Is there a free alternative to Google Workspace?

For email, yes. Omucloud gives you unlimited mailboxes on your own domain, sending and receiving, permanently free with no per-user charge and no card. It does not replace Docs, Drive or Meet, so a team that needs the suite should look at Zoho Workplace's free tier for five users or Lark's for twenty instead.

What is the best Google Workspace alternative if I only use it for email?

If most of your Workspace bill was seats that only read and reply to mail, an email-only product is the cheaper shape: Omucloud if you want it free on the web and in apps, Fastmail or a flat-rate host such as Migadu if you want IMAP and a desktop client. Keep one Workspace seat for the documents if you still need them.

Is a G Suite alternative the same thing as a Google Workspace alternative?

Yes. G Suite was renamed Google Workspace in October 2020; the product, the per-user pricing and the alternatives to it are the same. Anything that replaces Workspace replaces G Suite.

Can I keep the Gmail interface and use my own domain for free?

Only by forwarding. A free forwarding service such as Cloudflare Email Routing delivers mail for your domain into a Gmail you already have, and a Gmail send-as identity replies from it. It works, and there is no mailbox on the domain itself, which is the difference from Omucloud, where every address is its own inbox with its own password.

How do I move my email from Google Workspace to Omucloud?

Export your mail with Google Takeout first. Then add the domain in Omucloud, replace the SPF record that currently includes _spf.google.com with ours, publish the MX and DKIM records, and wait for verification. New mail arrives in Omucloud from that moment; the old archive stays wherever you exported it to.

Zoho Mail or Google Workspace — and where does Omucloud fit?

Zoho Mail is the cheaper per-seat suite and has a free plan for five users; Google Workspace is the more polished one at US$9.40 a seat. Omucloud is neither: a free mail product with no seat count at all. Pick Zoho or Google if you want the suite, Omucloud if the suite was never the point.

A Google Workspace alternative

Everything Workspace charges you for,minus the seat.

Google Workspace is the default for good reason: Gmail, Docs, Drive and Meet, run well, priced per person. If your company uses all of it, keep it. If the invoice is mostly seats that only ever read and reply to email, that is the part Omucloud replaces — unlimited mailboxes on your own domain, free, with nobody counting.

Try Omucloud freeNo credit card. Three DNS records. Keep Workspace until you are sure.

Three people around one long table in a bright office, a sixth chair empty at the end

A founder at a café counter, glancing at her phone

Six people on the domain · $0 a month

Read this half first

Four things Workspace has that Omucloud does not, stated in full and before anything in our favour. If any one of them is something your company runs on, Google is the right answer and the rest of this page will not change that.

The suite

Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive, Meet and Calendar as a working set, with Gemini inside them. Omucloud is mail and calendar invitations. If your company runs on shared documents, Workspace is the product and this page is not for you.

Storage measured in gigabytes

30 GB pooled per person on Business Starter, terabytes above it. Omucloud gives 500 MB of attachment storage per account, kept until you delete it. If a mailbox needs more than the free 500 MB, the domain can add pooled storage: Business, 100 GB for US$20 a month, or Scale, 1 TB for US$100 a month, shared by everyone on the domain and never charged per person. Beside per-seat pricing that is close to nothing — US$20 a month is what a suite charges for about two seats, and here it covers the whole company.

IMAP, SMTP and a desktop client

Workspace works in Apple Mail, Outlook and Thunderbird. Omucloud is a web app with iOS and Android apps, and offers no IMAP, POP or SMTP at all.

Administration at scale

Single sign-on, device management, retention rules, audit logs, 24/7 support with a contract behind it. Omucloud has a domain owner who creates mailboxes, and best-effort support.

A year of Business Starter

The bill grows by one line every time someone joins.

Google's list price for Business Starter is US$9.40 per user per month on flexible billing, as shown on its pricing page in September 2026; an annual commitment is discounted. Twelve months of it, at five sizes of team, beside what the same mailboxes cost on Omucloud.

