Why Office Unbound · Google Workspace
An open-source alternative
to Google Workspace.
How Google Workspace — formerly G Suite — compares with what Office Unbound is being designed to be, with architectural differences, functional targets and verified results kept in separate columns.
Project status Office Unbound is in Phase 1, architecture and evaluation. Nothing on this page describes software you can use today.
What Google got right
Many organizations chose Google Workspace for good reasons, and those reasons still hold.
Google Workspace was built for the browser from the start. Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides work in any modern browser with nothing installed, real-time co-editing is the default rather than a feature, and administration through the Admin console is approachable for a business without a dedicated IT team. Google runs the infrastructure, patches it, and operates a security team at a scale few organizations could match.
It is not a closed box either. Google Vault provides retention and eDiscovery in eligible editions, administrators can export organization data, users can download their own data through Google Takeout, and Gmail, Calendar and Contacts are reachable through standard protocols and documented APIs. Anyone leaving Google Workspace starts from a better position than a closed platform would give them.
The reasons to look elsewhere are therefore not about quality. They are about where the service runs, who decides when it changes, who can read the code, and how much of the organization’s working history lives in formats that exist only inside Google’s service.
Where the models differ most
Four characteristics of Google Workspace shape any comparison — and any move away.
Documents that are not files
A Google Doc, Sheet or Slides deck is a record in Google’s service, not a file with bytes on disk. It can be exported to Office or OpenDocument formats, but outside Google it only exists as an export. Office Unbound is designed around real files in open and Office formats.
Labels, not folders
Gmail lets one message carry several labels at once. Almost every other mail system, Office Unbound’s included, stores a message in one folder. The difference is invisible until it has to be converted.
Shared Drives
Shared Drives belong to the organization rather than to a person, which solves the problem of files leaving with an employee. Office Unbound plans team and department storage with the same intent; the permission model will differ.
Meet and Chat in the account
Meet and Chat are built into the same Google account and interface. Office Unbound plans meetings and chat on open standards — Matrix, WebRTC — under one identity, but as distinct services an operator runs.
The comparison
Grouped by kind of difference. Each Office Unbound entry has two columns: what it is designed to do, and what is verified.
Architectural distinction — the first group of rows: differences in hosting, licensing, source and control that follow from Office Unbound’s design, marked Design goal. Target functionality — the second group: what the platform is being built to do, marked Planned or Under evaluation. Verified functionality — the last column: Not verified on every row, because no release exists to test.
Google Workspace features vary by edition and region; the Google column is a general description, not a statement about your subscription. The table scrolls sideways on narrow screens.
| Dimension | Google Workspace today | Office Unbound target | Office Unbound today |
|---|---|---|---|
| Architectural distinctions | |||
| Hosting models | Google’s cloud only. Data-region controls exist in some editions. | Design goal Customer-hosted or MSP-hosted; managed hosting a possible future option. | Not verified No installable release. |
| Infrastructure control | None below the Admin console settings. | Design goal The operator chooses hardware, network and storage; initial target Linux VMs on Proxmox VE. | Not verified Deployment design in Phase 1. |
| Software licensing | Per-user subscription by edition, priced and changed by Google. | Design goal Open-source license, with costs in infrastructure, operations and optional services. License not yet selected. | Not verified License not selected. |
| Source code | Proprietary. | Design goal Public source for Office Unbound’s components on open-source upstream projects. | Not verified Repository not published. |
| Update policies | Google ships continuously. Rapid Release and Scheduled Release tracks change when some features appear, not whether. | Design goal Updates staged and approved by the customer or MSP, with an emergency-patch path. | Not verified Update process being designed. |
| MSP customization | Partners resell and administer; the service is the same for every customer. | Design goal Per-customer architecture, plans and policies, with provisioning APIs. | Not verified Planned for Phase 6. |
| Support responsibility | Google runs the service; partners or internal IT support users. | Design goal The operator owns operations and first-line support; software support offerings not yet defined. | Not verified No support offering exists. |
| Deployment complexity | Very low: verify a domain and add users. | Design goal Inherently higher: servers, storage, DNS, certificates, backup. Deployment tooling planned to reduce it. | Not verified No tooling yet. |
| Ongoing operations | Google’s. | Design goal The operator’s, supported by central monitoring, update and backup tooling. | Not verified Planned. |
| Data portability | Good export tools — Takeout, the admin data export, Vault — but native Docs formats must be converted on the way out. | Design goal Files stored in open and Office formats; documented exports; operator-to-operator moves. | Not verified Export design in Phase 1. |
| Target functionality | |||
| Mail and calendar | Gmail with labels, conversation view and strong spam filtering; Google Calendar with booking and resources. | Planned Folder-based mailboxes, shared mailboxes, calendars and resources in an Outlook-style webmail; IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV clients. | Not verified Mail servers under evaluation. |
| Office applications | Docs, Sheets and Slides: browser-native, real-time co-editing, own document model. | Under evaluation Browser editing of Office and OpenDocument files on Collabora Online or ONLYOFFICE. | Not verified Editors under evaluation. |
