The three plans, one line each
Microsoft 365 Business comes in three tiers. Strip away the feature lists and they line up like this:
- Business Basic (about €6-7 per user per month): business email, Teams, and the web versions of Word, Excel and Outlook, with 1 TB of storage. No installed desktop apps.
- Business Standard (about €12.50-14 per user per month): everything in Basic, plus the Office apps you install on the computer.
- Business Premium (€22 per user per month): everything in Standard, plus the security and device management, including Defender for Business, Intune and Entra ID P1.
Those numbers moved on 1 July 2026: Microsoft raised Business Basic from USD 6 to USD 7 and Business Standard from USD 12.50 to USD 14 per user per month, while leaving Premium at USD 22[1].
Which quietly makes Premium the better-value tier than it was, because the gap you are paying to close is now smaller.
What changes as you move up
Basic to Standard is really about the desktop apps. The step that changes your security posture is Standard to Premium.
The hidden requirements, and the actual arithmetic
Two capabilities are licence-gated in a way the marketing pages do not make obvious, and both are the ones you need:
- Conditional Access requires Entra ID P1. Not Basic, not Standard. Without P1 you can turn MFA on, but you cannot write a policy that says "challenge this sign-in because it came from an unmanaged device in another country". Security defaults are all you get[2][3].
- Intune requires Premium (or a standalone Intune Plan 1 add-on). Basic and Standard have no device management at all - no enforced encryption, no compliance policies, no remote wipe[4][5].
So the real comparison is not Standard vs Premium. It is Standard plus the pieces you have to buy anyway, vs Premium. Per user per month, at list:
For a 10-person team that is roughly $1,320-$1,920 a year of difference, in Premium's favour, before counting the second vendor relationship and the second console. There is no configuration in which assembling the equivalent of Premium from Standard is cheaper. If you need the security tier, buy the security tier.
The small print that catches people out
Something most comparison pages gloss over: Basic and Standard leave out the security tools cyber insurers now treat as a baseline, meaning endpoint detection and response, device management, and enforced MFA through Conditional Access. Premium is where all three arrive.
That reframes the choice for a lot of small businesses. Premium starts to look less like the premium option and more like the sensible floor, since going without it can fail a cyber-insurance assessment or leave open the gaps a breach walks through.
Why the cheapest plan can end up the expensive one
Take Standard to save money, then add the security piece by piece, and the bill usually lands above what Premium would have cost, on a setup that is harder to keep straight. That is before the real exposure: a failed insurance renewal, or a single breach, makes the few euros a month between the plans look like nothing.
The 300-user ceiling
Worth knowing early: the whole Business family stops at 300 users[5]. Past that, you move up to an Enterprise plan such as E3, at a higher price per seat. A business growing quickly towards that line is usually better off planning around E3 from the start than being pushed into a migration at an awkward moment.
Choosing, in three questions
Three questions usually settle it:
- 1Do people need the installed desktop apps, or will the web versions do? If the web is enough, Basic can work. If not, you are into Standard or above.
- 2Do you handle client or regulated data, or want cyber insurance? If so, Premium is the one, for the security it carries.
- 3Are you heading past 300 people? If that is on the horizon, look at E3 now rather than later.
For most of the businesses we work with, the answer lands on Business Premium, simply because the security inside it has stopped being optional.
