Migrating from Google Workspace: A Realistic Checklist for Small Teams

Most migration guides are written by the company you are migrating to, which makes them unreliable in a specific way: they are accurate about the easy parts and quiet about the hard ones. We build a Google Workspace alternative, so treat this with appropriate suspicion — but we have tried to write the guide we would want to read.

The short version: moving documents is easy, moving email is the hard part, and the single biggest predictor of a painful migration is how much automation you have built on top of Sheets.

First: separate the three things people mean by “Google Workspace”

Google Workspace bundles what are really three products with very different switching costs.

Gmail and your domain’s email. The highest-stakes piece. Email is your password-reset channel for every other service you own, so a botched cutover locks you out of far more than your inbox.

Docs, Sheets, Slides and Drive. The collaboration layer. This is the piece most alternatives — ours included — actually replace.

Identity: “Sign in with Google”. Easy to forget, and it has tendrils. If your team signs into other SaaS using Google as the identity provider, removing Workspace can orphan those accounts.

What actually breaks: file fidelity

Every vendor claims Word and Excel import. The claim is usually true and the detail is usually where the pain is. From building import and export ourselves, the things that most often survive imperfectly:

Complex Word layout. Multi-column sections, headers that differ per section, floating images anchored to paragraphs, and tracked changes. Body text and basic formatting transfer reliably; heavily designed documents can need a tidy-up.

Spreadsheet formulas beyond the common set. Ordinary arithmetic, lookups and aggregates are fine. Array formulas, pivot tables and anything Google-specific such as IMPORTRANGE or GOOGLEFINANCE have no equivalent in most alternatives — those are Google platform features, not spreadsheet features.

Apps Script. Nothing imports Apps Script. If you have automation reading a Sheet on a schedule, that is a rewrite, not a migration. Count those scripts before you commit to anything.

The practical move: take your three most complicated real documents — not fresh test files — and import them into whatever you are evaluating on day one. Ten minutes of that tells you more than a month of feature comparison.

The order to migrate in

Sequence matters more than tooling. This order minimises the window where a mistake is unrecoverable:

1. Inventory first. List every Shared Drive, every external collaborator with access, every Apps Script, and every service that uses “Sign in with Google”. The last two are the ones that ambush people.

2. Export a full backup while you still have access. Google Takeout produces an archive of Drive, Gmail and Calendar. Do this before you cancel anything, and verify the archive opens. A backup you have not opened is a hope, not a backup.

3. Move collaboration before email. Documents and chat can run in parallel with Google for weeks with no risk. Email cannot — you have one MX record and it points somewhere. Get the low-risk half done and stable first.

4. Migrate identity before cancelling. For every service using Google sign-in, add an email-and-password login or a different provider while Google still works. This is the step people skip, and it is the one that locks you out.

5. Email last, deliberately. If you are also changing email host, do it as its own project with its own rollback plan. Keep the Google account alive in a cheap state for at least a month afterwards.

6. Cancel only after a full billing cycle of quiet. If nobody has needed to go back for thirty days, you are done.

When you should not migrate

Three cases where we would tell you to stay put:

Your business logic lives in Sheets. If a spreadsheet with Apps Script is effectively an internal application — quoting, rotas, stock — migrating means rebuilding software, not moving files. Budget accordingly or do not start.

You are mid-audit or mid-fundraise. Migrations consume attention and create a window where documents are in two places. Do not run one alongside anything that requires clean records.

Your clients collaborate in your Drive. If external parties edit your documents daily, you are migrating their workflow as well as yours. Sometimes still worth it — but it is a change-management project, not an IT task.

What the destination should give you

Whatever you choose, insist on these before committing: import and export in open formats (a tool you cannot leave is the problem you just escaped), a single permission model so offboarding is one action, MFA you can enforce for everyone rather than merely offer, and a clear answer on where data is stored and who can decrypt it. We wrote the full version of those questions in our guide to evaluating a secure document tool.

For completeness on our own position: CollaboPoint gives you documents, spreadsheets, presentations, chat, HD calls and an AI assistant in one workspace, imports and exports Office formats, and is free for individuals with team plans at £7 per seat. We do not host email, we are not an identity provider, and our data sits in the United States under SCCs — see the FAQ for the unvarnished version.

A two-week trial that actually tells you something

Pick one live project. Run it end to end in the new tool — brief, discussion, documents, calls, sign-off — while Google stays untouched as your safety net. Import your three worst documents on the first day. At the end, ask the team one question: would you rather go back?

That answer is worth more than any migration guide, including this one.