Workplace
Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Standard or Premium: which do you need?
Short answer
Business Basic gives you mail, Teams, OneDrive and Office in the browser. Business Standard adds the Office programs you install on your computer. Business Premium adds management and security on top: managing laptops with Intune, protection against malware and rules for who may sign in from where. You can mix them. Anyone working on a managed laptop with company data is best off with Premium; someone who only reads mail can manage with Basic.
What is in each licence?
| Business Basic | Business Standard | Business Premium | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Business mail and calendar | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Word, Excel, PowerPoint in the browser and on the phone | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| The same programs on your computer | No | Yes | Yes |
| Managing laptops and phones with Intune | Limited | Limited | Yes |
| Protection against malware on devices | No | No | Yes |
| Sign-in rules (known device, location) | No | No | Yes |
| Extra filter for phishing and harmful attachments | No | Partly | Yes |
The table follows the layout Microsoft uses in 2026. Microsoft moves features between licences from time to time, so check the details at the moment you choose.
How do you choose per employee?
Look at the work, not the job title.
Basic suits someone who reads mail and now and then opens a document. Think field staff, production, a casual worker. There is no company laptop, or the laptop is shared.
Standard suits someone who is in Excel or Word all day, but where security is arranged elsewhere or little sensitive data passes through. In practice we recommend it less and less. The difference with Premium lies in exactly the things that insurers and clients ask about.
Premium suits everyone with their own company laptop and access to client data, finance or HR. In most offices that is nearly everyone.
Why is Premium not a luxury?
Because the expensive incidents are not about Word. They are about a hijacked account, a lost laptop or an attachment that installs something. Premium includes the tools against those:
- Conditional access. Signing in only works from a device the organisation knows. A stolen password is then worth little.
- Intune. A laptop is encrypted, gets updates and can be wiped remotely. More on that in rolling out laptops with Intune and Autopilot.
- Defender. Suspicious behaviour on a laptop is reported before the whole network joins in.
Anyone who has to buy these separately from other suppliers usually pays more and ends up with three management environments instead of one.
What are the pitfalls?
Buying Premium and setting nothing up. The licence does little by itself. Without setup you pay for Standard with a dearer label.
Giving everyone the same licence for convenience. Five casual workers on Premium is wasted money. Five administrative staff on Basic is a risk.
Licences nobody uses. When we take over management we almost always find licences for people who have left. How to prevent that is covered in employee leaving.
The director as an exception. The account with the most rights gets the lightest security, because the rules are awkward. Attackers know that.
What about the Enterprise licences?
E3 and E5 are meant for larger organisations and for specific requirements, such as extended logs or legal hold. Up to 300 users, Business Premium is almost always the better buy: comparable security for daily work, built more simply.
Under licences we go through what each employee needs, cancel what nobody uses and set up what you pay for.