Microsoft sells three main Microsoft 365 plans for businesses with up to 300 users: Business Basic, Business Standard and Business Premium. The names suggest good, better and best, but the differences are more specific than that, and picking the wrong one either leaves security gaps or means paying for features nobody switches on.
This guide covers what each plan includes, what the step up actually buys, and how we usually recommend choosing. Microsoft adjusts prices and bundles from time to time, so we have left prices out. Check the current figures before you buy.
What every business plan includes
All three plans share the same foundation:
- Business email on Exchange Online, with a 50 GB mailbox per user
- 1 TB of OneDrive storage per user, plus SharePoint for shared files
- Web and mobile versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook
- Microsoft Teams for chat, meetings and calling. Versions without Teams are also sold, so check the exact plan name.
- Email protection against spam and malware, and multi-factor authentication through security defaults
Business Basic
Business Basic stops at the web and mobile apps: there are no desktop versions of Word, Excel or Outlook to install. It suits staff who mainly live in email and Teams, frontline or field roles that work from a phone, and people who already have a desktop Office licence they are happy with.
Business Standard
Business Standard adds the desktop apps: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote, installable on up to five PCs or Macs, five tablets and five phones per user. For most office staff who spend the day in documents and spreadsheets, this is the minimum that feels complete.
What Standard does not add is much in the way of security or device control. It has the same baseline protection as Basic.
Business Premium
Business Premium includes everything in Standard, plus the security and management tools that Basic and Standard lack:
| Feature | What it does |
|---|---|
| Microsoft Intune | Enrols and manages company laptops and phones, applies security settings, and wipes company data from a lost device |
| Entra ID P1 (Conditional Access) | Blocks risky sign-ins, such as logins from unexpected countries or unmanaged devices |
| Defender for Business | Endpoint detection and response on Windows and Mac devices |
| Defender for Office 365 Plan 1 | Checks links and attachments in email before staff open them |
| Purview Information Protection | Sensitivity labels and data loss prevention for confidential documents |
| Exchange Online Archiving | Additional archive storage for mailboxes that outgrow 50 GB |
| Windows Autopilot | New laptops configure themselves when an employee first signs in |
Premium also includes the right to use Azure Virtual Desktop, which matters if you plan to run desktops in the cloud.
How to choose
Start from security, not apps. If the business holds client records, personal information or financial data, the controls in Premium stop the incidents we see most often: stolen passwords, unmanaged laptops and malicious attachments. In our view, Premium is the sensible default for most offices.
Mix plans where it makes sense. You can hold different plans in the same tenant, for example Premium for office staff and Basic for a crew who only need email and Teams. Premium protections only cover the users licensed for them, so mix deliberately rather than to save a few dollars on someone who handles sensitive data.
Know the 300-user limit. Each business plan caps at 300 users. Beyond that, the Enterprise plans take over.
Copilot is an add-on. Microsoft 365 Copilot is licensed separately on top of any of these plans. Before adding it, tidy up who can see what in SharePoint and OneDrive, because Copilot can surface anything a user already has access to.
Common licensing mistakes
- Standard for everyone out of habit, when some roles would be fine on Basic
- Paying for Premium and never configuring it. Intune and Conditional Access do nothing until someone sets them up.
- Microsoft 365 bought through a reseller bundle that limits your admin access
- Licences still assigned to people who left, quietly renewing every month
A licence review is part of our free IT assessment. If you are weighing up a change of plan, or moving to Microsoft 365 from another platform, our Microsoft 365 and migration pages explain how we handle it.