Which Microsoft 365 licenses do you actually need?

There is no single answer for a whole organization, which is why this tool asks about your workforce split first. The honest general rule is: under 300 seats, Business Premium plus the Business Premium editions of the Defender and Purview suites covers almost everything E5 does for $37 per user per month against $60. Over 300 seats, Microsoft 365 E3 is the base and you add the Defender Suite, the Purview Suite, or both depending on what you are actually obliged to do. In both cases, anyone who does not need installed desktop Office should not be on a full knowledge-worker license at all.

Yes, and you almost certainly should. Microsoft explicitly supports combining Enterprise, Business, and standalone plans in a single tenant. The only hard constraint is that Business Basic, Business Standard, Business Premium, and Apps for business are capped at 300 provisioned licenses across the whole family combined, not 300 each. Above that you keep the 300 Business seats and license everyone else on E3, E5, F1, or F3 in the same tenant.

Not the enterprise versions. Since May 2025 Business Premium is no longer an eligible base plan for the $12 Microsoft Defender Suite or the $12 Microsoft Purview Suite, which now require Microsoft 365 E3, or Office 365 E3 with EMS E3. Business Premium instead has its own editions: Defender Suite for Business Premium at $10, Purview Suite for Business Premium at $10, or both together for $15, all capped at 300 seats. That makes Business Premium plus both suites $37 per user per month, not the $46 most comparisons still quote.

It depends entirely on whether you need conditional access. Business Basic is $7 and gives a 50 GB mailbox and 1 TB of OneDrive, but it does not include Entra ID P1, so those accounts cannot be covered by a conditional access policy. Microsoft 365 F3 is $10 and does include Entra ID P1 and Intune Plan 1, with a 2 GB mailbox. So if you have to be able to tell an insurer that conditional access applies to every account, F3 at $10 beats Business Basic at $7 plus Entra ID P1 at $7. If you do not, Business Basic is cheaper and gives a far bigger mailbox.

When you need three or more of the things only E5 bundles: Security Copilot, Intune Endpoint Privilege Management, Cloud PKI, Power BI Pro for a lot of people, and Teams Phone for a lot of people. Power BI and Teams Phone are the two most commonly missed. E5 is $60. E3 plus the Defender Suite is $51 and E3 plus both suites is $63, so the security and compliance stack alone does not justify E5 unless you need both suites. Add fifty Power BI Pro seats or fifty Teams Phone seats and the math flips.

No. This runs entirely in your browser, nothing is sent anywhere, and there is no email gate. If you want the version with your actual license counts and renewal date in it, send those over and we will come back with a written comparison.

Yes. We are a Microsoft partner and licensing is included in our managed IT bundles rather than billed as a separate line. That is also why this tool is built to recommend the cheapest correct answer rather than the largest one: if the honest answer is that you are already over-licensed, we would rather you heard it here.