So I read your comment and strolled on over to Zoho, who I'd never heard of before. They have a lot of products...just wow. That's a lot of stuff.
It's just such a jumble. I find myself wanting to know more about what they have to offer but yet completely overwhelmed by everything that's there. Can anybody speak to the quality of these products? How well do they interact? Is Creator any good? It looks like a BPM offering that could fit for small businesses?
Just a heads up. I hate badmouthing companies, but... I wanted to use them instead of Google but my standard .com domain kept error int out in there interface and multiple support emails and posts in their support forum went unanswered so I bailed back to Google.
I wanted to like them, but their signup and support experience was terrible. Their other products seemed to work well, but they've lost me as a customer.
Just treat it like google, or AWS - you're not going to use all their services and you don't need to. The things I'm using I'm really happy with.
Email just works. No thrills there. Using a custom domain.
Invoicing is pretty simple and I like that tracking payments and payment processors are integrated.
Docs are pretty good. They allow both storing files in arbitrary structure and tagging them at the same time. There's a phone app which I used once or twice and it's ok.
In general, I like it. It supports 2FA. If they let me pay for the service I would (5 users minimum, there's no cheap single-user subscription). It's kind of like an office suite - you're not going to praise how great it is, there are some obscure issues out there, but it works year after year for me and I'm happy to use it. While it may have happened, I can't remember any outage of their service.
Pretty happy custom domain + free Zoho mail user. 25 free users with 5 GB of email storage each is a pretty amazing deal you get without paying a dime.
Although, to be perfectly honest, I don't use any other product offered by Zoho.
You can use a custom domain using a personal gmail account if you forward email to the gmail account from the registrar and then setup send mail as using gmail.
If you're using Gandi (a registrar I would strongly recommend), you can set this up from your Gandi domain dashboard: Click "Manage mailboxes" and create a forwarding address. Example: https://i.imgur.com/qRmho7J.png - The MX values for your domain need to be Gandi's default email servers.
