Microsoft teams pricing overview: Features, plans & costs breakdown

Microsoft Teams is the collaboration backbone for a ton of businesses, but let’s be real: trying to figure out its pricing can feel like you’ve been asked to solve a puzzle in the dark. With recent shake-ups, like unbundling the app from Microsoft 365 and launching new AI add-ons, it’s gotten even trickier. If you’re trying to land on the right plan without blowing your budget, you’re in the right spot.

This guide will walk you through the Microsoft Teams pricing, plans, and add-ons, minus the confusing jargon. We’ll cover everything from the bare-bones plans to the fancy AI extras. But picking the right plan is only the first step. The real win is making all the knowledge inside Teams easy for your people to find and use, which is something we’ll get to as well.

What is Microsoft Teams?

So, what is Microsoft Teams, really? Think of it as your company’s digital office. It’s where you chat with coworkers, jump into video meetings, share files, and plug in other apps. It’s the central spot where project updates happen, decisions are made, and your company’s most important internal knowledge gets stored every single day.

A breakdown of Microsoft Teams pricing plans

Microsoft slices its plans into a few main categories for Business, Enterprise, and Home users. The big change you need to know about is that you can now buy some plans with or without Teams bundled in, which gives you more choice.

Microsoft Teams pricing for business & enterprise plans at a glance

Let’s put all that side-by-side to make it a bit clearer. Here’s a quick comparison of the most common plans.

Plan	Price (per user/month, annual)	Target User	Max Meeting Participants	Storage Per User	Office Apps	Key Feature
Microsoft Teams Essentials	$4.00	Small businesses needing only Teams	300	10 GB	None	Standalone meeting & chat solution
Microsoft 365 Business Basic	$6.00	Businesses needing web apps	300	1 TB	Web & Mobile only	1 TB storage & custom email
Microsoft 365 Business Standard	$12.50	Businesses needing full Office suite	300	1 TB	Desktop, Web, & Mobile	Full Office desktop apps & webinars
Microsoft 365 E3 (with Teams)	~$39.00 ($33.75 + $5.25)	Large enterprises	1,000	1-5+ TB	Desktop, Web, & Mobile	Advanced security & compliance

Business plans: For small to medium-sized companies

This group of plans is made for organizations that need up to 300 user licenses. They scale up in features and perks, so you can pick the one that fits your team’s size and what you actually need to get done.

• Microsoft Teams Essentials: This is the no-frills, standalone Teams package. For $4.00 per user, per month (with an annual subscription), you get the core Teams experience. That includes unlimited group meetings for up to 30 hours, 300 participants, and 10 GB of cloud storage for each user. The catch is that it doesn’t come with the Office apps or any advanced security, so it’s best for businesses that just need a solid way to communicate.

• Microsoft 365 Business Basic: At $6.00 per user, per month, this plan packs in everything from Essentials and adds the web and mobile versions of Microsoft Office apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. You also get a much more generous 1 TB of storage per user, a custom business email, and access to other handy apps like Planner and Forms.

• Microsoft 365 Business Standard: For $12.50 per user, per month, this plan is a big step up. You get the full desktop versions of the Office apps on top of the web and mobile ones. It also adds features for hosting webinars, including attendee registration and reporting, plus video editing tools with Microsoft Clipchamp.

• Microsoft 365 Business Premium: Clocking in at $22.00 per user, per month, this is the top-tier plan for businesses. It includes everything in Business Standard plus a heavy-duty layer of security and device management. You get tools like Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Entra ID (what used to be Azure Active Directory) to help protect against cyberthreats and manage who can access what data.

Enterprise plans: For larger organizations

For companies with more than 300 people or those with serious security and compliance needs, the enterprise plans offer more muscle and control. With the new pricing, Teams is usually sold as a separate license that you tack onto a core Microsoft 365 plan.

• Microsoft Teams Enterprise: This is the new standalone Teams license for enterprise customers, priced at $5.25 per user, per month. Think of it as the building block you add to the bigger enterprise suites.

• Microsoft 365 F3 (Frontline): This plan is built specifically for frontline workers and costs $8.00 per user, per month (with Teams included). It gives essential communication and task management tools to employees who are always on the move or in service roles.

