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Business Standard vs Business Premium
Standard is Office, mail, Teams and files. Premium is the same plus the tools that manage the devices, protect the sign-ins and stop a phishing mail before it lands. If people work from home, from a café or from their own phone, the gap between the two is the gap between having a security posture and not.
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Everyone works on office machines that someone already manages, or the company is small enough that the owner knows every device. Nobody has asked for multi-factor policies beyond the defaults, and no customer questionnaire has asked about endpoint protection. You need Office and mail and nothing else.
Business Standard in full, with every buying option →…
Laptops and phones leave the office. A cyber-insurance form or a customer has asked what protects your endpoints and sign-ins. You have anything that should not leave the company — contracts, personal data, drawings — and want labels and data loss prevention. Or you have ever had a mailbox compromised: Premium is the plan that would have stopped it.
Business Premium in full, with every buying option →| Feature | Business Standard… | Business Premium… |
|---|---|---|
| Apps and productivity | ||
| Desktop Office apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook) | ✓ | ✓ |
| Web and mobile Office apps | ✓ | ✓ |
| Install on 5 PCs or Macs, 5 tablets, 5 phones per user | ✓ | ✓ |
| Microsoft TeamsIn the EEA, most plans are also sold without Teams at a lower price. Teams is then bought separately. | ✓ | ✓ |
| SharePoint | ✓ | ✓ |
| Microsoft Bookings | ✓ | ✓ |
| Email and storage | ||
| Business email hosting (Exchange Online) | ✓ | ✓ |
| Mailbox sizediffersBusiness Premium moved from 50 GB to 100 GB in summer 2026. | 50 GB | 100 GB |
| Auto-expanding archive mailboxBusiness Premium onlyBasic and Standard include a 50 GB archive that does not expand. Business Premium (through Exchange Online Archiving), E3 and E5 expand up to 1.5 TB. | — | ✓ |
| OneDrive storage per user5 TB+ applies from five seats and can be raised on request to Microsoft. | 1 TB | 1 TB |
| Identity and devices | ||
| Microsoft Entra ID P1Business Premium onlyThis is the line that most often decides between Office 365 E3 and Microsoft 365 E3. | — | ✓ |
| Microsoft Entra ID P2 (identity protection, PIM) | — | — |
| Conditional AccessBusiness Premium only | — | ✓ |
| Microsoft Intune Plan 1Business Premium only | — | ✓ |
| Windows 11 Enterprise upgrade rights | — | — |
| Security | ||
| Defender for Office 365 Plan 1 (Safe Links, Safe Attachments)Business Premium onlyIncluded in Microsoft 365 E3 from July 2026, with the E3 price change; earlier E3 had Exchange Online Protection only. | — | ✓ |
| Defender for Office 365 Plan 2 (attack simulation, threat hunting) | — | — |
| Defender for Business (endpoint protection)Business Premium onlyThe SMB endpoint product. Enterprise plans use Defender for Endpoint instead. | — | ✓ |
| Defender for Endpoint Plan 2 | — | — |
| Defender for Identity | — | — |
| Defender for Cloud Apps | — | — |
| Sensitivity labels and information protectionBusiness Premium only | — | ✓ |
| Compliance | ||
| Data loss prevention for email and filesBusiness Premium only | — | ✓ |
| Retention policies and litigation holddiffersLitigation hold is a feature of Exchange Online Plan 2, and of Plan 1 with Exchange Online Archiving, which Business Premium includes. Basic, Standard and E1 need the Archiving add-on, around EUR 2.60 per user per month. | Add-on | ✓ |
| eDiscovery (Standard) | — | — |
| eDiscovery (Premium) | — | — |
| Insider Risk Management | — | — |
| Communication Compliance | — | — |
| Customer Lockbox | — | — |
| Voice and analytics | ||
| Power BI Pro | — | — |
| Teams Phone (phone system)A calling plan or direct routing is still needed on top, and is bought separately. | — | — |
| Limits | ||
| Maximum usersThe 300-seat cap is the most common reason a growing company has to move off the Business plans. | 300 | 300 |
highlighted rows differ included. The same rows, for every plan at once, are on the full comparison; prices are Microsoft’s list per user a month on a one-year commitment, in the currency of the region chosen at the top of the page.
You can, but by the time you add Intune, Entra ID P1 and Defender for Business separately you have paid more than Premium and hold four subscriptions instead of one.
Yes, and it also carries an archive mailbox; Standard does not.
No. Premium is a superset. The move is a licence swap on the same tenant and takes minutes.
A written answer with the arithmetic, in your currency, usually within one business day.