Google Chat arrives with the Workspace licence, which makes it the cheapest chat in the building. This page is about the two things that follow from being a component: what it does when the conversation turns into work, and whose law you are under while it does.
Capability by capability
Every line about Google Chat was read on its own pages on 24 September 2026. Where we are still building something, the table says so.
| Google Chat |  |
|
|---|---|---|
| Conversation | ||
| How you get it | Chat is included with Google Workspace at no additional cost. It is not sold on its own. | One subscription that is the product, not a component of a suite. |
| A free plan for a company | Google Workspace has no free plan — all four editions are paid. The free Essentials Starter edition is a separate product without Gmail. | Free is a real plan: eight people, chat, two Boards projects, six months of history, surveys and kudos, with no card. |
| From talk to work | ||
| Tasks | A space member can create group tasks and assign them; a task assigned to you appears in your personal Google Tasks list. Fields are title, details, date and time, assignee. | A message becomes a task with an owner, a deadline and a milestone, on boards in kanban, list, table and Gantt views — and its comments come back to the channel. |
| When a space gets large | When a space becomes too large, you can no longer assign tasks in it. | The same product at eight people and at eighty. |
| People and focus | ||
| Guests | External users need a Google Workspace or Google account; guest accounts do not, and invitees create one on acceptance. A space is set as external when it is created and that setting cannot be changed later. Guests cannot add or remove apps or webhooks, or interact with apps in a space. | A guest gets one named channel and one project on Boards, and the setting is not a one-way door. |
| Searching and archiving the record | Google Vault, which stores, archives and searches data, appears in the Business Plus edition. | Search across the whole history on every plan, and an audit log in the product. |
| Culture, clients, tickets | ||
| Culture: kudos, surveys, eNPS | Not part of the product. | Feedback Friday, kudos, leaderboards, anniversaries and surveys from Free; pulse surveys and eNPS from Workspace. |
| Where it runs | ||
| The law that applies | The Workspace agreement provides that for customers not covered by its other governing-law clauses, all claims are governed by California law and litigated exclusively in the federal or state courts of Santa Clara County, California. | Polish law and Polish courts, with a Polish company on the other side of the agreement. |
Sources: Google Chat · Google Workspace pricing · Google Workspace Essentials Starter · Assign tasks in Google Chat · Chatting with external users · Google Workspace Terms of Service. Checked against Google Chat’s own pages on 24 September 2026.
Giving the point away
Three of them, and none is a throwaway. If these are what your team runs on, Google Chat is the right answer and we would rather you knew now.
If your company pays for Workspace, Chat costs nothing extra and every account already exists. We cannot beat a marginal price of zero and we are not going to pretend we can.
Google’s editors are the best real-time collaborative documents there are, and they sit one click from the chat. We keep our documents simple by design and yours will stay in Workspace either way — we are built to sit beside it, not to replace it.
One account opens the mail, the calendar, the video call and the file. For an IT department that standardised on Google, that coherence is worth more than any single feature.
Where the difference shows
A Google Chat task has a title, details, a date and an assignee, and lands in a personal Google Tasks list. In taos a message becomes a task with an owner, a deadline and a milestone, on a board with kanban, list, table and Gantt views — and its comments come back as a reply in the channel it came from.
Workflow templates with steps, deadlines counted from the start, a department answering for each stage and conditions that branch. Google Chat has no equivalent, so the process lives in a document nobody opens.
Workspace has no free edition; the free Essentials Starter is a different product without Gmail. Ours is eight people with chat, boards, surveys, kudos and the dashboard, with no card and no expiry.
Kudos, Feedback Friday, leaderboards, anniversaries and surveys from the free plan; pulse surveys and eNPS from Workspace. Google Chat has no layer for this at all.
An agency or an accounting office lives in several client organisations at once. In taos you switch between them without logging out, with every notification from every module and every organisation in one list.
The Workspace agreement sends claims that its other clauses do not cover to California law and the courts of Santa Clara County. Ours is a Polish company, on European infrastructure, under Polish jurisdiction — and taos is built to sit beside Workspace, not to take it away from you.