Essentials editions

Teams of up to 100 users at a company or school can use Google Workspace Essentials Starter edition for enhanced collaboration.

Video meetings, Drive, and collaboration tools for teams

With Essentials Starter, you get these familiar, easy-to-use tools for work or school:

• Docs, Sheets, and Slides for content creation
• Drive for cloud storage
• Meet for secure video meetings
• Chat for efficient group and direct messaging

You also get easy tools for managing team members.

Note the following details:

• Any number of teams can sign up—Although an Essentials Starter team can have up to 100 users, there's no limit to the number of teams that can sign up at your organization.

  If you signed up for Essentials Starter before June 3, 2022, each team can have up to 25 users.

• Support and Gmail are not included—Essentials Starter edition doesn't include access to Google Workspace support. If you need Gmail, sign up instead for a Google Workspace Business edition.
• Paid upgrades are available—You can upgrade to a paid edition of Essentials at any time from your Team dashboard to add more users, get additional business features, and access Google Workspace support.

  You can also buy a paid edition of Essentials through a Google Sales representative or local reseller.

• Educational institutions aren't eligible for Essentials Starter—Instead, qualifying institutions can sign up for Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals, which is available at no cost, or a paid Education edition. Compare Education editions.

All you need is a business email address

Use Google Workspace Essentials Starter at no cost with a team of up to 100 users at your company, simply by signing up with your business email address. You can then add other users who have email addresses in the same domain. For example, if your address ends in @yourbusiness.com, you can use Essentials with other people whose addresses end in @yourbusiness.com. 

If your organization uses Microsoft 365, you can let everyone join Essentials with their Microsoft account (if your IT administrator allows it).

Note: You can't sign up with an address at a public web host like gmail.com or yahoo.com. Instead, you must use a custom address, such as for a business or organization. 

Learn more and sign up

Includes Meet, Chat, Drive and other features

Video calls, content storage, and collaboration

• Voice and video conferencing—Host and join a video meeting from anywhere with up to 100 participants. Learn more
• Group and direct messaging—Communicate and collaborate efficiently from anywhere with Chat. Learn more
• Productivity suite—Easily create and co-edit files with Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Google Forms.
• Files available any time, any place—Store and share over 100 file types—even Microsoft Office files—and co-edit them in real time, from any device. Learn more
• Digital whiteboarding—Collaborate in real-time with coworkers to share and visualize ideas with Jamboard. Learn more
• Tasks tracking—Assign tasks while collaborating in Chat spaces, and keep track of all your tasks on your computer or phone. Learn more
• Easy scheduling—Schedule video meetings and other events more easily, get reminders about upcoming activities, and share calendars. Learn more
• Shared notes—Capture, share, and collaborate on your notes on any device, anywhere. Easily create check lists, action items, voice memos, and more with Keep. Learn more

Team management

• Add and remove team members—Control who in your organization can use Essentials. Learn more
• Assign a Team admin role—Give another user full administrative control over your team's Essentials account. Learn more

Upgrade for even more features

At any time, you can easily upgrade to a paid edition of Essentials to get:

Paid edition	Features	Learn more
Enterprise Essentials	1 TB of pooled storage per user  Advanced features for Google services, such as shared team drives and longer video meetings with 250 participants, recording, noise cancellation, polls, Q&A, breakout rooms, and attendance tracking Security features, such as security alerts, mobile device management, and warning messages when sharing outside of the organization Policy controls for features, such as document sharing Access to Google Workspace support	Switch to Enterprise Essentials
Enterprise Essentials Plus	Everything from Enterprise Essentials except Calendar, plus: 5 TB of pooled storage per user Up to 500 meeting participants and live-stream to 100,000 viewers in Meet	Switch to Enterprise Essentials Plus

Unlock advanced features for your domain

If you upgrade to a paid edition of Essentials and you're the owner or IT administrator for your organization's domain name, you can get advanced business features by verifying your domain:

• Account (identity) management features, such as the ability to create user accounts and manage user profiles
• Advanced security and compliance controls, such as 2-Step Verification, password monitoring and enforcement, Security center, access transparency, data regions, and client-side encryption
• Advanced mobile device management
• Delegated admin access based on role
• Data retention and eDiscovery with Google Vault
• Connected Sheets BigQuery data connector
• Work Insights

The features that you can access depend on your paid Essentials edition. You also take over management of any existing Essentials users in your organization.

Learn more about using Essentials with your domain.

Next steps

• Start using Essentials with your team

_{Google, Google Workspace, and related marks and logos are trademarks of Google LLC. All other company and product names are trademarks of the companies with which they are associated.}