Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Standard or Premium: which one does your office need?

What every business plan includes

All three business plans give each person a work mailbox on your own domain, Teams for chat and meetings, OneDrive for personal files and SharePoint for shared ones. They all include the web and mobile versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, so someone on Business Basic can still open a quote in a browser, edit it and send it. The business plans are designed for organisations up to a set user cap (currently 300), which covers almost every small and medium office in New Zealand.

Where the plans differ is not email or storage so much as what runs on the computer and how well the business is protected. That is the decision you are really making. A cheaper plan is not a cut-down mailbox; it is the same mailbox with fewer tools around it. Prices change and are set in US dollars converted for the NZ market, so check current pricing with Microsoft or your reseller rather than relying on an old quote.

Business Basic: browser and phone users

Basic fits people who rarely sit at a desk all day: a warehouse supervisor checking the roster, a part-time bookkeeper who logs in twice a week, a site manager who lives in the Outlook and Teams apps on a phone. The web apps have improved a lot and handle most everyday documents well. Where they fall short is heavy Excel work with macros, large mail merges, complex Word templates with tracked changes from several reviewers, and anything that needs an add-in only available on the desktop.

If you find a Basic user installing a pirated or personal copy of Office to get around that, they need a different plan. Mixing a personal Microsoft 365 Family licence with a work account on the same laptop also causes confusing sign-in problems and puts company files under a personal account.

Business Standard: the installed apps

Standard adds the full desktop apps for Windows and Mac, which most office staff expect. Each person can install them on several of their own computers, tablets and phones, so a laptop at work and a desktop at home are both covered. Standard also adds a few extras such as webinar tools in Teams. For a design studio, an accountancy practice or a real estate office where people spend the day in Excel and Word, Standard is the minimum that will feel normal.

What Standard does not add is much protection beyond the baseline. You get Microsoft's standard spam and malware filtering and you can switch on multi-factor sign-in, but you do not get the tools to manage the laptops themselves, block sign-ins from unexpected countries, or stop a stolen device from keeping company email.

Business Premium: the security layer

Premium is Standard plus three things that matter once you hold client records: device management (so company laptops and phones get enforced settings and can be wiped), conditional access (rules such as requiring a managed device or blocking risky sign-ins), and endpoint protection that watches for ransomware behaviour on each computer. It also adds email archiving and information protection features useful for law firms, medical practices and anyone with Privacy Act obligations.

The catch is that Premium does nothing until it is configured. We regularly see offices paying for Premium with every security feature still switched off because nobody set it up after the licences were bought. If you upgrade, budget time to roll out the device management and access rules, and test them with one or two staff before switching them on for everyone.

Mixing plans in one office

You do not have to put everyone on the same plan. A common pattern for a twenty-person office is Premium for the people who handle money and client files, Standard or Basic for staff who only need email and Teams, and a frontline plan for shared kiosk devices. The admin centre lets you assign different licences to different people, and you can change someone's plan later without moving their mailbox.

The trap is security policies that only apply to licensed users. If your conditional access rules come from Premium, the Basic users are outside them, and attackers look for exactly those accounts. Either cover everyone with Premium, or check with whoever manages your tenant how the cheaper accounts are protected. Office IT's health check includes a licence review that looks for this gap.

A quick way to decide

Go through your staff list and ask two questions about each person. Do they need Word and Excel installed to do their job properly? Can they open client records, payroll, banking or anything else that would hurt if a stranger got in? A no to both suggests Basic. A yes to the first only suggests Standard. A yes to the second, whatever the first answer, points to Premium.

Then look at the devices. If staff take laptops home, use their own phones for work email or work from cafes and client sites, the device management in Premium becomes much more valuable, because it lets you wipe company data from a lost phone without touching the person's family photos.