Business Email Options Comparison

This is not a normal blog article. This is for our many clients who ask what business email options they have.

Technomancer uses business email, such as james@technomancer.biz, instead of james_technomancer@gmail.com for the obvious reasons. Namely, it appears more professional, contributes to our corporate branding, and anyone can make a gmail so it’s less trustworthy (like the_real_james_technomancer@gmail.com and not_fake_james_technomancer@gmail.com). When an employee leaves, their business email is revoked, to make sure they no longer represent our company.

The 2 options are to use Technomancer’s webmail vs using a popular platform such as Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. For this article, let’s talk about Google Workspace as that’s more popular, but Microsoft 365 is similar.

I. Setup

Technomancer-hosted business email

Each business email is set up on Technomancer’s servers, then connected to a personal GMail account. Once that connection is established, your business email can now be accessed via personal GMail. You can send and receive as your business email account.

Google Workspace

We’ll connect your Google Workspace account to your website. Then the administrator will create business email user accounts for each person. The admin can delete users, create groups.

II. Price

Technomancer-hosted business email

Google Workspace

$6/user/month at the cheapest. So 10 emails is $60/month.

III. Ownership

Technomancer-hosted business email

Decentralized ownership. The business owner owns the business email, but the personal GMail account it’s connected to is owned by the employee. The business owner can delete the connection, but the personal GMail account associated with it will still contain the emails and will need to be manually deleted or revoked if the employee leaves. Security policies (such as 2-factor authentication) are enforced on the individual GMail account.

Google Workspace

Centralized ownership. Owner can add, suspend, delete business emails and associated files related to it. They can also transfer ownership of those emails and files to another account. They can also set company-wide security policies, such as forcing everyone to enable 2-factor authentication.

IV. Other Features

Technomancer-hosted business email

Standard IP reputation. Email usually goes through, but sometimes has issues getting through some servers. Requesting to be added to their whitelist usually does the trick.

Standard features of personal GMail.

No profile picture.

No other additional features

Google Workspace

Higher IP reputation. For some reason, Google Workspace emails seem to have a higher likelihood of getting through to GMail or other Google Workspace emails.

Advanced Google Email features such as read receipt and company-wide signatures.

Profile picture appears when sending emails to other GMail or Google Workspace accounts.

Other features, such as higher storage, software access, and support

V. Conclusion

Google Workspace is the better product, but it’s expensive. You’ll have to decide if it’s worth it.

Please note that when buying Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, you should buy directly from the source. We have client’s who bought from 3rd-party vendors and who couldn’t not transfer their emails and were stuck paying higher fees.

Full disclosure: We went with our own hosted business email for our 1st 8 years of operation, and it worked. But since then, we’ve been using Google Workspace email. $6/user/month is expensive, but we believe it made sense in our line of business and our use cases, notably because we’re an I.T. company and needed the stronger security and centralization controls.

However, we have other clients who’ve been using our hosted business email and have no intentions to switch. They have thousands of customers that interact with them every month. Yes, there are some issues and hassles, but the monthly cost doesn’t seem to justify the switch for them, and their businesses have been doing very well.

Whatever you decide, we can help with the setup. Hopefully this article will help you make a better informed decision. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.