21 Google Workspace Features Every Business Owner Needs to Know (Formerly G Suite)

Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) is Google’s all-in-one suite of cloud-based productivity, communication, and collaboration tools for businesses. It’s available in multiple pricing tiers with increasing storage, security, and enterprise capabilities. Whether you’re new to Google Workspace or a longtime user, there are features across every tier that can improve how your team works. Here are 21 features every business owner should know, organized by category.

What Core Productivity Apps Does Google Workspace Include?

Quick Answer: Gmail, Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms, all cloud-based, all supporting real-time collaboration, and all integrated with each other and the Workspace Marketplace.

Gmail. Gmail is the fastest and most widely used email platform on the web, and it’s fully included with Google Workspace. Anyone can use Gmail for free with a personal Google account. Workspace provides the ability to create and manage individual user accounts under your domain, along with higher storage limits. Gmail also integrates with dozens of other Google products and third-party add-ons, so you can work efficiently without leaving your inbox. For a detailed comparison, see our analysis of Outlook vs. Gmail.

Google Drive. Google Drive is your cloud storage hub for documents, photos, and files. The Basic plan provides 30 GB of storage. Business and Enterprise plans offer unlimited cloud storage with 5 or more users, or 1 TB per user with fewer than 5 users. Drive serves as both an organizational tool and a collaboration platform, team members can share files, set permissions, and access documents from any device.

Google Docs. Google’s cloud-based word processor functions as an alternative to Microsoft Word. You can create, share, and collaborate on documents in real time, import and export various file types, and control who can access each document. Docs is available on every device through a web browser.

Google Sheets. Google’s cloud-based spreadsheet application functions as an alternative to Microsoft Excel. You can create, manage, and share spreadsheets with straightforward user permissions and file-type controls. Like Docs, Sheets supports real-time collaboration and is accessible from any device with a browser.

Google Slides. Google’s cloud-based presentation application functions as an alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint. You can create, manage, and share slideshow presentations with the same real-time collaboration and permission controls available across all Workspace apps.

Google Forms. Google Forms allows you to create surveys, quizzes, and data collection forms. Responses can integrate directly into Google Sheets for analysis. Forms is useful for market research, employee feedback, training assessments, and evaluating employee satisfaction.

What Communication and Collaboration Tools Are Available?

Quick Answer: Google Calendar, Google Meet/Chat (formerly Hangouts), Google Currents for internal social networking, Google Keep for note-taking, and Jamboard for digital whiteboarding.

Google Calendar. Google Calendar includes all standard scheduling features, automatic notifications, recurring events, and shared calendars, plus deep integration with Gmail and other Workspace apps. You can automatically convert email messages into calendar events, share availability with teammates, and manage multiple calendars across your organization.

Google Meet and Google Chat (formerly Hangouts). Google’s communication tools cover messaging, group chats, phone calls, and video conferencing. Google Meet handles video meetings, while Google Chat manages text-based messaging and group conversations. Both are reliable for remote and distributed teams, easy to learn, and integrated with Calendar and Gmail for smooth scheduling.

Google Vids. Google Vids is Workspace’s video creation app for work: teams turn screen recordings, stock footage, and voiceover into shareable video updates. Google lists Vids among Workspace’s included applications, and the Workspace SLA covers Vids under the same 99.9% uptime commitment as Gmail. This entry replaced Google Currents, which no longer exists; the story is below.

Google Keep. Google Keep is a note-taking and task management app that integrates with other Workspace tools. A Google Keep plugin for Gmail allows you to convert emails into to-do list items and notes. Keep is useful for organizing ideas, tracking tasks, and ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.

Gemini in Workspace apps. Gemini drafts replies in Gmail, builds formulas in Sheets, and takes notes in Meet. Google folded Gemini into Business and Enterprise plans on January 15, 2025, “without the need to purchase any add-ons,” per its own announcement. Business Starter’s coverage is marked as limited, with Gemini in Gmail only. This entry replaced Jamboard, which Google retired; the story is below.

What Security, Administration, and Support Features Does Google Workspace Provide?

Quick Answer: An alert center for threat detection, strict data privacy policies, admin-level user controls for managing accounts and permissions, Google Vault for archiving and compliance, and 24/7 customer support at all plan levels.

