The three plans at a glance
| Business Basic | Business Standard | Business Premium | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price (annual commitment, ex VAT) | £5.40 | £10.80 | £16.90 |
| Exchange mailbox | 100 GB | 100 GB | 100 GB |
| Archive mailbox | 50 GB | 50 GB | Up to 1.5 TB |
| Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Office apps | Web and mobile only | Desktop, web and mobile | Desktop, web and mobile |
| Device management (Intune) | No | No | Yes |
| Conditional access (Entra ID P1) | No | No | Yes |
| Defender for Business | No | No | Yes |
Prices are Microsoft’s UK list prices following the 1 July 2026 increase; your reseller’s may differ slightly. Our guide to the July 2026 price rise has the before-and-after.
Business Basic: email, Teams and the web apps
Basic gives every user a full Exchange Online mailbox, Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint, and the web and mobile versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. What it does not include is the desktop Office applications — including desktop Outlook.
It suits staff who work mainly in a browser or on a phone, frontline and site teams, and anyone who already has desktop Office from another licence. For a business that mostly needs email and calendars, it is the cheapest sensible Microsoft option.
Business Standard: adds the desktop apps
Standard is Basic plus the installable desktop versions of Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, on up to five PCs or Macs, five tablets and five phones per user. For a team that lives in Excel and desktop Outlook, that is what you are paying the extra £5.40 for.
It is the most common small-business plan, and frequently the wrong one — either because half the staff would be fine on Basic, or because the business would be far better protected on Premium.
Business Premium: adds the security layer
Premium is Standard plus the tools that turn Microsoft 365 into a properly managed and protected environment:
- Intune to manage and secure company laptops and phones, and wipe them if lost.
- Entra ID P1, including conditional access — for example, only allowing sign-ins from managed devices or from the UK.
- Defender for Business for endpoint protection.
- Exchange Online Archiving, with an archive that grows to 1.5 TB.
- Purview information protection for labelling and protecting sensitive documents.
Premium was held at £16.90 when Basic and Standard rose in July 2026, which narrowed the gap. For businesses that handle client money or sensitive data — accountants, solicitors, healthcare — it is often the best value of the three, because buying those security tools separately costs more.
Which one should you choose?
- Choose Basic if your team works in the browser, on phones, or already has desktop Office.
- Choose Standard if people genuinely need desktop Excel, Word and Outlook, and you manage device security another way.
- Choose Premium if you handle sensitive data, need to manage company devices, or want conditional access — or if a cyber insurance or client questionnaire asks about any of those.
- Mix them. Licences are assigned per person, so a business can run Premium for the finance team and Basic for site staff.
Where hosted Exchange fits — honestly
If email and calendars are all you need, Business Basic is cheaper than our hosted Exchange mailbox, and includes a larger mailbox. We say that plainly because we sell both.
Businesses choose hosted Exchange instead for reasons other than price: UK-only hosting and UK-only support written into the contract, a named engineer on a direct phone number, mailbox administration in the SolidCP control panel, no annual commitment, and a like-for-like move off their own Exchange server with public folders and permissions intact. If none of those matter to you, Microsoft 365 is probably the better buy — and we will quote you for it.