The quotas cover different things
This is the comparison people skip, and it changes the maths entirely. A Google One plan is shared between Google Photos, Google Drive and Gmail, so years of email attachments eat into the same allowance as your photo library.
An iCloud+ plan is shared between iCloud Photos, full device backups, iCloud Drive and Mail. Device backups in particular are large and invisible — a couple of iPhones can occupy a substantial share of a plan before a single photo is counted.
So identical storage numbers are not equivalent value, and 'I need 200 GB' means something different on each side. Look at what is actually consuming the quota you have before comparing tiers at all.
Where Google Photos is stronger
Search is the clearest advantage. Google indexes the content of your photos, so searching an object, a place, or even text visible in an image returns results without you having tagged anything. It is genuinely useful for finding one photo among tens of thousands.
Platform parity is the second. Google Photos behaves the same on Android, iOS and the web, which matters if your household is mixed or if you expect to change phones across ecosystems.
Third is the compression escape hatch. Storage saver compresses new uploads, and Recover storage can retroactively re-compress an existing library. That second option is irreversible, but it is a real lever that has no direct iCloud equivalent.
Where iCloud is stronger
Integration, mostly. On Apple devices iCloud Photos is the system photo library rather than an app on top of one, so edits, albums and shared libraries propagate without a second sync layer running in the background.
Device backup being part of the same quota is a genuine convenience even though it consumes space — one plan covers the phone as well as the photos, which is simpler than managing two providers.
Apple Photos also surfaces a Duplicates album, which finds exact duplicate images on-device. Google offers nothing equivalent. It is limited to exact matches, so re-compressed and resized copies still slip past, but it is more than the alternative provides.
Neither one solves duplicates properly
Google Photos has no duplicate finder at all. Its only duplicate-related behaviour is an upload-time check that refuses a byte-identical file, and any edit, crop, resize or messaging-app round trip produces a file it treats as brand new.
Apple's Duplicates album goes further by scanning what you already have, but it is still an exact-match feature. The copies that actually accumulate — the same photo at three resolutions from three different apps — are near-duplicates, not exact ones.
Matching those requires perceptual hashing, which fingerprints what an image looks like rather than what bytes it contains. That is what third-party tools do, and on the Google side it is also the only way to catch a photo duplicated between Google Photos and Google Drive.
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A migration reads from one library and writes to the other, and the write side has no idea what is already there. If you have ever partially copied photos across before, you will end up with two copies of a good portion of the library.
Format conversion compounds it. Photos re-encoded during transfer come out with different bytes and different names, so no exact-match tool on either side will recognise them as copies of what you already had.
The practical advice is to clean before you move, not after. Clear the obvious waste, run a duplicates pass, and see what the library actually weighs — a lot of migrations turn out to be unnecessary once the number drops.
How to decide
If all your devices are Apple and you want one plan covering backups and photos, iCloud+ is the lower-friction choice. If you have mixed devices, or you rely on finding photos by searching their contents, Google Photos is the stronger tool.
If the reason you are comparing is that one of them is full, changing provider is unlikely to be the fix. Work through a cleanup on the service you already use, then re-evaluate with a real number instead of a warning banner.
And if you decide to run both, budget for it honestly: two quotas, two cleanups, and no shared awareness between them. That is a legitimate choice, but it is the most expensive one available.