| File synchronization | Drive for desktop, streaming or mirroring My Drive and Shared Drives. | Planned Branded desktop client for Windows, macOS and Linux with selective sync and offline files. | Not verified Nextcloud leading candidate. |
| Team chat | Google Chat with spaces and direct messages, inside Gmail or standalone. | Planned Chat, channels and team workspaces on Matrix, with guest access and retention. | Not verified Matrix and Element under evaluation. |
| Video meetings | Google Meet in the browser and in Calendar, with recording and room hardware in some editions. | Planned Browser meetings and screen sharing linked to calendar invitations; capacity set by the operator’s infrastructure. | Not verified LiveKit and MatrixRTC under evaluation. |
| Telephony | Google Voice, an add-on in some countries. | Planned SIP-based calling with extensions, queues and voicemail; carrier charges separate. | Not verified Hardening phase; FreeSWITCH candidate. |
| Identity and administration | Google accounts and the Admin console; SAML and OIDC for third-party apps; directory sync from Active Directory. | Planned SSO, MFA and directory on OIDC, SAML and LDAP, with one console across services. | Not verified Keycloak under evaluation. |
| Security controls | 2-Step Verification and security keys, context-aware access, DLP and Vault in eligible editions. | Planned Authentication policy, mail filtering, tenant isolation, audit and retention; inspectable source and SBOMs. | Not verified Security architecture in Phase 1. |
| Third-party integrations | Workspace Marketplace, Apps Script, AppSheet and very wide “Sign in with Google” support. | Planned Open management APIs and standard protocols; a much smaller ecosystem that has to be built. | Not verified API design in Phase 1. |
| Migration support | Google provides tools for moving into Workspace. | Planned Assessment, then guided migration out of Workspace: Gmail, Calendar, Contacts, Drive, Shared Drives, Docs conversion. | Not verified Discovery architecture in Phase 1. |
| Feature maturity | Mature, used at very large scale, continuously developed. | Mature upstream components; a new integrated platform with everything that implies. | Not verified Pre-release. |
Google-specific questions to answer first
Each of these decides how hard leaving will be. The planned assessment is meant to answer them from your own tenant.
- How heavily are labels used?
- If people file mail under several labels at once, someone must decide how that becomes folders: one primary folder per message, copies in each folder, or a flattened archive. None is lossless. A mailbox that uses labels lightly converts with little friction.
- How much lives in native Docs formats?
- Every Doc, Sheet and Slides deck must be converted to an Office or OpenDocument file. Most text and data converts well. Sheets functions that exist only in Google — IMPORTRANGE, GOOGLEFINANCE and similar — Apps Script bound to a document, some formatting, and comment threads may not transfer cleanly, and revision history does not travel with an exported file.
- Who owns what in Drive?
- Files in My Drive belong to individual users; files in Shared Drives belong to the organization. Sharing grants often cross between the two and reach outside the domain. Ownership and permissions must be mapped deliberately, and external shares re-created or retired.
- What is in Chat and Meet?
- Chat spaces and Meet recordings are exportable only as far as Google’s APIs and the organization’s permissions allow, and have no exact destination format. Plan to archive what matters rather than expecting chat history to carry on uninterrupted.
- What signs in with Google?
- Many third-party applications use “Sign in with Google” or SAML with Google as the identity provider. Each one has to be pointed at a new identity provider, and that inventory is often longer than expected.
- What runs on Apps Script or AppSheet?
- Automations and small internal apps built on Google’s platform do not migrate. They need to be rebuilt on open APIs or replaced.
Practical limitations
Moving from Google Workspace to Office Unbound — once it exists — will involve trade-offs that no amount of engineering removes.
- Proprietary integrations: Marketplace add-ons, Apps Script, AppSheet apps and Google sign-in for third-party services.
- Advanced document features: Google-only spreadsheet functions, linked objects between Docs and Sheets, and some layout and formatting.
- Historical collaboration data: Docs revision history, comment threads in some cases, Chat history and Meet recordings.
- Compliance tooling: Vault holds and retention rules do not transfer; Office Unbound plans retention and legal-hold workflows of its own, without certifications.
- Browser-native simplicity: running your own platform means someone operates servers, backups and updates.
What a move would gain
For an organization where these matter, the trade-offs above may be worth making.
- Mail, files and documents held on infrastructure the organization or its provider controls, in a location it chooses.
- Documents stored as ordinary files in open and Office formats rather than records inside one service.
- Source code that can be read, scanned and independently reviewed.
- Updates applied after testing, in a maintenance window, rather than when they ship.
- A provider relationship that can change without changing platform — see ownership and independence.
All of these are design objectives. None is verified in a release.
From G Suite to here
Organizations that adopted G Suite years ago often have a decade of mail and Drive content, and a working culture built around shared Docs. The planned migration path starts with an assessment that connects to the Workspace tenant with authorized, least-privilege access and reports volume, ownership, label usage, native-format documents and unsupported content before anything moves. Passwords and 2-Step Verification secrets cannot be copied out of Google, so users enroll again on the new platform.
Migrate from Google Workspace
Migration Assessment & Readiness Engine
Thinking about leaving Google Workspace?
Tell us how your organization uses Gmail, Drive and Docs, and what would stop you moving. It shapes what the migration tooling handles first.