Self-Hosted Email vs Google Workspace: An Honest Cost and Feature Comparison

The decision between self-hosted email and Google Workspace is one of the most consequential infrastructure choices a business makes. Your email is the backbone of business communication — it is how you reach customers, receive payments, coordinate with partners, and manage your team. Getting this wrong affects productivity, security, and costs for years.

This comparison is based on running both — self-hosted email on dedicated servers and Google Workspace across multiple organizations. There is no universally right answer; the best choice depends on your team size, technical capability, budget, and regulatory requirements.

Cost Comparison: The Numbers Tell a Clear Story

Google Workspace Business Starter costs $7 per user per month, providing 30 GB of storage per user, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Meet with 100 participants, and basic support. For a 20-person company, that is $1,680 per year. Google Workspace Business Standard at $14 per user per month doubles to $3,360 per year and includes 2 TB of storage per user and enhanced Meet features. Business Plus at $18 per user jumps to $4,320 annually.

Self-hosted email on a VPS costs roughly $20 to $40 per month for a server capable of handling 50 users — that is $240 to $480 per year regardless of user count. Add $50 per year for a domain and SSL certificates (Let's Encrypt is free). Storage is limited only by your server's disk — a 500 GB server provides far more storage per user than Google Workspace for a fraction of the cost.

At the 10-user mark, self-hosted is 3 to 6 times cheaper than Google Workspace. At 50 users, the cost difference becomes dramatic: $4,200 per year for Google Workspace versus $500 for self-hosted. Over five years, a 50-person company saves $18,500 or more with self-hosting.

Features: What You Get vs What You Need

Google Workspace includes an integrated suite: Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet, Chat, and Admin Console. These tools work together seamlessly — scheduling a meeting from an email, collaborating on a document linked from a calendar invite, and joining a video call from a chat message all feel effortless.

Self-hosted email provides email, calendar (via Radicale or SOGo), and contacts. You do not get integrated cloud storage, document editing, or video conferencing. However, you can combine self-hosted email with free alternatives: Nextcloud for file storage and document editing, Jitsi Meet for video conferencing, and Mattermost for team chat. This requires more setup but provides equivalent functionality at zero ongoing cost.

Security and Privacy

With Google Workspace, Google processes and stores all your email on their servers. They have access to your communications — while they no longer scan personal Gmail for advertising, business data is still processed by their systems. For businesses handling sensitive data, legal communications, or operating under regulations like GDPR or HIPAA, this data residency concern may be a dealbreaker.

Self-hosted email gives you complete control over your data. Your emails never pass through third-party servers (except in transit to the recipient's server). You choose where your server is located, who has access to it, and how data is encrypted. For privacy-focused organizations, this is the deciding factor.

However, security and privacy are not the same thing. Google invests billions in security — their infrastructure is protected by some of the best security engineers in the world. A self-hosted server is only as secure as the person maintaining it. If you do not apply patches promptly, configure TLS properly, and monitor for compromises, your self-hosted server may be less secure than Google's infrastructure despite giving you more privacy.

Deliverability and Reliability

Google Workspace benefits from Google's sender reputation — emails from Gmail servers have excellent deliverability because Google maintains strict anti-abuse policies. Google's infrastructure provides 99.9 percent uptime backed by an SLA, with redundancy across multiple data centers.

Self-hosted email deliverability depends entirely on your configuration and IP reputation. With proper SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and a clean IP address, you can achieve comparable deliverability — but it requires initial effort and ongoing monitoring. Your uptime depends on your server and hosting provider. A single server provides 99 to 99.5 percent uptime; achieving higher availability requires replication across multiple servers.

Operational Overhead

Google Workspace is fully managed — Google handles updates, security patches, spam filtering, storage, backups, and uptime. Your team spends zero time on email infrastructure maintenance. For small teams without dedicated IT staff, this is enormously valuable.

Self-hosted email requires ongoing maintenance: applying security patches, monitoring for deliverability issues, managing disk space, updating spam filter rules, renewing SSL certificates, and troubleshooting delivery problems. Budget 2 to 5 hours per month for maintenance. If you have a technical team member who enjoys this work, it is manageable. If nobody on your team wants to maintain a mail server, Google Workspace is worth the premium.

The Honest Recommendation

Choose Google Workspace if you have fewer than 10 users and no technical staff, value integrated productivity tools, need guaranteed uptime with an SLA, or handle compliance requirements that Google Workspace meets. Choose self-hosted email if cost optimization is important at scale, data sovereignty and privacy are priorities, you have technical staff to manage the server, or you need unlimited accounts and storage.

The hybrid approach works well too: use Google Workspace for your core team and self-hosted email for bulk addresses, aliases, and automated sending. This gives you the best of both worlds — Google's reliability for critical communications and self-hosted flexibility for everything else.

ZeonEdge Mail offers the cost efficiency of self-hosting with the reliability of a managed service. We handle the operational overhead so you get data control without the maintenance burden. Get started with ZeonEdge Mail.