Key Takeaways
If you only have a minute, here’s where the decision usually lands:
- The real difference is desktop Office. Basic gives you web and mobile Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint. Standard installs the full desktop apps on up to five PCs or Macs per user. Teams, Exchange, SharePoint and OneDrive are in both.
- Prices went up on July 1, 2026. Basic is now $7 per user per month and Standard is $14, both on annual commitment. Premium stayed at $22.
- The core Dynamics 365 integrations work on Basic. The Business Central and Sales add-ins run in Outlook on the web, the Business Central app for Teams works on any business plan, and Edit in Excel works in Excel for the web.
- Standard earns its price with a few specific jobs. Editing Business Central Word report layouts, heavy Excel work against ERP data, offline file editing and Access all need desktop apps.
- Neither Basic nor Standard includes device management, Conditional Access or endpoint protection. Intune, Defender for Business and Entra ID P1 (Conditional Access) are Premium-only, and buying them separately on Standard costs more than the $8 jump to Premium.
- Mix tiers. Most Dynamics 365 shops end up with Basic for frontline and occasional users, Standard for finance and operations, and Premium for anyone whose device or sign-in you need to control.
Introduction
If you’re rolling out Dynamics 365, the Microsoft 365 question usually arrives late and in a hurry. Someone needs mailboxes and Teams for the new users, procurement wants one number, and the choice gets made on price: Basic is half the cost of Standard, so Basic it is. Six months later finance is asking why they can’t edit a report layout and the warehouse lead wants to know why Excel keeps opening in a browser tab.
The plans aren’t complicated, but the way they interact with Business Central, Sales and Customer Service isn’t obvious from Microsoft’s comparison page. This guide walks through what each plan includes, what the tier changes for Dynamics 365 users specifically, what the real cost looks like once the add-ons arrive, and a straightforward way to decide who needs which plan. We’ll also cover when the honest answer is neither Basic nor Standard but Premium.
What Each Plan Includes
Start with the plain inventory, because most of the confusion comes from assuming Basic is a stripped-down version of everything. It isn’t. The cloud services are nearly identical; the gap is the software on the device. Prices and inclusions below are from Microsoft’s business plan comparison, verified on October 20, 2026. They’re US list prices on annual commitment, before tax, and your CSP or partner agreement may differ.
| Area | Business Basic | Business Standard | Business Premium |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price (per user per month, annual, from July 1, 2026) | $7 | $14 | $22 |
| Office apps | Web and mobile only | Desktop apps on up to 5 PCs or Macs per user, plus web and mobile | Same as Standard |
| Teams | Included (a no-Teams version is also sold) | Included, plus webinars | Included, plus webinars |
| Exchange mailbox | 100 GB, 50 GB archive | 100 GB, 50 GB archive | 100 GB, up to 1.5 TB archive |
| OneDrive | 1 TB per user | 1 TB per user | 1 TB per user |
| SharePoint | Plan 1 | Plan 1 | Plan 1 |
| Loop, Clipchamp, Bookings | Limited | Included | Included |
| Access | No | Access (PC only) | Access (PC only) |
| Copilot Chat | Included; Copilot grounded in your work data needs the Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on (see the add-on table below) | Included; Copilot grounded in your work data needs the Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on (see the add-on table below) | Included; Copilot grounded in your work data needs the Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on (see the add-on table below) |
| Email security | Exchange Online Protection (anti-spam, anti-malware, basic anti-phishing), plus URL time-of-click protection added June 2026 | Same as Basic | Defender for Office 365 Plan 1: Safe Links, Safe Attachments, anti-phishing |
| Device management | None | None | Intune Plan 1 |
| Endpoint protection | None | None | Defender for Business |
| Identity | Entra ID Free, security defaults and MFA | Same as Basic | Entra ID P1 with Conditional Access |
| Data protection | None | None | Purview DLP and sensitivity labels |
| Max users (all business plans combined, per tenant) | 300 | 300 | 300 |
Three things in that table deserve a second look. First, Basic, Standard and Premium all carry the same Power Platform rights: the seeded Power Apps and Power Automate licenses that cover standard connectors and Dataverse for Teams. Upgrading from Basic to Standard doesn’t buy you premium connectors or a full Dataverse environment; those come from your Dynamics 365 licenses or from standalone Power Platform plans. Second, the security rows are empty for both Basic and Standard. Both include MFA, security defaults and Exchange Online Protection, but neither has device management, Conditional Access, endpoint protection or data loss prevention. Standard is a productivity upgrade, not a security upgrade. Third, Publisher is gone: Microsoft removed it from Microsoft 365 on October 1, 2026, so if anyone still depends on it, that’s a migration to plan, not a licensing choice.
