Although Google provides a free version of their Workspace suite for schools, they also have paid tiers available for schools that are looking for more features and capabilities.
I often get asked by schools to explain the differences between the free and paid versions of Google Workspace for Education, to help them weigh their options and decide which plan is best for them.
The current tiers include:
- Education Fundamentals - A free foundational suite of secure and easy-to-use tools such as Google Docs, Classroom, Meet, Gmail, Forms, Chat and more.
- Education Standard - A paid edition that builds on the Fundamentals tier with advanced security and analytics tools.
- Education Plus - A paid edition that includes everything in Fundamentals and Standard, but with even more tools to empower users and enrich and personalize learning.
To help schools understand and evaluate the different tiers, I maintain a resource document that highlights many of the added features of the Plus tier. See below for access to that document, as well as a duplication of the information as this blog post for easy reference.
Although there are many security and analytics benefits of Plus, I tend to focus on the impact on teaching, learning, and the end user, so those are the features that I have pulled out for this resource.
