The short version
For most schools, nothing needs to be set up. The "Sign in with Google" button on the Steplab login page works out of the box with any Google account – whether that's a Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) account managed by your school, or a personal Google account.
The single most important thing to understand is this:
Steplab matches your Google account to your Steplab account by email address. As long as the email address on a person's Google account is the same as the email address on their Steplab account, signing in with Google will "just work".
There is no separate setup, domain connection, or app installation required on your side for this to function.
How it works
A user clicks Sign in with Google on the Steplab login page.
They're sent to Google's standard sign-in screen, where they log in with their normal Google credentials (and complete 2-step verification if your organisation requires it).
Google confirms who they are and returns their email address to Steplab.
Steplab looks for an existing Steplab account with that exact email address and, if it finds one, signs the person in.
Behind the scenes, Steplab uses Google's standard OpenID Connect / OAuth 2.0 sign-in and reads only basic profile information – essentially the user's email address (and, if available, their profile picture). Steplab does not read mailboxes, Drive files, calendars or any other Google Workspace data.
"How do we connect Steplab to our Google Workspace?"
The reassuring answer is: there's no Workspace-to-Steplab connection to set up.
Steplab's Google sign-in accepts sign-ins from any Google account automatically, so there is no need to:
register Steplab as an application in your Google Admin console,
share a domain, client ID, or any credentials with us,
create a connector or configure SSO/SAML, or
have your IT team configure anything in Google Workspace.
If your team would like Steplab to offer Google sign-in so it aligns with the other tools you use, the answer is simply: it already does. Your staff can start using the Google button immediately.
One caveat: Workspace accounts that restrict third-party apps
Some organisations lock down their Google Workspace so that staff cannot sign in to third-party applications unless an administrator has allowed them (this is controlled in the Google Admin console under third-party app access, and is a setting on your side, not in Steplab).
If your Workspace is configured this way, staff may be blocked from completing Google sign-in until a Workspace administrator permits it. This is the only scenario in which your IT team would need to take any action, and it's governed entirely by your own Google policies.
Things to be aware of
Email matching can be a common cause of issues. Almost every Google sign-in problem comes down to the email address Google reports not matching the email address on the Steplab account. If a member of staff can't sign in with Google, the first thing to check is whether those two addresses are identical. If someone was added to Steplab under a different address (for example, an alias) from the one on their Google account, the Google button won't find their account – simply align the two addresses and it will work.
The email address must be verified. Steplab requires that the Google account's email address is verified by Google. For school-managed Workspace accounts this is effectively always the case, so it's rarely an issue in practice.
Users must already exist in Steplab. Signing in with Google does not create a new Steplab account on its own. People are added to Steplab in the usual way (typically invited by a school lead). New users activating an invitation can choose to set their account up using Google, but the Google button on the main login page only works for people who already have a Steplab account or a pending invitation.
There is no "Google only" enforcement setting. Steplab doesn't provide a school-level switch to force everyone to sign in with Google. Sign-in methods (password, Google, Microsoft, passkey) generally sit side by side. In practice, once someone has signed in with Google and has never set a Steplab password, the system will steer them back to Google rather than offering a password – but this happens per user, automatically, rather than being a policy you configure.
No data is read from your Workspace. Steplab only uses Google to confirm identity and retrieve the user's email address. It does not access mailboxes, documents, or other Google Workspace data.
Getting help
If you'd like us to:
help reconcile users who were added under a different email address from their Google account, or
troubleshoot a member of staff who can't sign in with Google,
please get in touch with our support team at [email protected] or start a live chat. It helps if you can tell us your school's email domain(s) and a couple of example accounts that aren't working, so we can pinpoint the cause quickly.