With the inventory clear, the useful question is what each of those lines actually changes when the user’s day job runs through Dynamics 365.
What the Tier Changes for Dynamics 365 Users
Dynamics 365 leans on Microsoft 365 in four places: Teams, Outlook, SharePoint and OneDrive, and Office itself. Here’s how each one behaves on Basic versus Standard, because the answer is more favorable to Basic than most people expect, with a few sharp exceptions.
Teams Works the Same on Every Plan
The Business Central app for Teams, the Dynamics 365 app for Teams and record sharing into channels all work on Basic. One detail worth knowing: Microsoft’s access with Microsoft 365 licenses feature lets any user on Business Basic, Standard or Premium view Business Central records inside Teams without a Business Central license. It’s read-only and Teams-only, but for a warehouse supervisor who needs to look up an item or a customer, it can replace a Team Member license entirely. That works identically on Basic, so it’s never a reason to pay for Standard.
Outlook Add-ins Work in the Browser and on Desktop
The Business Central Outlook add-in and the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook both run on the modern Office add-in framework, which means they work in Outlook on the web as well as the desktop app. A sales rep on Basic can see a contact’s opportunities and log an email to Sales from the browser. What Basic users give up is the desktop Outlook experience itself: offline access to the mailbox, shared mailbox handling that some teams rely on, and the muscle memory most finance and sales people have built up over years. That’s a productivity argument, not a compatibility one.
SharePoint and OneDrive Are Identical, With One Catch
Business Central’s document integration, where attachments and the Edit in Excel workbook live in OneDrive and SharePoint, uses SharePoint Plan 1 and the 1 TB OneDrive that every business plan includes. Storage, sharing and co-authoring are the same on Basic and Standard. The catch is what happens when a user opens the file. On Basic it opens in Word or Excel for the web. For a quick look at a posted invoice, that’s fine. For a month-end workbook with external links, macros or Power Query, it isn’t.
Office Apps Are the Real Difference
This is the real dividing line, and for Business Central users it shows up in two specific jobs.
Edit in Excel, the feature that lets users pull a list out of Business Central, change it and publish it back, works in Excel for the web as well as desktop Excel on Windows, so Basic users aren’t locked out. But the web version caps the workbook at 100 columns when OneDrive handles the file, and anything involving Power Query, pivot caches, VBA or large journals is desktop work. If your accountants post journals or reconcile through Excel, they’ll hit that wall in the first month.
Word report layouts are the harder stop. Customizing an invoice, statement or purchase order layout in Business Central means adding fields through the XML Mapping pane on Word’s Developer tab, or through the Business Central Word add-in. Word for the web has neither. Anyone who owns document layouts needs desktop Word, which means Standard. Our walkthrough on designing custom report layouts in Business Central shows exactly what that work looks like.
Power Platform Rights Don’t Change Between Tiers
Basic and Standard carry the same seeded Power Apps and Power Automate rights, limited to standard connectors and Dataverse for Teams. The flows and apps that touch Dynamics 365 data use the Dataverse connector, which is premium, and the right to use it comes from the user’s Dynamics 365 license, not from Microsoft 365. So a Sales Professional user on Basic can run a Dataverse flow; a Standard user with no Dynamics 365 license can’t. If someone is telling you to upgrade to Standard for Power Platform reasons, ask them which entitlement they mean.
The short version: Teams, SharePoint and Power Platform are tier-neutral, Outlook is a comfort issue, and Office is the deciding factor. Before turning that into a decision table, it’s worth looking at what each plan really costs once the first year is behind you.
List Price vs Real Total Cost
The list prices are $7 and $14, and on a 50-user tenant the difference is $4,200 a year. That number is real, but it’s rarely the number that ends up on the invoice twelve months later, because the first year of a Dynamics 365 rollout is when the add-ons show up. Everything in this section is a list-price model: it leaves out your Dynamics 365 licenses, tax, CSP discounts and implementation, and it’s meant to show the shape of the cost rather than your exact bill.
The July 2026 increase
Microsoft’s official licensing notice raised prices on July 1, 2026: Basic went from $6 to $7, Standard from $12.50 to $14, and Premium stayed at $22. The same update added 50 GB of mailbox storage and URL time-of-click protection to Basic and Standard, plus Copilot Chat improvements across all three. Monthly-commitment subscriptions carry a premium on top, roughly 5% for annual plans billed monthly and about 20% for true month-to-month. If your renewal is in the next few months and you’re still on old pricing, that’s worth a conversation before it lapses.
