Google Says Apps For Education Now Has More Than 20 Million Users

Google just announced that its Apps for Education suite is now being used by more than 20 million students, faculty members, and staff worldwide. The company made this announcement in a blog post celebrating the upcoming World Teachers’ Day on October 5.

Google Apps For Education launched almost exactly six years ago. The service seems to be growing at a rate of about 5 million new users per year. In 2010, Apps for Education had about 10 million users and last year, Google announced that it had signed up an additional 5 million users for the service since.

The education edition includes all of the standard Google products like Gmail, Calendar, Good Docs, and Drive. In addition schools can make use of Vault, the company’s archiving and e-discovery solution that helps them to be prepared for internal investigations, litigation and compliance audits. Schools do not have to pay for access to Apps for Education, and students get up to 25GB of storage space on Google’s servers.

With Office 365 for Education, Microsoft currently offers a very similar suite of products for schools. In 2011, Microsoft said its product (which was still called live@edu back then) had about 15 million users. The company hasn’t released any new numbers since, though it recently expanded its service to Europe and announced that it had signed up more than 4.5 million students through the Catholic International Education Office there.

Here are a few additional momentum numbers Google shared about its education-focused initiatives today:

  • 400+ universities are posting lectures and/or full courses online using YouTube Edu
  • 600,000 staff from the Philippines Department of Education will now be using Google Apps
  • Universities across the continents are signing up for Apps, including schools in Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, and Africa
  • More than 500 schools and districts went back to school with Chromebooks this fall
  • Seven of the eight Ivy League universities and 72 of this year’s top 100 U.S. universities (as determined by 2013 U.S. News and World Report’s ranking) have gone Google with Google Apps for Education