google Workspace | ~$14,400+ | productivity suite; CRM/accounting/HR bought separately |
| Microsoft 365 | varies by tier, Business Standard ~$1,680/user or higher tiers | productivity + Teams; verticals sold separately |

The honest trade for Zoho's lower price is brand familiarity and depth in any single app. Google Docs and Microsoft Word have decades of muscle memory behind them; Zoho Writer and Zoho CRM are competent, not category-leading, in any individual category — the value is in not needing five separate vendor relationships and five separate invoices, not in any one app being the best in its class.

If your business is already running separate CRM, accounting, and HR tools alongside Google or Microsoft for email, add up what all of those cost together before assuming the "cheaper" productivity suite is actually cheaper overall — Zoho One's whole pitch is that the bundled total beats the sum of best-in-class parts. If you need any single function to be genuinely best-in-class — Salesforce-level CRM, for instance — Zoho One's bundle discount stops being the deciding factor and you're back to pricing tools individually.