If your team lives in Google Docs but prefers Claude to Gemini, you no longer have to copy text back and forth between tabs. Anthropic opened a public beta of Claude for Google Workspace on Tuesday, a single Marketplace add-on that puts a Claude sidebar inside Docs, Sheets and Slides on every paid Claude plan. It reads the file you have open, edits it in place, and logs every change in version history under your name.
That raises a practical question most of the launch coverage skipped: what does it cost to get an AI assistant inside your documents, and is adding Claude cheaper or pricier than the AI Google already bundles? We pulled the list prices from Google, Anthropic and Microsoft's own pricing pages and did the math for a small team.
The price of an AI sidebar, plan by plan
Google now folds Gemini into Workspace rather than selling it as an add-on, but not evenly. On Google's pricing page, Business Starter ($7 per user per month on an annual plan) gets Gemini in Gmail and the Gemini app, while Gemini inside Docs, Meet and the rest starts at Business Standard ($14). Claude, meanwhile, is a separate subscription. Anthropic's pricing lists Pro at $17 a month billed annually ($20 monthly) and Team standard seats at $20 a seat billed annually ($25 monthly). For a third reference point, Microsoft lists Microsoft 365 Business Standard with Copilot at $23.50 per user per month, paid yearly.
| Setup (annual billing, USD) | Per person / month | 10 people / year | AI inside your documents |
|---|---|---|---|
| Workspace Business Starter | $7 | $840 | Gemini in Gmail only, not Docs |
| Workspace Business Standard | $14 | $1,680 | Gemini in Docs, Gmail, Meet and more |
| Microsoft 365 Business Standard with Copilot | $23.50 | $2,820 | Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint |
| Business Starter + Claude Team seat | $27 | $3,240 | Claude sidebar in Docs, Sheets, Slides (beta) |
| Business Standard + Claude Team seat | $34 | $4,080 | Both Gemini and Claude |
The yearly column is just the monthly price times 10 people times 12 months, so you can swap in your own headcount. The comparison that matters most is the upgrade cost. If you're on Starter and simply want AI inside Docs, moving to Standard adds $7 per person per month, or $840 a year for ten people. Adding Claude Team seats instead adds $20 per person per month, or $2,400 a year, which is about 2.9 times as much.
That isn't quite apples to apples, though, and it's worth being fair to Claude here. A Claude seat isn't only a sidebar. It also gets you the full Claude app, Claude Code, and the Microsoft 365 add-in, all drawing from the same usage pool, so a team that would pay for Claude anyway gets the Docs integration at no extra cost. The decision is really about whether your people already reach for Claude, not about the sidebar alone.
What the beta can and can't do
We read Anthropic's help center guide end to end, because the limits tell you more about who this is for than the feature list does. In Docs, Claude can rewrite sections, restyle headings and propose bigger changes as cards you accept or reject. In Sheets, it writes and fixes formulas, builds pivot tables and native charts, and can pull data into Python for cleanup. In Slides, it builds new slides from your deck's own layouts and flags text that overflows or overlaps.
The guardrails are tight by design. The add-on asks Google for permission to touch only the file it was opened in, so it can't browse your Drive, open other files or export a PDF. It can't share a file or change who has access, and it always stops to ask before inserting a link or an image from the web, even in its "Accept all edits" mode. That's a sensible answer to the obvious worry, a document that hides instructions in white text, and Anthropic says Claude treats file content as data and labels hidden text it finds.
The rough edges are real, too. A single operation stops after about six minutes because of Google's own limits, closing the sidebar kills the task, and Firefox isn't supported. Claude can't read or resolve comments in Docs, its edits land as direct edits rather than suggestions, and charts it adds to Slides are pasted images that won't update when your sheet changes. Chat history is saved per file in your browser, so it won't follow you to another laptop. For companies with compliance needs, the guide says the beta doesn't support zero data retention, isn't covered for HIPAA, and won't run through Amazon Bedrock, Vertex AI or Azure, even though the Microsoft 365 version does.
Here's how we'd decide, and this is our opinion rather than anything the vendors told us. If your team already pays for Claude Team and lives in Google Workspace, install it today; a Workspace super admin can push it to everyone or to selected groups from the Admin console. If you're on Business Starter and nobody has a strong model preference, the $7 upgrade to Standard is the cheaper way to get AI into Docs. If you're a spreadsheet-heavy analyst who already likes Claude, try it on a personal Pro plan for a month before buying seats for the whole team. And if you handle health records or anything that needs zero retention, wait for the beta to grow up before pointing it at real files.