• Microsoft 365 E3 & E5 (no Teams): These are the main suites for large companies. Most organizations now buy an E3 or E5 license and then add the Teams Enterprise license. Microsoft 365 E3 costs $33.75 per user, per month and delivers advanced security and productivity tools. Microsoft 365 E5 is $54.75 per user, per month and throws in advanced analytics, voice capabilities, and even more sophisticated security features.

What about the free and home Microsoft Teams pricing plans?

Microsoft does have a free version of Teams, but it comes with some big catches: group meetings are cut off after 60 minutes, you can only have 100 people, and you get a tiny 5 GB of total storage. These limits make it a non-starter for most businesses or any kind of dedicated support team.

Navigating key add-ons for Microsoft Teams pricing: Teams premium and copilot

But wait, there’s more. The price on the box isn’t always the final cost. Microsoft offers some powerful AI add-ons that can seriously increase what you pay, but also what your team can do. It’s important to know what they are and if they’re worth it for you.

Microsoft Teams Premium: AI-powered meetings and webinars

Microsoft Teams Premium is an add-on that sprinkles AI over the core Teams experience to make meetings more useful. For $10 per user, per month, it gives you features like intelligent meeting recaps, AI-generated notes and action items, and real-time translation for captions. It also adds better webinar controls and security features like watermarking and meeting encryption.

It’s great for making meetings less of a drag, but the thing to remember about Premium is that it’s laser-focused on the meeting itself (before, during, and after). It doesn’t help with the bigger problem of finding information across all your company’s channels, documents, and other systems when you need it.

Microsoft 365 Copilot: The enterprise-wide AI assistant

Microsoft 365 Copilot is a much bigger, more powerful AI assistant that plugs into the whole Microsoft 365 world, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. For a steep $30 per user, per month (on top of a qualifying plan), it can summarize long chat threads, draft documents from a simple prompt, build presentations from a Word file, and analyze data in Excel.

Copilot is an amazing personal productivity booster. However, it’s more of a personal assistant than a company librarian. For a support agent or an employee who needs one correct answer to a specific question right now, Copilot’s broad reach can make it slower or less direct than a tool built for that exact job.

The hidden cost: Untapped internal knowledge

Here’s a problem you’ve probably seen a dozen times: you pay for this platform where thousands of conversations, decisions, and files are created every day. But how do you actually use all that knowledge after the fact?

This creates some familiar headaches. Employees end up asking the same questions over and over because finding the original answer is impossible. Support agents waste time digging through endless chat histories and scattered files to find a straight answer. Important information gets buried just moments after it’s shared, forcing people to constantly reinvent the wheel.

This "knowledge gap" is a massive hidden cost. It burns time, leads to inconsistent answers, and leaves both your employees and customers frustrated. The search bar inside Teams is often too broad and clunky to pinpoint the exact piece of info you need in the moment.

How eesel AI enhances your Microsoft Teams investment

That’s exactly the problem tools like eesel AI are built to solve. Think of it as a smart brain that plugs into your setup to unlock the value of your company’s knowledge, right inside Microsoft Teams.

The AI Internal Chat from eesel AI is an assistant that your employees can ask questions and get instant, accurate answers from. It turns your Teams environment from just a place to talk into a self-service knowledge hub.

Here’s what makes it different:

• Connects to all your knowledge: It doesn’t just look at Teams. It learns from your official knowledge sources like Confluence, Google Docs, your help center, and even past support tickets. This pulls everything into a single source of truth.

• Works where you work: Employees get answers without having to leave the Microsoft Teams interface. That means less toggling between apps and faster solutions.

• A layer, not a replacement: eesel AI works on top of your existing Microsoft Teams setup. You don’t have to migrate anything. It just makes the investment you’ve already made in Teams a whole lot smarter.

Pro Tip: With eesel AI’s multi-bot setup, you can create separate, specialized bots for different departments. For instance, you could have an IT bot in your #it-help channel that’s trained only on IT docs, and a separate HR bot in the #hr-questions channel that only uses the employee handbook for its answers.

Making the right choice for your budget and needs

Picking a Teams plan isn’t just about comparing monthly fees. You also have to think about the add-ons, the unbundling of Office apps, and what your team actually needs to stay productive. A cheaper plan might look good upfront, but it can end up costing more in wasted time and frustration if it doesn’t truly fit your workflow.

That’s where eesel AI can help. By turning your Teams channels into a reliable source of answers, you make it easier for everyone to find the information they need and work smarter, not just harder. You can see the difference for yourself. Start a free trial or book a demo today.