The add-ons that arrive later
These are the ones that show up on Basic and Standard tenants running Dynamics 365, roughly in the order they tend to appear:
| Add-on | Why it comes up | List price per user per month |
|---|---|---|
| Intune Plan 1 | Someone wants to require a compliant device before a user opens Business Central or Sales on a phone | $8 |
| Entra ID P1 | Conditional Access: block sign-ins from outside the country, require MFA for Dynamics 365 only, limit legacy auth | $7 |
| Defender for Business | A ransomware scare, a cyber-insurance questionnaire, or an auditor asking about endpoint detection | $3 |
| Defender for Office 365 Plan 1 | Safe Links and Safe Attachments after a phishing email lands in a finance inbox | About $2; included in Premium |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot (Business) | Copilot in Word, Excel and Outlook grounded in company data. Copilot Chat is free on every plan; the paid add-on is $21, or $23.50 bundled with Standard and $32 bundled with Premium | $21 |
| Backup | No business plan includes backup of Exchange, SharePoint or OneDrive. Third-party backup is a separate line | Varies |
The three security add-ons alone, Intune, Entra P1 and Defender for Business, add $18 to a Standard seat. Premium is $8 more than Standard and includes all three plus Defender for Office 365 and Purview. That arithmetic is why Premium is usually the better buy for anyone whose device or identity you need to control, which we’ll come back to.
A realistic 50-user picture
Take a 50-person company running Business Central with 15 finance and operations users, 25 sales and service users, and 10 warehouse and field staff. Put everyone on Basic and it’s $4,200 a year. Put everyone on Standard and it’s $8,400. In practice the mix that holds up looks more like 20 Standard, 20 Basic and 10 Premium, which comes to $7,680, less than putting everyone on Standard, and it stops the add-on creep because the people who need security controls already have them. The point isn’t the exact number. It’s that the per-user list price is the wrong thing to optimize.
Which brings us to the practical question: for a given user, which plan do they need?
Which Users Need Which Plan
The cleanest way to assign plans is by what a person does in a normal week, not by their job title. Go through your user list with these three groups in mind and most of it sorts itself out.
Users who only need Basic
If someone looks up Business Central records in Teams and never posts anything, Basic covers them, and the read-only Teams access may mean they don’t need a Business Central license either. Inside sales and service users who log emails and check opportunities from Outlook are fine too, because the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook runs in Outlook on the web. Shared mailboxes, kiosks and service accounts belong here as well, or on an Exchange-only plan if they don’t need Teams.
Users who need Standard
The moment a user posts journals or reconciles through Edit in Excel, they’ll want desktop Excel, because the web version caps the export at 100 columns and can’t run Power Query, pivots or macros. Anyone who owns invoice, statement or purchase order layouts needs desktop Word, since Word for the web has no Developer tab or XML Mapping pane. Add people who edit documents offline on site or in the field, anyone who depends on Access, and anyone who runs webinars, and you have your Standard list. Outside reps who simply prefer desktop Outlook can go either way; it’s a comfort call, not a technical one.
Users who need Premium
If a user opens Dynamics 365 on a personal phone or an unmanaged laptop, you need Intune and Conditional Access, and both are Premium-only. If they handle payments, payroll or customer data, Purview DLP, Defender for Business and Safe Links are the difference between a near miss and an incident. And if you need to stop sign-ins from outside the country, that’s Conditional Access again, which means Entra ID P1.
In practice that sorts most Dynamics 365 tenants the same way. Warehouse, field and shop-floor users land on Basic. Finance and operations land on Standard, and the ones who touch report layouts have no choice. Sales splits down the middle, and anyone whose device or sign-in you need to govern moves up to Premium regardless of what they do in Office.
Two cases the business plans don’t cover
Frontline staff may not need a business plan at all. Microsoft 365 F1 (about $3) and F3 (about $10, list prices that vary by channel) are built for shift workers: Teams, read-only or web Office, a small or kiosk mailbox, and, in F3, Intune and Conditional Access. They’re restricted to frontline roles under Microsoft’s terms. Microsoft’s access with Microsoft 365 licenses page includes Microsoft 365 F1 and F3 in its list of eligible licenses, so Business Central’s read-only Teams access works on them; it’s in the eligibility list rather than the headline, so look for it there. For a warehouse crew that never opens a mailbox, F1 or F3 can be the better fit.
