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Comparison

Google Workspace vs Fastmail

These are not the same kind of product. Google Workspace is an office suite that includes mail — Docs, Sheets, Meet and Drive are the reason it costs what it costs. Fastmail is a mail service, sold to people who want mail to be good rather than bundled.

A year for five people: $420 on Workspace Business Starter, $300 on Fastmail Business Standard. Fastmail Family is $132 for up to six, but it is a household plan and a company buying it is buying the wrong plan.

Choose by what you would miss on the Monday after switching. If that is Docs and Drive, this is not a close decision and you should stay on Workspace.

Skip to the table

Side by side.

A year of email for five people. List prices, read off each provider’s own page on 12 August 2026. Our column is here because leaving ourselves out of our own table would be coy, not because this page is about us.

Google Workspace vs Fastmail: annual cost and features for 5 people, with FranklyMail as a third column.
Per year, 5 peopleGoogle WorkspaceFastmailFranklyMail
Price per year, 5 people$420$300 on Business Standard$9
Cheapest plan that fits five people$420 — Business Starter, $7/user/mo$132 on Family, up to 6, households only$9
Pricing modelPer user, per month, on an annual termFlat up to 6 on Family, per user on BusinessFlat, plus storage you use
Storage30 GB per user, not poolable down60 GB per person10 GB pooled, then $0.40/GB/yr
IMAP, POP3, SMTPYesYesYes
JMAPNoYesYes
Sieve filtersNoYesYes
First-party iOS and Android appsYesYesNo
Calendar and contactsYesYesNo
Docs, Sheets, Meet, DriveYesNoNo
SSO / SAML, retention holds, audit logYesOn higher business tiersNo
Masked EmailNoYesNo
Unlimited mailboxesNoNoYes

The question is whether you are buying mail or buying a suite

Workspace Business Starter is $7 per user per month on an annual term — $420 a year for five people. That number is not a mail price. It is mail, calendar, video, documents, spreadsheets, shared storage and an admin console, sold as one seat, and if a team uses that seat it is good value.

Fastmail does not try to be that. It is a mail service with a calendar and contacts attached, made by people who have been running mail for over twenty years, and the product it competes with is not Workspace as a whole — it is Gmail, on its own, unbundled from the rest of the invoice.

That makes the comparison less about features than about what you replaced. Teams who moved their documents to Notion, their calls to Slack or Zoom and their files to Dropbox, Figma and GitHub are still paying office-suite prices for the one part they kept.

Where each one is genuinely better

Workspace wins on spam filtering, and it is not close — Google sees more mail than anyone alive, and any comparison that claims parity is selling something. It also wins on administration at real scale: SSO and SAML, retention holds, an audit trail, device management, a support contract with a name on it. And nobody is ever second-guessed for choosing Google, which is worth something on a procurement form.

Fastmail wins on the daily experience of using email. The apps are better than a standards-based webmail and it is not close in that direction either. It speaks JMAP and supports Sieve, so power users get real server-side rules and fast clients — neither of which Workspace offers. Masked Email is one of the better features anyone has shipped in this category.

The thing neither wins is the pricing model. Both bill per person for a service whose costs are storage and bandwidth, which is why both invoices grow when you hire someone who reads four messages a week.

What actually moves, in either direction

Mail moves either way without drama. Both speak IMAP, Google Takeout exports an mbox, and mail follows the MX record — so nothing breaks while you set up, because your MX has not moved yet. You flip it last.

Calendar and contacts move between these two, because both have them. That is the practical reason a Workspace-to-Fastmail move is a smaller job than a Workspace-to-anything-mail-only move: you are not deciding where your calendar lives afterwards.

Documents do not move. If Docs and Sheets are where your company writes things down, leaving Workspace means picking a replacement and migrating it, and that is a bigger project than changing mail providers. Price it before you compare mail prices.

Buy Google Workspace if…

  • Drive is your filesystem and Docs is where your company writes things down.
  • You need SSO, SAML, retention holds or an audit trail — for a client, an auditor, or a regulator.
  • You want one vendor, one invoice and one support number for mail, calendar and video.
  • Spam volume is your actual problem and you want the best filter available.
How Google Workspace compares to us →

Buy Fastmail if…

  • Email is a thing you spend hours in and you want it to be pleasant.
  • You already replaced Docs, Drive and Meet, and you are only still paying Google for Gmail.
  • You want JMAP, server-side Sieve rules, or Masked Email.
  • You are a household of up to six — Family is $132 a year and a genuinely good deal at that size.
How Fastmail compares to us →

When neither is the answer

Both of these bill per person, and that is the assumption worth checking before you pick one. A partner who sends forty messages a day and a bookkeeper who reads four a week cost a mail server almost the same — which is to say almost nothing. Storage and bandwidth are the real costs.

FranklyMail charges for those and gives away the headcount: $9/yr a year, unlimited mailboxes, unlimited domains, 10 GB pooled across all of them, $0.40/GB/yr beyond that. Five people is $9. So is fifty.

The reason this section is at the bottom and not the top: we do not have apps, a calendar, or contacts, and our spam filtering is not Google’s. If the two products above appealed to you for those things, we are not a third option, we are a worse one. We are the answer for the person who read this far and realised they were comparing two office suites when they only wanted addresses on a domain they own.

Get started, $9/yr

Fair questions.

Is Fastmail cheaper than Google Workspace?
For a household, yes and by a lot: Fastmail Family is $132 a year for up to six people against $420 for five on Workspace Business Starter. For a company the gap narrows, because a business buys Fastmail Business Standard at $5 per user per month — $300 a year for five, against Workspace's $420.
Can I use Fastmail with my own domain?
Yes, on every plan except Business Basic. You point your MX, SPF and DKIM records at Fastmail the same way you would with any provider.
Do I lose Google Docs if I move to Fastmail?
Yes. Fastmail has mail, calendar and contacts, not documents or shared drives. Most people who leave Workspace for mail alone keep a free Google account for the parts they still use, or move documents to Notion. Either way it is a separate decision from the mail one, and a bigger one.
Which has better spam filtering?
Google, honestly. It sees more mail than any other operator on earth and the filter reflects that. Fastmail’s is good and its Sieve support lets you write rules Google will not let you write, but on raw filtering Google is ahead.

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