As we’ve previously explained, one of the best parts of Microsoft Teams is that it comes with Office 365 at no additional cost. You may be wondering, though, which plan might be the best way to get your organization or company onboard with Teams. In this guide, we take a closer look at Office 365 plans which can bring the power of Teams to your employees for free.
For everyone — Teams Free tier
If paying for Office 365 isn’t an option for your organization, you can still enjoy Microsoft Teams. Microsoft recently introduced free tier of Teams, but it is limited in functionality. For instance, Teams Free has a maximum of 300 users, and file storage of 2GB per user, with 10GB of free storage. There’s also no support for scheduled meetings, phone calls and audio conferencing, and no access to administration tools for managing users, apps, and reporting usage statistics. With the free tier, you’ll also miss out on some integrations with Planner, Hub, and Microsoft’s other collaboration tools. You can learn more about the free tier of Microsoft Teams by clicking here.
For most — Office 365 Business Essentials and Business Premium
A few days ago, we dived into the differences between Business Essentials and Business Premium, but we’d like to remind you that both of these plans give free access to Microsoft Teams. The cheaper plan of the bunch is Office 365 Business Essentials. This comes in at the cost of at $5 per user with an annual commitment or $6 with a monthly commitment. It also comes with access to Microsoft Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, Planner, and Hub. Unfortunately, the plan only includes access to the web and mobile versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, so keep that in mind if you’re choosing this as a method of getting access Microsoft Teams.
The second, more expensive, option to getting Teams is with Office 365 Business Premium. This plan comes in at the cost of $12.50 user per month with an annual commitment or $15 per user per month with a monthly commitment. With this plan, you not only get Microsoft Teams, but also SharePoint, OneDrive, Exchange, as well as the option to install Office on all of your PCs, Macs, and phones.
For bigger organizations — Office 365 Enterprise
For larger organizations with more than 300 employees, Office 365 Enterprise would be the best way to get Microsoft Teams for free and to all employees. It is included with the E1, E3, E4, E5, and F1 plans. These plans are a bit more on the expensive side, but we’ve simplified things and listed pricing for each plan below. Keep in mind, though, that Office 365 Enterprise E4 has been retired, and is no longer available for purchase.
- Office 365 Enterprise F1: $4.00 per user, per month, annual commitment
- Office 365 Enterprise E1: $8.00 per user per month, annual commitment
- Office 365 Enterprise E3: $20.00 per user, per month, annual commitment
- Office 365 Enterprise E5: $35.00 per user, per month, annual commitment
The differences between each of these enterprise plans boil down to features. Enterprise F1 is the cheapest since it is more about “frontline” workers and access to online services and apps. On the other hand, Office Enterprise E1 is also reasonably affordable, as it includes all the Office 365 collaboration services, as well as additional controls for IT professionals. In the middle is Office 365 Enterprise E3, which includes the full Microsoft Office suite of applications, and access to additional Office 365 collaboration services. Finally, with Office 365 Enterprise E5, you get the best of the best, which is everything included in all the other plans, and additional advanced security and analytics features.
For education and developers
While Teams might be thought of as for businesses, Microsoft also offers Teams to both schools and developers for free under certain Office 365 plans. For those in education, Teams is included with the base Education, Education Plus, Education E3 (retired) and Education E5 plans. Some of these plans are free, but we won’t get into the paid plans due to the complexity of the bundles. If you’re interested in learning more, Microsoft explains the differences here. Finally, if you’re a developer and build productivity experiences, you can get Teams for free with Office 365 Developer, but you need to sign up for the program through Microsoft.
Teams is growing, and you could grow with it too
Putting things into perspective, Microsoft Teams is growing, and it is thanks to Office 365. Over 500,000 organizations have come on board with Teams since it was first introduced, and it at one point was deemed as overtaking Slack. So, how does your organization plan to use Teams to grow? Let us know in the comments below.