TeamGoogle Workspace, per yearOmucloud

Just you

$113

$0 on Omucloud

Three co-founders

$338

$0 on Omucloud

A five-person shop

$564

$0 on Omucloud

Ten, with the first hires

$1,128

$0 on Omucloud

Twenty-five

$2,820

$0 on Omucloud

Google's price is the one to check, not ours: it changes, and the figure above was read off workspace.google.com in September 2026. Omucloud's has one moving part, and it is the only thing that can be bought. If a mailbox needs more than the free 500 MB, the domain can add pooled storage: Business, 100 GB for US$20 a month, or Scale, 1 TB for US$100 a month, shared by everyone on the domain and never charged per person. Beside per-seat pricing that is close to nothing — US$20 a month is what a suite charges for about two seats, and here it covers the whole company.

Google Workspace alternatives

The field, and where each one fits

Most lists of Workspace alternatives are a page arguing for one product. This one names eight, says what each is for, and puts Omucloud where it belongs — on the last row, for one particular kind of company.

Microsoft 365 Business Basic: Per user, per month; The other suite. Outlook, Teams and the Office web apps, with Exchange behind the mail. The natural choice if your customers and documents already live in Microsoft's world.
Zoho Workplace: Per user; a free plan for five; The cheapest complete suite, and Zoho Mail's Forever Free plan is a genuine free tier for a team of up to five. Our own comparison with it is linked below.
Proton for Business: Per user, per month; End-to-end encrypted mail, calendar and drive from a Swiss provider. Pick it when confidentiality is the requirement rather than the price.
Fastmail: Per user, per month; Email done properly with nothing else attached: fast, standards-based, excellent IMAP. For people who want a mail client, not a suite.
Lark: Free plan for up to 20 users; A chat-first suite in the Slack shape, with mail, docs and video inside it. The free tier is generous if the team wants messaging more than mailboxes.
Flat-rate mail hosts (MXroute, Migadu, Purelymail): Priced by storage, not seats; Unlimited mailboxes for a flat yearly fee, run over IMAP in the client of your choice. Excellent value if someone on the team is comfortable configuring a mail client for everyone else.
Forwarding (Cloudflare Email Routing, ImprovMX) plus Gmail: Free; Mail to your domain lands in a Gmail you already have, and a send-as identity replies from it. Free and familiar, and there is no mailbox on the domain itself — the address is a rule, not an inbox.
Omucloud: Free, never per user; Real mailboxes on your own domain, as many as the business needs, on the web and in the apps. No suite, no IMAP, no seat count. The row on this list for a company whose Workspace bill was mostly email.

Side by side

Omucloud and Google Workspace, row by row

The ember rule marks the product each row favours. It lands on Google in five of the eleven rows, which is the honest count.

What it costs

The line item this page exists for.

Price: OmucloudFree, permanently, with no per-user charge (the stronger of the two on this row); Google WorkspaceFrom US$9.40 per user per month on Business Starter (September 2026, flexible billing)
What adding a person costs: OmucloudNothing. A mailbox is created, not bought (the stronger of the two on this row); Google WorkspaceOne more seat on the invoice, every month
Addresses on the domain: OmucloudUnlimited real mailboxes, plus shared addresses held by several people (the stronger of the two on this row); Google WorkspaceOne mailbox per paid user, with aliases and group addresses on top
Credit card to start: OmucloudNone (the stronger of the two on this row); Google WorkspaceRequired after the trial

The mail itself

Both are real business email. The difference is where you read it.

Send and receive on your domain: OmucloudYes, DKIM-signed and SPF-authorised; Google WorkspaceYes
Where you read it: OmucloudWeb app, iOS and Android apps; Google WorkspaceGmail on the web and in its apps, or any IMAP client (the stronger of the two on this row)
IMAP / POP / SMTP: OmucloudNot offered; Google WorkspaceIncluded (the stronger of the two on this row)
Attachment storage: Omucloud500 MB per account, 25 MB per message. Need more? Pooled storage for the whole domain from US$20 a month (100 GB), never per person — beside a per-seat bill, close to nothing.; Google Workspace30 GB pooled per user on Starter, 2 TB on Standard (the stronger of the two on this row)

Everything around the mail

A suite against a single product, and the suite wins the suite rows.