Alert center. The Google Workspace alert center provides a centralized view of notifications about your domain. It’s useful for identifying security threats, resolving issues proactively, and monitoring operations. Most alerts also generate an email to your administrator account, but the alert center consolidates everything in one place.

Security and privacy. Google’s Workspace FAQ states that core customer data is encrypted at rest with 128-bit or stronger AES, and in transit over HTTPS with forward secrecy. Google’s pricing page separately lists an “Ad-free email experience” on every Business plan. An earlier version of this entry quoted a broader no-advertising promise from the FAQ. That wording is gone from the current page, so we now quote what it states today.

Admin-level user controls. Administrators can manage all user accounts centrally, resetting passwords, locking accounts, controlling document and file permissions, and managing who can access sensitive information. For businesses of any scale, centralized user management is a core security and operational feature.

Google Vault. Google Vault provides archiving, electronic discovery, and compliance capabilities. It helps businesses reduce litigation costs, retain and search organizational data, and speed up regulatory investigations. Vault may not be relevant for every business, but for organizations with compliance or legal discovery requirements, it’s a critical tool.

24/7 customer support. All Google Workspace plans include 24/7 customer support. Google’s support team can assist with product setup, user management, troubleshooting, and any technical issues across the Workspace platform.

What Enterprise-Level Features Does Google Workspace Offer?

Quick Answer: Business and Enterprise plans add universal Cloud Search across all apps, a low-code development environment, data loss prevention controls, and user activity tracking with endpoint management.

Universal Cloud Search (Business and Enterprise). Business and Enterprise plans include cross-app Cloud Search. It scours every account and file you can access and returns universal results. Lost a document, or can’t remember where a presentation lives? Cloud Search finds it across Gmail, Drive, Docs, and other Workspace apps simultaneously.

Low-code development environment (Business and Enterprise). Google’s app-building tool today is AppSheet, which Google’s own help center calls “a powerful no-code application development platform.” Google retired the old low-code development environment, App Maker. That developer link now redirects to AppSheet’s getting-started guide; we kept it so you can watch the redirect happen. AppSheet builds internal tools on top of Sheets and Drive data, and Gemini in AppSheet can draft an app from a plain-language description.

Data loss prevention (Enterprise only). Enterprise plans include data loss prevention (DLP) controls for Gmail and Drive. Administrators can set parameters to detect transfers of sensitive data and block them. Credit card numbers and other personally identifiable information are the usual targets. DLP controls provide an automated security layer that reduces the risk of accidental data exposure.

User activity tracking (Business and Enterprise). Business and Enterprise plans enable user activity tracking through endpoint management. Administrators receive automatic notifications of suspicious activity and can review a history of user searches, exports, message views, and other actions across the Workspace platform. That tracking is admin-side security; to see how your team handles email itself, EmailAnalytics charts reply times from the inbox side with nothing to install.

How Do Third-Party Apps and Integrations Extend Google Workspace?

Quick Answer: The Google Workspace Marketplace offers third-party plugins and integrations, both free and paid, that add functionality to Gmail, Drive, Docs, and other Workspace apps.

Google Workspace Marketplace. One of the strongest features of Google Workspace is its openness to third-party apps and integrations. Most Workspace products support optional plugins that add functionality or smooth out existing workflows. You can browse these in the Google Workspace Marketplace, where some are free and others require a subscription.

Many third-party platforms also offer direct integration with Gmail and other Workspace products. For example, EmailAnalytics integrates with Gmail to analyze and visualize your email activity, providing insights into response times, email volume, and team communication patterns. These integrations allow you to build a customized productivity stack on top of Workspace’s core platform.

For a broader look at the ecosystem, see our guides on Google Workspace tools and 51 Google Workspace tips and tricks. And for a head-to-head platform comparison, see our analysis of Google Workspace vs. Microsoft 365.

Which Google Workspace Edition Do You Need? (The Old G Suite Versions, Mapped)

People still search for “G Suite versions,” and the honest answer is that the versions ladder got renamed with everything else. G Suite Basic, Business, and Enterprise became the Google Workspace editions below. A “G Suite account” today just means a Workspace account under the old name.

Edition	Price	Storage	Meet cap	Vault
Business Starter	Google lists $7 per user per month annual, $8.40 flexible	Google says 30 GB pooled per user	Google caps Meet at 100 participants	Not included
Business Standard	Google lists $14 per user per month annual, $16.80 flexible	Google says 2 TB pooled per user	Google caps Meet at 150 participants	Not included
Business Plus	Google lists $22 per user per month annual, $26.40 flexible	Google says 5 TB pooled per user	Google caps Meet at 500 participants	Included, per Google’s comparison
Enterprise	Google publishes no price; contact sales	Google says 5 TB pooled per user	Google’s pricing page says 1,000 participants	Included, per Google’s comparison

Those prices come from Google’s Business editions page, last updated July 29, 2026. The flexible month-to-month rate runs 20% above the annual rate on every tier.

Two caps matter before you pick. Google’s pricing page states that Business plans max out at 300 users, with no user limit on Enterprise. Every Business tier carries the same 99.9% uptime commitment under the Workspace SLA.

Still on an old G Suite subscription? Google’s legacy editions page says you can keep it but can’t switch to a different G Suite edition. New signups closed with the 2020 rename.

What Happened to Google Currents and Jamboard?

Both died, and most feature lists never got the memo. Earlier versions of this article listed both, so this is us correcting our own page, not just everyone else’s.

Jamboard’s shutdown is documented on Google’s own end-of-life page. The whiteboard device reached end of life on October 1, 2024, and the web and mobile apps stopped working the same day. Google converted saved jams to PDFs in Google Drive during 2025.

Want your old jams back? Google’s export instructions say to search Drive for type:Jam and download each file as a PDF or PNG.

Currents got a quieter burial. Google’s old Currents help address now lands on the Workspace help homepage rather than a product page. Currents also appears nowhere in Google’s current product lists. It’s missing from the Workspace features page and from the product menu of the Workspace help hub.

We replaced those two entries with Google Vids and Gemini rather than shrinking the list. If a features article you’re reading still pitches Currents or Jamboard, the rest of its facts are probably stale too.

Frequently Asked Questions About Google Workspace Features

What is Google Workspace (formerly G Suite)?

Google Workspace is Google’s cloud-based suite of productivity, communication, and collaboration tools for businesses. It includes Gmail, Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Calendar, Meet, Chat, Keep, Vault, Vids, and administrative features. Plans are available in multiple pricing tiers with increasing storage and capabilities.

What core productivity apps are included?

Google Workspace includes Gmail for email, Google Drive for cloud storage, Google Docs for word processing. Google Sheets covers spreadsheets, Slides covers presentations, and Forms covers surveys and quizzes. All apps are cloud-based, support real-time collaboration, and integrate with each other and with third-party tools through the Workspace Marketplace.

What communication and collaboration tools does it include?

Google Calendar for scheduling, Google Meet for video conferencing, Google Chat for messaging. Add Google Keep for shared notes, Google Vids for workplace video, and Gemini for AI assistance inside those apps. Google retired Currents and Jamboard, which older versions of this list included.

What security and admin features are included?

All plans include an alert center for threat detection, strict data privacy policies, admin-level user controls, and 24/7 support. Google Vault for archiving and compliance is included only on Business Plus and Enterprise, per Google’s edition comparison.

What enterprise-level features are available?

Business and Enterprise plans add universal cross-app Cloud Search, a low-code development environment, and user activity tracking with endpoint management. Enterprise plans also include data loss prevention (DLP) controls for Gmail and Drive.

What is Google Vault?

Google Vault is a Workspace tool for archiving, electronic discovery, and compliance. It enables businesses to retain, search, and export organizational data for legal and regulatory purposes, reducing litigation costs and streamlining investigations.

Can you add third-party apps to Google Workspace?

Yes. The Google Workspace Marketplace offers third-party apps, plugins, and integrations that extend the functionality of Gmail, Drive, Docs, and other products. For example, EmailAnalytics integrates with Gmail to provide email activity analytics and visualization.

Is Google Workspace better than Microsoft 365?

Both platforms offer similar core functionality. Google Workspace is generally considered more intuitive for cloud-first collaboration, while Microsoft 365 offers stronger desktop application support. For a detailed comparison, see our analysis of Google Workspace vs. Microsoft 365.