According to a recent survey by Statista, employees in the U.S. spend at least six hours on email per week. With this in mind, your chosen email provider can make a significant difference to your workflow. Among the numerous options, two services stand out—Gmail and Outlook.
Both providers offer various features that can enhance your productivity, so choosing between them involves diligent research. To help you find the email service that suits your needs, this Gmail vs. Outlook for business comparison will show you what features to focus on and how the two options compare. You will learn about the benefits and drawbacks of each and discover another alternative worth considering.
What to look for in a business email service
When exploring email providers, you should assess four aspects of their solutions:
Features
Accessibility
Pricing
Productivity and workflow
The following breakdowns of each factor show how Gmail and Outlook approach them.
Features
Gmail and Outlook offer similar email management features, though the user experience is different. Outlook comes with a slightly outdated user interface that can make navigation more complex.
Email categorization is a good example. Gmail uses labels you can create directly from the inbox. To label an email, all you have to do is click the tag icon in the upper menu and select the label.
Outlook uses folders that you can create by right-clicking the Folders button in the left-hand menu. It also offers different-colored labels, letting you categorize mail visually. Labels are separate from folders, and categorizing an email doesn’t move it to any folders you create, so there might be some confusion in terms of organizing your mail.
Another important feature is the email sending limit, and Outlook is far more generous than Gmail—it offers 10,000 emails daily compared to Gmail’s 2,000. This may not be a concern for smaller teams, but larger businesses might find Gmail too limiting.
As for unique features, Gmail offers several useful tools unavailable with Outlook:
Confidential mode: Lets you protect sensitive messages by setting an expiration date and requiring two-factor authentication (2FA)
Smart Reply: Autocompletes messages to let you compose them faster. While convenient, this feature has been tied to significant privacy concerns
Large attachments: Sets the attachment limit to 10 GB if you integrate with Google Drive
Outlook also has a few features that give it an advantage over Gmail:
Built-in calendar: Lets you stay organized without switching apps
Custom message alerts: You can customize message alerts according to various criteria to ensure you don’t miss important emails
Quick Parts: You can save blocks of text and insert them into new messages to streamline your communication
Keep reading: Check out how Gmail compares to Office 365 and discover the differences between Office 365 and Outlook.
Accessibility
Gmail and Outlook support most browsers and major mobile platforms, so there’s not much difference there. Both solutions also have various accessibility options, ensuring people with disabilities can have a pleasant and productive emailing experience.
Outlook’s Accessibility Checker scans the email to identify issues that might make it hard to read, such as:
Problems displaying tables
Low-contrast text
Object and image alignment issues
Gmail doesn’t have such an option built in, but you can use Google’s Accessibility Scanner app for similar purposes.
Both providers support assistive technology like screen readers, so people with disabilities should have no trouble navigating the platforms.
Pricing
You can’t buy Gmail or Outlook for business separately—both providers include these services in their comprehensive workplace solutions, Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. This makes sense because email is only a part of a typical online workflow, so you need a robust productivity suite to perform daily tasks.
Google Workspace offers three standard business tiers:
Plan | Cost |
Business Starter | $8.40/user per month ($7 per month billed annually) |
Business Standard | $16.60/user per month ($14 per month billed annually) |
Business Plus | $26.40/user per month ($22 per month billed annually) |
Microsoft’s plans come at a similar price, though the Basic and Standard tiers are slightly less expensive:
Plan | Cost |
Business Basic | $7.20/user per month ($6 per month billed annually) |
Business Standard | $15/user per month ($12.50 per month billed annually) |
Business Premium | $26.40/user per month ($22 per month billed annually) |
Google Workspace also offers a custom Enterprise Plan, while Microsoft 365 has three specific enterprise tiers with obligatory annual commitment:
Microsoft 365 E3: $33.75/user per month
Microsoft 365 E5: $54.75/user per month
Microsoft 365 F3 (for frontline workers): $8/user per month
While Microsoft’s plans are slightly pricier, they are also more generous. For instance, you get 1 TB of storage per user compared to Google’s 30 GB with the equivalent tier. You also get 50 GB of dedicated email storage, while Google Workspace’s storage is combined.
Productivity and workflow
Email communication is embedded in the DNA of most modern businesses. So, if you’re constantly looking for ways to streamline your workflow and maximize efficiency, you need an email service provider that prioritizes productivity.
Gmail and Outlook offer a range of productivity features but approach them differently. Gmail’s interface is modern and intuitive, offering features like labels and Smart Reply designed to help you speed up email management. However, these organizational features are limited for complex workflows.
Outlook, on the other hand, has more customization options, including folders and categories, but its interface is more cluttered and less user-friendly. The basic organization tools that both platforms offer do not provide the high level of automation and customization that highly efficient business operations require.
For instance, managing a high volume of emails across multiple teams or projects can become overwhelming with Gmail or Outlook. These snags in workflow can lead to missed deadlines, communication breakdowns, and, eventually, a decline in productivity.
Take a moment to evaluate your productivity needs. Understanding the factors that influence your productivity and workflow, such as automation and customizability, will help you choose the most efficient business email service.
If a streamlined, customizable email experience is what your business needs, consider Notion Mail. Designed with productivity in mind, it offers AI-powered features to reduce inbox clutter, automate repetitive tasks, and help you stay focused on your business goals.
Streamline your workflow with Notion Mail
Notion Mail is an AI-first email provider revolutionizing the email management landscape. This tool empowers busy professionals and growing businesses with automated email management that transforms workflow.
Unlike traditional email clients, Notion Mail's easy-to-use features let you create custom views of your inbox. This helps you build an organizational system that works for your needs based on your unique properties instead of regular chronological sorting.
Notion Mail leverages the power of AI to automate many routine tasks like email categorization or summarization, allowing you to focus on work that matters. Here’s a breakdown of how its key productivity features work:
Feature | How it works |
Autopilot | Choose your preferred criteria to automatically sort, label, and prioritize your incoming emails |
Customizable views | Create personalized inbox views by filtering and arranging your emails according to project, client, department, etc. |
/Schedule command | Insert a scheduling button into your emails, allowing recipients to schedule their emails directly in your calendar |
Snippets | Create and save pre-written email templates; insert them into new emails in one click |
Integrate with the Notion suite for seamless productivity
When you start using Notion Mail, you’re not just getting an email client—you’re gaining a tool designed to integrate seamlessly with the broader Notion ecosystem. By connecting with tools like Notion Calendar, the platform streamlines how you manage tasks and collaborate with your team. It creates a central hub for boosting team productivity and improving communications.
Notably, the free Notion Calendar integration allows key stakeholders to view your availability, schedule meetings in one click, and receive automated reminders. Say goodbye to unending scheduling conflicts and back-and-forth emails!
Other key integrations from the Notion suite include:
Notion docs: Collaborate in real-time on documents, gather feedback, and contextualize all communications within a shared workspace.
Notion wikis: Build a robust knowledge base for your team, which you can seamlessly reference within email conversations. This helps eliminate information silos and creates a culture of knowledge sharing.
This in-depth level of integration builds a unified environment where access to all your work tools is only a button away.
How to get started with Notion Mail
Creating a Notion Mail account is simple—sign up with your Google or Gmail account for instant access.
Notion Mail is available for desktop, iOS, and Android. It offers many AI-powered productivity features by default, but if you want to explore more advanced tools, get the .
Bonus read: Explore our other reviews and comparison guides to learn what different platforms bring to the table and how they stack up against each other:
