Microsoft Teams Pricing 2025: A Simple Guide to Every Plan

Let's be real for a second: trying to figure out Microsoft Teams pricing can feel like a full-time job. It was already a bit of a maze, but now that Microsoft has unbundled Teams from its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 suites, things have gotten even trickier. You're probably staring at the screen wondering which plan you actually need, what’s included, and how much it’s really going to set you back each month.

You're in the right place. This guide is here to be your translator. We're going to walk through every plan, add-on, and potential "gotcha" cost, without the corporate jargon. The goal is simple: to give you the clarity you need to pick the right plan for your business.

We’ll also touch on a common side effect of everyone using Teams. It’s a fantastic hub for collaboration, but it can also become a black hole where your company's most valuable information gets lost in endless chats and channels.

Understanding Microsoft Teams

At its heart, Microsoft Teams is a communication and collaboration app that acts as the central nervous system for the Microsoft 365 world. Think of it as your company's digital office building. It's where you can send quick messages, hop on video calls, share files, and plug in other apps you use daily.

It was built to be the main hub for teamwork, which is why it exploded in popularity as companies shifted to remote and hybrid work. Its biggest claim to fame has always been how smoothly it works with the classic Office apps we all know, like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. That’s all still true, but getting everything to play nicely together now involves navigating a much more complicated price list.

A screenshot of the main Microsoft Teams dashboard, which is central to understanding the platform before looking into Microsoft Teams pricing.

A breakdown of Microsoft Teams pricing plans

Microsoft basically splits its pricing into two main categories: Home and Business. Each one is a different world with its own features, rules, and price tags. Let’s dig into what you get with each, so you can figure out what makes sense for you.

Microsoft Teams pricing: Home plans

First up are the Home plans. As you can probably guess, these are designed for personal use, families, or maybe a tiny, informal group project. They’re perfectly fine for chatting with friends or organizing a family reunion, but they’re missing the security, admin controls, and support that any serious business needs.

Here’s a quick glance at how they stack up:

Feature	Microsoft Teams (Free)	Microsoft 365 Personal	Microsoft 365 Family
Price	$0	$6.99/month	$9.99/month
Users	1	1	Up to 6
Group Meeting Limit	60 minutes	30 hours	30 hours
Participant Capacity	100	300	300
Cloud Storage	5 GB per user	1 TB per user	Up to 6 TB total (1 TB per person)
Core Office Apps	Web versions only	Premium web, mobile & desktop apps	Premium web, mobile & desktop apps
Support	Community forums	Ongoing technical support	Ongoing technical support

Microsoft Teams pricing: Business plans

Alright, this is where things get a bit more complicated. For businesses, you can now buy Microsoft 365 plans that come with Teams, or you can buy them without it. If you go for a plan that doesn't include Teams, you have to add a separate license called "Microsoft Teams Enterprise." That little add-on will cost you an extra $5.25 per user, every month.

It’s an extra hoop to jump through and an extra line item on your invoice. Let’s look at how the main business plans compare:

Plan	Price with Teams (Annual)	Price without Teams (Annual)	Key Features	Who It's For
Microsoft Teams Essentials	$4.00/user/month	N/A (Standalone)	Unlimited 30-hour meetings for up to 300 people, 10 GB of storage per user, and meeting recordings. No Office apps included.	Small businesses that just need a solid, professional video meeting tool without paying for the whole Microsoft suite.
Microsoft 365 Business Basic	$6.00/user/month	$4.75/user/month	Everything in Essentials, plus web and mobile versions of Office apps, 1 TB of cloud storage per user, custom business email, SharePoint, and Exchange.	Businesses that live in the cloud and run on web and mobile apps. Perfect if you need that professional email address and serious cloud storage.
Microsoft 365 Business Standard	$12.50/user/month	$10.25/user/month	Everything in Basic, plus the full desktop versions of Office apps you can install, webinar hosting features, and collaborative tools like Microsoft Loop.	Companies that want the best of both worlds: the full power of desktop Office apps combined with top-tier collaboration tools.
Microsoft 365 Business Premium	$22.00/user/month	$19.75/user/month	Everything in Standard, plus heavy-duty security from Microsoft Defender, advanced data controls, and cyberthreat protection.	Businesses that handle sensitive information and can't afford to mess around with security and device management.

