Business email and office suites

Business email suites host a company's mail on its own domain ([email protected]) together with shared calendars and contacts, and most add file storage, document editors and video meetings under one per-user price. A small company usually picks one when it sets up its domain and stays for years, so the plan that holds enough storage, the admin and compliance controls on it, and how mailboxes come out again matter as much as the entry price. The suites differ in what they bundle (a full office suite, encrypted mail with documents, or mail on its own), how they count storage (per user or pooled for the team), and which plan carries retention, eDiscovery and single sign-on.

We compare them on the same six indicators, read from each vendor's pricing, plan comparison, trust, legal, help center and developer pages:

• Pricing clarity: whether the plan you need has a published per-user price, can be bought online and month to month, whether introductory discounts show their renewal price and AI add-ons their price, and whether the pages leave prices out or contradict each other.
• Free plan and trial: a permanent free plan on your own domain and what it allows; otherwise the trial length, whether it needs a card, and any money-back guarantee.
• Price for 5 users: the monthly cost for 5 users on the cheapest plan with email on your own domain, shared calendars and at least 50 GB per user, billed annually at the renewal price, with the arithmetic shown; 0 when the pages cannot price it.
• Admin and compliance: the vendor's own SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, a HIPAA agreement, a GDPR DPA, EU data storage, SAML single sign-on, an admin audit log and required two-step verification, and on which plan each one sits.
• Small-business mail features: several domains, aliases and a catch-all address, shared mailboxes, retention, eDiscovery, a free migration tool, document editors and recorded meetings.
• Data export and exit: exporting your own mailbox or every mailbox as an admin, calendar and contact formats, IMAP and APIs, what happens after cancelling, refunds and cutting seats.

Delivery rates, uptime and speed depend on conditions public pages do not show, so we do not score them. Each review says which pages it was written from and when. Where we have run a product hands-on, the evidence is on its page.