The other limit is the 300-user ceiling, and it’s often misread. The cap is 300 users per tenant across Basic, Standard and Premium combined. You can mix tiers inside that 300, but you can’t run 300 of each. Microsoft’s older guidance was sometimes read as 300 per plan, which is why that version still circulates, but the current licensing terms enforce a combined tenant cap. Past it, the path is the enterprise plans. Microsoft 365 E3 at $39 and E5 at $60 after the July 2026 increase remove the cap and bring the full security stack: Intune, Defender for Endpoint and Conditional Access. Office 365 E3 at $26 also removes the cap and adds enterprise compliance, but not that security layer. Enterprise plans are usually bought through a volume licensing agreement with its own minimums and channel, so if you’re within a year of 300 users, plan the transition with your partner now rather than mixing business and enterprise SKUs by accident.
If you’d rather not assign plans by hand, that’s what a licensing audit does. Before that, it helps to know the moments when a Basic tenant usually discovers it’s outgrown the plan.
Common Upgrade Triggers in the First Year
Almost nobody upgrades from Basic because of a planning exercise. They upgrade because something specific stops working the way a user expects, usually in the second half of the first year, once the rollout is over and people are using the system in anger. These are the ones we see most.
Finance needs desktop Excel
The first month-end goes fine in Excel for the web. By the third, someone has built a reconciliation workbook with Power Query pulling from Business Central’s API, a pivot across three companies and a macro that formats the output. Excel for the web won’t run it, and the Edit in Excel export is capped at 100 columns in the browser. The finance team asks for desktop Excel, and that’s a Standard license.
Someone needs to change an invoice layout
A customer asks for a PO number on the invoice, or the company rebrands. The person who owns layouts opens the Word template on Basic and finds there’s no Developer tab and no XML Mapping pane. This one isn’t a preference; it’s a hard stop, and it tends to arrive at the least convenient moment.
Sales asks for desktop Outlook
Outside reps and account managers live in email. Outlook on the web with the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook does the job, but after a few months of working from client sites with patchy connections, the requests for the desktop app start. It’s rarely framed as a licensing question, which is why it catches IT by surprise.
Document workflows outgrow web Office
Business Central document attachments, contracts in SharePoint and quotes generated from Sales all open in web Office on Basic. That’s fine until the documents get complex: tracked changes across a long contract, mail merges, embedded objects. Teams that handle a high volume of customer-facing documents tend to want desktop Word within the year.
An audit or an insurer asks about device control
This is the trigger that doesn’t lead to Standard at all. A cyber-insurance renewal, a customer security questionnaire or an internal audit asks how you control which devices can open Dynamics 365. The answer on Basic and Standard is “we don’t, beyond MFA,” and the fix is Intune and Conditional Access, which means Premium.
If you can see two or three of these coming for a given group of users, license them for it now. Moving users up a tier mid-term is usually possible, but how it’s prorated depends on your agreement and channel, and it’s always cleaner to license the right tier from the start. And that last trigger deserves its own section, because it’s the one where the Basic-versus-Standard framing stops being useful.
When Business Premium Is the Right Answer
The Basic-versus-Standard decision is about productivity. Premium is about control, and for a company running its finances and customer data in Dynamics 365, that’s often the decision that matters more. Premium costs $8 more than Standard and includes everything Standard has plus the security and management layer. It also closes several of the gaps we cover in mistakes to avoid when setting up security in Dynamics 365. Here’s when it’s the right call.
You need to control which devices reach Dynamics 365
Business Central and Sales are browser apps with mobile apps. Without Intune, any device with a valid password and MFA can open them, including a personal phone or a home laptop. Intune Plan 1 lets you require a compliant, managed device before the app opens, wipe company data from a lost phone without touching personal data, and push the Business Central and Dynamics 365 mobile apps to managed devices. If an auditor or insurer has asked about this, Premium is the shortest route.
You need Conditional Access
Conditional Access is the Entra ID feature that lets you say “finance users can only sign in from managed devices in these countries” or “require MFA for Dynamics 365 even if we don’t require it for Teams.” It needs Entra ID P1, which Basic and Standard don’t include; they get security defaults, which is a single tenant-wide MFA setting. Buying Entra ID P1 separately is $7 a user, which is most of the gap to Premium on its own.