Documents, meetings, AI: OmucloudNone. Optional Omu AI drafts replies from your voice, off by default; Google WorkspaceDocs, Sheets, Slides, Meet, Drive, Gemini (the stronger of the two on this row)
Setup: OmucloudThree DNS records, about three minutes, doable from a phone (the stronger of the two on this row); Google WorkspaceGuided, longer, with a trial and a billing step
Support: OmucloudBest effort, no contract; Google Workspace24/7 with a paid plan behind it (the stronger of the two on this row)

A florist at the shop counter, reading on a tablet propped beside cut flowers

A hand holding a phone over a wooden desk with a notebook and a terracotta pot

The free Google Workspace alternative

Free means the mailboxes. All of them.

Not a trial, not a free tier with a seat cap above it. Every address you create on a verified domain is a real mailbox with its own inbox and password, sending and receiving, at no cost — for one person or for forty. Sign-ups made by December 2026 keep that price permanently.

The limits are on attachments, and they are written down: 25 MB per message, 500 MB of storage per account, kept until you delete it. If a mailbox needs more than the free 500 MB, the domain can add pooled storage: Business, 100 GB for US$20 a month, or Scale, 1 TB for US$100 a month, shared by everyone on the domain and never charged per person. Beside per-seat pricing that is close to nothing — US$20 a month is what a suite charges for about two seats, and here it covers the whole company. That is the only money in the product. The free-forever page has every number.

Create the first mailbox

If you are leaving Workspace

Four things to know before you touch DNS, in the order they go wrong. The setup guide has the records themselves and where each registrar keeps its panel.

Export before you cancel

Omucloud does not import your archive. Take everything out with Google Takeout — mail, Drive, Calendar — while the subscription is still active, because a cancelled Workspace deletes its data after a grace period and there is no second chance at it.

MX can only point one way

The moment Omucloud's MX record wins, new mail stops arriving in Gmail. Publish the records when you have decided, not while you are still trying it — a free @omumail.co address is the way to try it without touching the domain.

Replace the SPF record

Your domain publishes one SPF TXT record, and right now it says include:_spf.google.com. Swap that for Omucloud's rather than adding a second record beside it; two SPF records is the most common reason a moved domain fails to verify.

Only mail moves

Calendar, Drive and Meet do not come with you; only the mailbox does. Many teams keep one Workspace seat for the documents and move the twenty mailboxes that were only ever reading email. That is a legitimate way to use both.

Common questions

Is there a free alternative to Google Workspace?: For email, yes. Omucloud gives you unlimited mailboxes on your own domain, sending and receiving, permanently free with no per-user charge and no card. It does not replace Docs, Drive or Meet, so a team that needs the suite should look at Zoho Workplace's free tier for five users or Lark's for twenty instead.
What is the best Google Workspace alternative if I only use it for email?: If most of your Workspace bill was seats that only read and reply to mail, an email-only product is the cheaper shape: Omucloud if you want it free on the web and in apps, Fastmail or a flat-rate host such as Migadu if you want IMAP and a desktop client. Keep one Workspace seat for the documents if you still need them.
Is a G Suite alternative the same thing as a Google Workspace alternative?: Yes. G Suite was renamed Google Workspace in October 2020; the product, the per-user pricing and the alternatives to it are the same. Anything that replaces Workspace replaces G Suite.
Can I keep the Gmail interface and use my own domain for free?: Only by forwarding. A free forwarding service such as Cloudflare Email Routing delivers mail for your domain into a Gmail you already have, and a Gmail send-as identity replies from it. It works, and there is no mailbox on the domain itself, which is the difference from Omucloud, where every address is its own inbox with its own password.
How do I move my email from Google Workspace to Omucloud?: Export your mail with Google Takeout first. Then add the domain in Omucloud, replace the SPF record that currently includes _spf.google.com with ours, publish the MX and DKIM records, and wait for verification. New mail arrives in Omucloud from that moment; the old archive stays wherever you exported it to.
Zoho Mail or Google Workspace — and where does Omucloud fit?: Zoho Mail is the cheaper per-seat suite and has a free plan for five users; Google Workspace is the more polished one at US$9.40 a seat. Omucloud is neither: a free mail product with no seat count at all. Pick Zoho or Google if you want the suite, Omucloud if the suite was never the point.

Keep the suite if you use it. Stop paying for the seats that only read mail.

Unlimited mailboxes on a domain you own, sending and receiving, free with nobody counting. Try it on a free @omumail.co address first, and move the domain the day you are sure.

Try Omucloud free