Compare Microsoft 365 Plans – Business vs Business Essentials vs Business Premium

Office 365 Business Plans (Now called Microsoft 365) mainly offer 3 variants – Office 365 Business, Office 365 Business Essentials and Office 365 Business Premium. Each of these editions provides something different depending on your needs. In this post, we’ll compare the plans so that you can decide which plan suits you better –

1. Office 365 Business
2. Office 365 Business Essentials
3. Office 365 Business Premium.

Microsoft 365 Business vs Business Essentials vs Business Premium

If you are using Office 365, licensed as a monthly or annual subscription, you get powerful services like business-class email, online storage, and teamwork solutions that you can access from anywhere. But when it comes to making a choice between different editions, we get confused. Worry not, we are here to make things simpler for you.

This breakdown will help you determine which edition of Office 365 Business is better -Office 365 Business, Office 365 Business Essentials or Office 365 Business Premium.

Detailed read: What apps does Microsoft 365 include?

1] Office 365 Business Essentials

This edition of Office 365 features only online services like OneDrive for Business, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams and Exchange Online. It does not give access to any of the popular and widely used Office Desktop apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.).

Since it does not run any Office Desktop apps, Office 365 Business Essentials can support online meetings and video conferencing for up to 250 people.

Organizations that want to have managed email, cloud storage along with a pocket-friendly option will find Office 365 Business Essentials as the best bet.

2] Office 365 Business Premium

Unlike its sibling, Office 365 Business Premium runs all of the online services and Desktop apps. It is more suited for larger organizations that have more than 300 employees.

One license Of Office 365 Business Premium covers fully-installed, always-up-to-date Office apps on 5 phones, 5 tablets, and 5 PCs or Macs per user. Like, Office 365 Business Essentials you can create team sites to share information, content, and files throughout your intranet using SharePoint in Office 365 Business Premium.

Apart from these differences,  Office 365 Business Premium and Office 365 Business Essentials show some core similarities like,

• Email hosting with 50 GB mailbox and custom email domain address
• File storage and sharing with 1 TB of OneDrive storage
• Hub for teamwork to connect your teams with Microsoft Teams (this facility is not available in Office 365 Business version)
• 24/7 phone and web support

3] Office 365 Business

If you want a fully-installed and always up-to-date versions of Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint for Windows or Mac (plus Access and Publisher for PC only), check out Office 365 Business. Each user can install the Office apps on up to 5 PCs or Macs. In comparison to Office 365 Business Premium and Office 365 Business Essentials, many features are cut short in Office 365 Business. For example,

• You cannot use your own custom domain name (e.g. [email protected])
• No facility to get business-class email on phones, tablets, desktops, and the web with Exchange
• You do not have an option to manage your calendar, share available meeting times, schedule meetings, and get reminders
• No ability to schedule meetings and respond to invitations with ease using shared calendars

If the above limitations of Office 365 Business bother you, Premium and Enterprise versions of it will offer you more advanced feature sets and better facilities than the Home and Personal editions. So, if your organization finds more use of Desktop applications, Office 365 Business Essentials is the right choice for you. On the other hand, if employees do not mind working with online applications – then Office 365 Business Essentials comes across as a really cost-effective solution.