Finance handles payments, payroll or customer data
Purview’s Data Loss Prevention and sensitivity labels can stop a bank file, a payroll export or a customer list from being emailed outside the company, and Defender for Office 365 Plan 1 adds Safe Links and Safe Attachments to the mailboxes most likely to be targeted by invoice fraud. Finance teams on Dynamics 365 are exactly the users phishing campaigns go after, and Standard gives them only Exchange Online Protection.
The add-ons cost more than the upgrade
Intune Plan 1 at $8, Entra ID P1 at $7 and Defender for Business at $3 add up to $18 on top of a $14 Standard seat, which is $32. Premium is $22. If you need any two of the three, Premium is cheaper, and it adds the email and data protection you’d otherwise go without.
Where Premium isn’t the answer is the obvious case: users who don’t need desktop Office and whose devices you don’t need to manage. A warehouse user on a shared, company-owned terminal who reads Business Central records in Teams doesn’t need $22 of licensing. The useful pattern for most Dynamics 365 tenants is three tiers, assigned by role, which is also the thing most tenants have never actually sat down and done.
Get a Free Microsoft 365 + Dynamics 365 Licensing Audit
Most tenants we look at are paying for the wrong mix: Standard seats for users who only open Teams, Basic seats for accountants who fight Excel for the web every month-end, and security add-ons stacked on Standard that would have been cheaper as Premium. Add in Dynamics 365 licenses that could be Team Member or read-only Teams access, and the overspend is usually a meaningful number.
Folio3’s licensing audit goes through your Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 assignments together, maps each user to the plan their work actually needs, and gives you a before-and-after cost with the July 2026 pricing applied. There’s no charge and no obligation, and if your current mix is right, we’ll tell you that too.
Book your free licensing audit with the Folio3 Dynamics team.
Folio3 is a Microsoft Dynamics 365 partner implementing and supporting Business Central, Sales and the wider Dynamics 365 suite for SMB and mid-market companies.
Frequently Asked Questions
Still weighing it up? These are the questions that come up most when Dynamics 365 customers compare the two plans.
What is the difference between Microsoft 365 Business Basic and Business Standard?
Standard includes the desktop Office apps, installable on up to five PCs or Macs per user, plus webinars, Loop and Clipchamp. Basic gives you the same Teams, Exchange, SharePoint and OneDrive with web and mobile Office only. Since July 1, 2026, Basic is $7 per user per month and Standard is $14, on annual commitment.
Does Dynamics 365 Business Central work with Microsoft 365 Business Basic?
Yes. The Business Central web client, the Teams app, the Outlook add-in and Edit in Excel all work on Basic, because the Outlook add-in runs in Outlook on the web and Edit in Excel runs in Excel for the web. What Basic users can’t do is edit Word report layouts or run heavy Excel workbooks, since both need desktop apps.
Which Microsoft 365 plan do Dynamics 365 Sales users need?
The Dynamics 365 App for Outlook works in Outlook on the web, so inside sales users can run on Basic. Outside reps who work offline or want the desktop Outlook experience are better on Standard. Neither plan is required by the Sales license itself; Dynamics 365 Sales includes its own Dataverse and Power Platform rights.
Do I need Business Standard for Power Apps or Power Automate?
No. Basic, Standard and Premium carry the same seeded Power Apps and Power Automate rights: standard connectors and Dataverse for Teams. The right to use the Dataverse connector with Dynamics 365 data comes from the user’s Dynamics 365 license, so upgrading Microsoft 365 doesn’t change it.
Can Business Basic users see Business Central data without a Business Central license?
Yes, inside Teams. Microsoft’s access-with-Microsoft-365-licenses feature lets users on any business plan view Business Central records in the Teams app, read-only, provided at least one other user in the tenant has a full Business Central license. It doesn’t cover the web client or mobile apps.
Is Business Premium worth it over Standard for Dynamics 365 users?
For any user whose device or sign-in you need to control, yes. Premium is $8 more than Standard and includes Intune, Entra ID P1 with Conditional Access, Defender for Business, Defender for Office 365 Plan 1 and Purview. Buying Intune, Entra P1 and Defender for Business separately on Standard costs $18 per user, so Premium is cheaper as soon as you need two of them.
Can I mix Basic, Standard and Premium in one tenant?
Yes, and most Dynamics 365 tenants should. Assign plans by what each user does: Basic for Teams-and-email users, Standard for finance, operations and document owners, Premium for anyone handling payments or signing in from unmanaged devices. The one constraint is the 300-user cap, which applies to all three business plans combined per tenant; beyond that you move to the enterprise plans.
If your question isn’t here, bring it to the licensing audit.
