With a range of plans for small, medium and enterprise businesses; identifying the plan (or plans) that are right for your organisation can be challenging. This Office 365 license comparison will overview the Business and Enterprise plans available from Microsoft to help you make the right choices for your organisation.
Within the Office 365 plans targeted at businesses there are two plan types:
- Office 365 Business
- Maximum number of users: 300
- Office 365 Enterprise
- No ceiling on the number of users
Office 365 Business
There are three Office 365 Business plans:
| Plan | Per Month (ex-GST) | Per Annum (ex-GST) |
| Office 365 Business | $12.00 | $144.00 |
| Office 365 Business Essentials | $6.90 | $82.80 |
| Office 365 Business Premium | $17.20 | $206.40 |
Note: For each user/mailbox in the plan the commitment is now annual, so the monthly rates shown above are for budgeting / comparison purposes only. The ‘Per Annum’ figure is the actual cost and commitment.
The main differences between the three plans are:
- The Office 365 Business plan does not include access to Microsoft Exchange (i.e. business e-mail) and as a result for the majority of organisations this plan is not useful and so won’t be considered further here.
- The key difference between Office 365 Business Essentials and Office 365 Business Premium is that Business Premium includes both the following desktop applications and the Web versions:
- Outlook
- Word
- Excel
- PowerPoint
- Publisher (desktop application only)
- Access (desktop application only)
- While Business Essentials only includes the Web versions (and there is no Web version of Access or Publisher)
So many organisations use a combination of Business Essentials and Business Premium depending on the needs of their user’s and their budget.
For a detailed comparison of Business Essentials and Business Premium plans click here
Office 365 Enterprise
There are four Office 365 Enterprise plans:
| Plan | Per Month (ex-GST) | Per Annum (ex-GST) |
| Office 365 ProPlus | $17.40 | $208.80 |
| Office 365 Enterprise E1 | $11.00 | $132.00 |
| Office 365 Enterprise E3 | $29.00 | $348.00 |
| Office 365 Enterprise E5 | $50.70 | $608.40 |
The main differences between the four plans are:
- Like the Office 365 Business plan, Office 365 ProPlus does not include access to Microsoft Exchange (i.e. business e-mail) and as a result is not a useful plan for the majority of organisations. This plan won’t be discussed further here.
- Office 365 Enterprise E1 is similar to Office 365 Business Essentials, in that it only includes the Web versions of: Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The size of the user mailbox is 50GB
- Office 365 Enterprise E3 and E5 are similar to Office 365 Business Premium, in that they also include the desktop applications:
- Outlook
- Word
- Excel
- PowerPoint
- Publisher (desktop application only)
- Access (desktop application only)
- However in contrast to the Enterprise E1 and Office 365 Business Premium plans, both E3 and E5 provide a user mailbox of 100GB.
- The Enterprise E3 and E5 plans also provide additional “back office” services
For a detailed comparison of the Office 365 Enterprise plans click here
Still have questions about which Office 365 plan (or plans) is right for your organisation? Contact ZEN today for assistance