Exchange Online Plan 1 or Microsoft 365 Business Basic: which do you need?

Exchange Online Plan 1 gives you business email, calendar and contacts, and nothing else. Microsoft 365 Business Basic gives you all of that plus Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive and the web versions of the Office apps, for a modest amount more. For nearly every business, Basic is the better buy.

The comparison is worth making carefully because Plan 1 looks like a saving and usually is not. The difference per user per month is small; the difference in what people can do is large. A business on Plan 1 has email and no sanctioned way to share a file, run a meeting or store a document, which means staff will invent one, and the inventions are personal Dropbox accounts, email attachments as version control and WhatsApp for anything urgent. That is not a saving, it is a governance problem with a small monthly discount attached.

Where Plan 1 genuinely fits is narrow and real: a role that needs a mailbox on your domain and nothing more. A generic address the accounting system sends from. A frontline worker who receives rosters. A contractor who needs to be reachable at your domain for a few months. Licensing those at the full collaboration tier is waste, and mixing plans within one tenant is supported and sensible when it is a deliberate decision rather than an accident.

One thing neither plan includes, and it catches people at both tiers: neither has the desktop Office applications, which start at Business Standard, and neither includes the security and device management tooling, which is Business Premium. If your search is really which plan should we be on, the answer for most Australian businesses handling client data is further up the ladder than either of these. If you want the mix mapped against what your people actually do, call 1800 456 567.