Switch to Enterprise Essentials edition

If you purchased your service from a reseller, go here instead |  Do I have a reseller?

If you're on the Annual Plan/Fixed-Term, you can downgrade editions only after you Switch from Annual to Flexible Plan.

If your Essentials or Essentials Starter users need access to premium Google Workspace features, you can upgrade your subscription to Enterprise Essentials. You can also switch from Enterprise Essentials Plus to Enterprise Essentials. However, you can’t switch to Enterprise Essentials from any other Google Workspace edition.

What to know before you switch editions

  • Everyone in your organization gets the same subscription. For example, you can’t transition some users to Enterprise Essentials while others keep using Essentials Starter.
  • If you’re on an Annual/Fixed-Term Plan, the transition includes all of your current users.
  • If you’re upgrading and your current subscription is on the Annual/Fixed-Term Plan with yearly payments, you can switch only to the Annual/Fixed-Term Plan with monthly payments. After you switch, you get a prorated credit for any remaining yearly subscription balance.
  • If you want to switch from Essentials Starter or Essentials to a different Google Workspace edition, first upgrade to Enterprise Essentials. Then, switch to the subscription you want.

What features will change?

Review how your service features change when switching to Enterprise Essentials from a different Essentials edition.

Expand section  |  Collapse all & go to top

Switching from Essentials Starter or Essentials
  • More pooled storage—You get 1 TB pooled storage across all users to keep over 100 different file types, plus shared drives for your teams.
  • Larger interactive meetings and advanced meeting functionality—Allow up to 250 participants in Google Meet and access Google Drive recordings, noise cancellation, polls, Q&A, breakout rooms, and attendance tracking.
  • Advanced security and compliance controls—Better protect your data, users, and devices with advanced endpoint management, data retention, and eDiscovery.
    • Security alerts—View notifications about potential issues within your organization.
    • Advanced endpoint management—Set up company-managed mobile devices, selectively distribute apps to mobile devices, and more.
    • Data retention and eDiscovery—Retain, search, and export your data with Google Vault.
  • 24/7 support
Switching from Enterprise Essentials Plus
  • Storage capacity—You get 1 TB of pooled storage across all users. If you purchased other storage, it isn’t automatically restored. To prevent storage restrictions that can occur after you switch editions, make sure that Enterprise Essentials provides enough storage for your organization's needs. For details, go to Review storage use across your organization.
  • Advanced video conferencing—Meetings are limited to 250 participants. You also lose access to enhanced noise cancellation.
  • Live streaming—You will no longer be able to live-stream meetings.
  • Security center—You will no longer have access to information and analytics about security issues that might be affecting your organization. You will also lose access to the security sandbox
  • Data exfiltration prevention for iOS—You won’t be able to control the movement of work data between apps on iOS devices.
  • Data loss prevention (DLP)—You can’t define rules that protect privacy and prevent users from sharing sensitive content in Google Drive with people outside of your organization.
  • Trust rules—If you turned on trust rules, your active trust rules remain active and enforced. You can view your trust rules, but you can’t edit or delete them. You can turn off trust rules to use Drive sharing settings instead.
  • Context-Aware Access—You can no longer create granular access-control policies based on attributes, such as user identity, location, device security status, and IP address.
  • Access transparency—You can no longer review logs of actions taken by Google staff when accessing user content.
  • BigQuery access to admin audit logs—You can no longer export admin access logs for analysis in BigQuery.
  • Work Insights—You can’t access the reporting tool to get detailed metrics on your users' Google Workspace adoption, work patterns, and collaboration.
  • Data regions—You can choose one geographic location for all users in your organization, but you lose access to advanced features, such as choosing different locations based on organizational unit or group and reporting and auditing.
  • Client-side encryption—You can no longer let users add another layer of encryption to Drive files, emails, and more. Users can still access and edit any content that's already encrypted, but they can't create new client-side encrypted items.

Switch from Essentials Starter

  1. Open Drive and at the bottom, click Team dashboard.
  2. Click Permissionsand thenUpgrade.
  3. Review the impact that this change will have, then click Next.
  4. Select a payment plan for your new subscription:
    • Flexible Plan—No long-term commitment, pay for the users that you have each month, and add or remove users as needed.
    • Annual Plan (Monthly Payment)—Requires a one-year contract, pay a monthly user commitment, and add users as needed. To increase the number of users, for users needed, enter a new number. The Annual Plan is not available when you downgrade to a lower-level edition.
  5. (Optional) To add a promotional code, for Flexible Plan, click Add promotion code and enter the code.
  6. Set up your billing account and payment method.
  7. Click Checkoutand thenPlace Order.

Switch from Essentials or Enterprise Essentials Plus

After you switch, if you have a domain-verified account, you can access all premium features. If you have an email-verified account, you can access a subset of premium features—to access all premium features, you need to verify your domain after you switch. For the steps, go to Verify your domain.

  1. Sign in to your Google Admin console.

    Sign in using your administrator account (does not end in @gmail.com).

  2. In the Admin console, go to Menu and then Billingand thenGet more services.
  3. Next to the edition that you want to switch, click Upgrade, Downgrade, or Switch.
  4. Review the impact that this change will have, then click Next.
  5. If your current subscription is on the Flexible Plan, select a payment plan for your new subscription:
    • Flexible Plan—No long-term commitment, pay for the users that you have each month, and add or remove users as needed.
    • Annual Plan (Monthly Payment)—Requires a one-year contract. Pay a monthly user commitment and add users as needed. To increase the number of users, for users needed, enter a new number. The Annual Plan is not available when you downgrade to a lower-level edition.
  6. If your current subscription is on the Annual Plan (yearly or monthly payments), select Annual Plan (Monthly Payment) as the payment plan for your new subscription.
  7. (Optional) To add a promotional code, for Flexible Plan, click Add promotion code and enter the code.
  8. Click Checkoutand thenPlace Order.


Google, Google Workspace, and related marks and logos are trademarks of Google LLC. All other company and product names are trademarks of the companies with which they are associated.

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