Microsoft 365 Licensing, Explained

Basic is web and mobile apps with business email — no desktop Office. Standard adds the desktop Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook applications. Premium adds the security and management layer: Intune device management, Defender for Business, Defender for Office 365 Plan 1, Purview Information Protection Plan 1, policy-based conditional access through Entra ID, and a Windows 11 Pro upgrade. All three cap at 300 users.

Microsoft sells the Business plans in two lines — one including Microsoft Teams and one excluding it, at lower prices. Checked 21 September 2026, Business Standard is ₹860 with Teams and ₹665 without, per user per month on an annual commitment excluding GST. Everything else in the plan is the same. If your organisation genuinely uses something else for chat and meetings, the without-Teams line is the cheaper and more honest choice.

Three triggers. You are approaching 300 users, which is a hard per-tenant cap on the Business plans. You need capabilities that only exist at enterprise level, such as advanced XDR, Power BI or the full compliance stack in E5. Or you have regulatory requirements that the Business tier cannot satisfy. Headcount alone is the usual reason, and it is worth planning for before you hit the ceiling.

Yes, and you usually should. There is rarely a good reason to put a warehouse team and a finance team on the same plan. Mixing plans within one tenant is normal, supported, and for most businesses the single largest saving available — commonly a few Premium seats, a core of Standard, and Basic for people who only need email and the web apps.

Generally not. Microsoft provides shared mailboxes without an assigned licence, so addresses like accounts@, info@ or support@ do not normally need a paid seat. Organisations that set these up as ordinary user accounts end up paying for them every month, and it is one of the first things worth auditing on an existing tenant.

Since 1 July 2026 Copilot is bundled into the headline Business Standard and Business Premium SKUs — the ones Microsoft prices at ₹1,955 and ₹2,660. The plainer Business Standard and Business Premium at ₹860 and ₹1,830 do not include it, and it can be added separately. Because the plan names are similar and the difference is over ₹800 per user per month, this is worth confirming rather than assuming. Checked 21 September 2026.

No, and this is a genuinely important distinction. Microsoft protects its own infrastructure and provides retention policies, versioning and a recycle bin. None of that is a backup you control. A deletion or a corruption discovered several months later is generally gone. Third-party backup for Microsoft 365 is a separate product and a separate line in the budget.

We look at your current tenant: who is licensed and at what level, who has left but still holds a seat, which shared mailboxes are being paid for as user accounts, and whether anything is being bought twice. Then we map what people actually do against what each plan includes. Most reviews of an existing tenant find something — it is rarely dramatic, and it is usually recurring.