Differences between Office 365
Business Basic and Office 365 Enterprise E1

Business Basic and Enterprise E1

Microsoft 365 Business Basic

Office 365 Enterprise E1

Suitable for User Size

<300 users

>300 users

Pricing

US$5

US$8

Microsoft Video

Exchange Online

Skype for Business

Office Application

OneDrive for Business

Yammer

Enterprise

Enterprise

Sharepoint Online

Power BI

Azure Rights Management (RMS)

Delve Analytics

Advanced eDiscovery

Differences between Business Basic and Enterprise E1

Scalability Limits

With the Business Basic plan, you may run into a couple of major scalability issues as an enterprise organization. First, you will only be allowed to license up to 300 users, so if you have more than that currently or plan to soon, you’ll need to ditch the Basic options. In addition, if you plan on scaling SharePoint extensively, with the Microsoft 365 Basic plans you will only be allotted up to 20 website collections, while with an Microsoft Office 365 E1 subscription you can have up to 500K website collections. Essentially, you will need to plan for scalability very carefully if you choose Microsoft 365 Business Basic.

Examples for Comparison

In a business of less than 300 users for the foreseeable future, the Business Basic plan is priced competitively and has a strong feature set for web content management. Unless your organization, in this scenario plans on scaling SharePoint Online beyond its basic capabilities or taking full advantage of the enterprise management capabilities included in E1, although limited compared to the other Enterprise plan options, you will be better off choosing Business Basic for your organization.

In a business of more than 300 users, the Microsoft 365 Business Basic plan is no longer an option for your organization; however the Microsoft Office 365 E1 plan still has a strong feature set in comparison to outside competitors at the same price point. However, if you desire additional capabilities beyond enhancing SharePoint, you may want to look into the Office 365 E3 and E5 plans as well.

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