Office 365 Office Plans mainly offers 3 variants – Office 365 Professional, Office 365 Professional Essentials and Office 365 Professional Premium. Each of these editions provides something different depending on your needs. In this article, we will compare the plans so that you can choose the one that suits you best –
- Office 365 Enterprise
- Essentials for Office 365 Enterprises
- Office 365 Professional Premium.
Office 365 Business vs. Business Essentials vs. Business Premium
If you use Office 365 licensed as a monthly or annual subscription, you benefit from powerful services, such as e-mail solutions, online storage, and professional-quality team work, to which you can access from anywhere. But when it comes to choosing between different editions, we are confused. Do not worry, we are here to simplify your life.
This breakdown will help you determine which edition of Office 365 Professional is best: Office 365 Professional, Office 365 Professional Essentials, or Office 365 Professional Premium.
1) Essentials for Office 365 Enterprises
This edition of Office 365 only offers online services such as OneDrive for Business, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and Exchange Online. It does not provide access to any of the most common and used desktop applications, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.).
Since it does not run any Office Desktop application, Office 365 Business Essentials can support online meetings and video conferences up to 250 people.
Businesses that want to manage email, cloud storage, and a pocket-friendly option will find Office 365 Business Essentials the best choice.
2) Office 365 Professional Premium
Unlike its brother, Office 365 Business Premium runs all online services and desktop applications. It is best suited to larger organizations with more than 300 employees.
An Office 365 Business Premium license covers fully installed and up-to-date Office applications on 5 phones, 5 tablets and 5 PCs or Macs per user. Like Office 365 Business Essentials, you can create team sites to share information, content, and files on your intranet with SharePoint Help in Office 365 Business Premium.
In addition to these differences, Office 365 Business Premium and Office 365 Business Essentials have fundamental similarities, such as:
- Email hosting with 50GB mailbox and custom email domain address
- Storage and file sharing with 1 TB of OneDrive storage
- Hub for team work to connect your teams to Microsoft teams (this feature is not available in the Office 365 Business version)
- 24/7 web and telephone support
3) Office 365 Enterprise
If you want a fully installed and always up-to-date version of Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint for Windows, or Mac (plus Access and Publisher for PC only), obtain Office 365 Professional. Each user can install Office applications on up to 5 PCs or Macs. Compared to Office 365 Business Premium and Office 365 Business Essentials, many features are truncated in Office 365 Business. For example,
- You can not use your own custom domain name (for example, [email protected])
- No ability to receive professional email on phones, tablets, desktops and the web with Exchange
- You do not have an option to manage your calendar, share available meeting times, schedule meetings, and receive reminders.
- Can not schedule meetings and easily respond to invitations for shared calendars
If the above limitations of Office 365 Professional bother you, its Premium and Enterprise versions offer you more advanced feature sets and better facilities than Home and Personal Editions. For example, if your organization is using desktop applications more, Office 365 Business Essentials is the right choice for you. On the other hand, if employees do not see the inconvenience of using online applications, then Office 365 Business Essentials appears as a truly cost-effective solution.