Gmail vs G Suite

Having a free Gmail account is ideal for the average user. After all, who cares if your email address has the @gmail.com domain? If you’re an ordinary user, the only people who are going to see that are your friends and family. You can use any of the apps Gmail offers and still have access to and full ownership of your files and everything you create which will reside in the cloud.

Sounds like a great deal, right? Unfortunately, it’s not if you’re running a business. Gmail and all its apps are not designed with the enterprise setup in mind. Businesses need to look professional. They need to have full control over everything created by their employees and they need full security which is why G Suite is arguably the best option. Yes, it means paying for the service which starts at just $5 per month has an enormous benefit.

Professional image

There are many benefits of using G Suite for a business. Perhaps the most significant is the professional image that G Suite allows a company to portray to the public. A customer is more likely to do business with a company that has an actual business email address than with a company that doesn’t. In other words, customers want to see a business email address that looks professional, rather than one that looks similar to their mother’s email address.

G Suite offers any business the ability to use a professional, custom domain for their email addresses, such as @companyname.com, rather than the standard @gmail.com. This really strengthens a company’s brand image.

Administration

Aside from a professional-looking email address, a company using G Suite also has full control over all business email accounts. If an employee leaves the company, he/she won’t be allowed to take his/her email address with them. Your admin will have full ability to change employee passwords and control access to all company email accounts.

G Suite makes it easy to set up multiple aliases for any email account. This means you can have multiple emails for an individual, such as john.doe@companyname.com, j.doe@companyname.com or johndoe@companyname.com.

Group email addresses are also easy to set up. This way, you can have one email address that will route emails to multiple people, which is ideal for email addresses related to marketing, support, sales or customer service.

It’s essential that companies have full control over all company-related files. When using Gmail, employees that create company files have ownership of those files. This means they can control access and should they leave the company, they can take those files with them. With G Suite, every file is owned and controlled by your company admin. This applies to files created in Google Docs, Google Slides and Google Sheets, even if those files were created by individual employees.

Should the employee leave the company, your admin can easily change access privileges for the files. They can also require mandatory backup of all files by every employee to the company’s Google Drive. Plus, file sharing is much easier, with full control over the access level for each individual employee.

Storage

Regular Gmail comes with 15 GB of space. This includes all email accounts and all space used in any of the Gmail apps. Unfortunately, this is often not enough space for business use, which is why G Suite comes with 30 GB of space for Basic and unlimited cloud storage for Business and Enterprise.

Support

When you’re running a business and something goes wrong, you need a support team that can guide you through the problem. That’s why G Suite is set up to offer 24/7 customer support via email, phone and live chat. If you’re using Gmail, you won’t have any customer support.

With all these benefits and such a small financial investment, it makes sense for any business owner or company to choose G Suite. After all, smooth operation, full control and peace of mind are critical to running a business in today’s digital world.