Big mail providers,and where your mail lives.
The two suites do what they claim. Their support is real. The comparison is not about quality. It is about where the mail physically lives, whose infrastructure it leaves from, and whose policy applies to the data.
What you get
Mail, calendar, and documents in one contract, with support that answers.
Deliverability at their scale is excellent, because their reputation is enormous.
No infrastructure to think about, at any headcount.
What it costs
Mail leaves their infrastructure, not your domain's. SPF, DKIM and DMARC are managed by them, for all their customers, the same way.
Per seat, per month, for as long as you stay. Leaving is a migration project.
The data is stored and processed under their terms, in their datacentres, on their schedule.
S/MIME is not the default in either. In Google Workspace the mail is not signed with your own key at all. In Microsoft 365 the certificates are yours to source and manage, and the signature is only as strong as the client that sends it.
Where we differ
Mail leaves a named machine in a named building. We can tell you which one it was when something went wrong.
S/MIME keys are issued on your domain. The signature is yours to verify, and ours to stand behind.
We work to 99.9% availability on a single node and publish what we measure on the status page. It is not a contractual guarantee and there are no automatic credits, but if an outage costs you something, customers or time, tell us and we make it right with you.
Your source, DNS, and accounts stay yours throughout. Leaving is a simple handover.
| Pick them when | Pick us when |
|---|---|
| You are a team that lives in Google Docs or Microsoft 365, and the suite itself is what you want. | You want to control the basic infrastructure rather than rent it per user. |
| Headcount changes weekly and you need seats to follow. | You need signed mail and a named operator. |
Not sure which one you are?
Open a brief and say what you have today. If the honest answer is that nothing should change, that is a valid result. You will get it in writing.