Comparing Office 365 Business Essentials Vs. Amazon WorkMail

With so many cloud companies vying for a piece of the organizational email market, the competition is high, and the features available vary greatly. By now, just about everyone has heard of Microsoft Office 365 and Google Mail. But Amazon has also thrown its hat into the ring to compete for market share. Considering Amazon is the leading storage company, it only makes sense the brand would also roll out an email solution.

To be fair to Amazon and its WorkMail product, we need to compare apples to apples when it comes to offerings. At its core, Amazon’s WorkMail provides a functional email product with comparable services to Google Mail. However, because this article is comparing Amazon’s WorkMail to Office 365, we’ll take the lowest comparable plan in the Office 365 offering. Office 365 Business Essentials would be the most comparable subscription, though the Microsoft Enterprise E1 would also be a great comparison.

Office 365 Business Essentials Vs. Amazon WorkMail

Services	Office 365 Business Essentials	Amazon WorkMail
Price	$5 per user per month	$4 per user per month or $6 per user per month with Amazon docs (200GB of space)
Microsoft Office Suite	Online Versions of Office – Word, Excel and PowerPoint	Not Included
Mailbox Storage	50 GB	50GB
Email Message Size Limit	150MB	25MB
Domain Support	900 domains per tenant	100 domains per tenant
Spam & Virus Protection	Exchange Online Protection	Included
Active Directory Integration	Included	Included
Interoperability with Exchange Server	Included	Included
Native Support	Microsoft Outlook 2010, 2013, and 2016 Microsoft Outlook 2010 and 2013, 2016 Click-to-Run	Microsoft Outlook 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016 Microsoft Outlook 2010 and 2013 Click-to-Run *(Note! Does not support POP3 or IMAP)*
File Storage and Sharing	1TB per user	1TB when bundled with Amazon Docs
Unlimited online meetings, IM, audio, HD video and web conferencing	Included	Not Included
Corporate Social Network	Included	Not Included
Work Management Tools	Included	Not Included
Microsoft Teams Chat-Based Workspace	Included	Not Included
Professional Digital Storytelling	Included	Not Included
User Maximum	300 per tenant	Not Included
Reliability (SLA)	99.9% uptime financially backed SLA

As you can see from the table above, Microsoft clearly has an advantage when it comes to the scope of features included. Once again, to be fair, Microsoft has been in the business productivity market much longer — 20 years to be exact. With experience (in the Microsoft case) comes an entire infrastructure built on the way organizations work today. Microsoft has embraced this philosophy in all its offerings, and Business Essentials is no different.

If your goal is to save money and still advance the way your company works, Office 365 Business premium is the way to go. Check out full details on the Office 365 Business Essentials and the Amazon WorkMail offerings to determine which one is the best solution for you.