Microsoft Teams pricing: Enterprise plans

For larger organizations, the rules change again. Microsoft now basically requires you to buy your Microsoft 365 suite and your Teams license separately. The all-in-one Enterprise plan with Teams included is a thing of the past.

You'll need to pick an enterprise suite and then bolt on the Teams license. Here are the common combinations:

• Office 365 E1 (no Teams): $7.75 per user/month

• Microsoft 365 E3 (no Teams): $33.75 per user/month

• Microsoft 365 E5 (no Teams): $54.75 per user/month

• And the required add-on: Microsoft Teams Enterprise license: $5.25 per user/month

So, if you were eyeing the E3 plan, your actual cost per user would be $33.75 plus $5.25, for a grand total of $39.00 per month.

The hidden costs: Add-ons

Many of the coolest and most useful features in Teams, especially the AI tools and phone services, are tucked away behind extra paid add-ons.

Microsoft Teams Premium

What it is: Teams Premium is an upgrade that injects a bunch of AI smarts and other advanced features into your meetings.

What you get: It gives you intelligent meeting recaps (so you can skip watching the whole recording), AI-generated notes and action items, live translated captions for over 40 languages, and extra security controls for when you're discussing top-secret stuff.

The cost: It's an extra $10 per user per month. And that’s on top of whatever plan you're already paying for that includes the basic Teams license. It's an easy way for your monthly bill to start creeping up without you noticing.

A screenshot of the AI-generated notes from a meeting recording, a key feature that affects Microsoft Teams pricing through the Teams Premium add-on.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

What it is: This is Microsoft's big, flashy generative AI assistant. It doesn't just work in Teams; it’s designed to pop up and help you across the entire Microsoft 365 universe.

What you get: Inside Teams, Copilot can give you the gist of a long, rambling chat thread, help you write messages that sound professional, create meeting notes on the fly, and answer questions by digging through your company's data in the Microsoft cloud (like your emails, files, and calendar).

The cost: Brace yourself. It’s a steep $30 per user per month, and you have to be on a qualifying Business or Enterprise plan to even have the option to buy it.

The catch: While it's undeniably powerful, Copilot is expensive and tries to be a jack-of-all-trades. It wants to do a little bit of everything, everywhere. That means it isn't specialized for specific, high-value jobs, like giving your team instant, accurate answers for internal support questions. For that, you really need a tool with more focus.

The Copilot interface inside Microsoft Teams, illustrating an add-on that significantly impacts Microsoft Teams pricing.

Microsoft Teams Phone bundles

What if you want to use Teams to make and receive calls from regular phone numbers? Well, that's another layer of costs.

• Teams Phone Standard: This gives you the basic cloud-based phone system, and it starts at around $8 per user, per month.

• Calling Plans: But that just gives you the system; you still need a plan to actually make the calls. A domestic calling plan can add another $12 to $16 per user, per month on top of that.

These costs pile up quickly, turning what seemed like a straightforward communication tool into a pretty significant monthly expense.

This video breaks down how Microsoft Teams phone system pricing is structured for larger companies, which is often different from smaller businesses.

Beyond pricing: The knowledge trap in Microsoft Teams

As your company starts living and breathing in Teams, a funny thing happens. It becomes a living archive of your business. Every decision, every project update, every clever answer to a tough customer question gets documented... somewhere. In some channel. Or a private chat.

And that's the problem. All that priceless knowledge becomes almost impossible to find when you need it. It’s scattered across dozens of channels, unstructured, and buried under a mountain of daily chatter and GIFs. Your team ends up wasting hours asking the same questions over and over because finding the original answer is harder than just asking again. Your support staff struggle to give consistent answers because the official process is lost in a thread from six months ago.

Teams is brilliant at getting conversations started, but it’s not so great at making the valuable outcomes of those conversations easy to find and reuse.

An example of a complex threaded conversation in Teams, highlighting the challenge of finding information which goes beyond the initial Microsoft Teams pricing.

A better solution: Get answers from your knowledge in Teams

This is exactly where a purpose-built tool like eesel AI shines. It’s designed to solve one problem perfectly: freeing the knowledge trapped in your collaboration tools. With its slick Microsoft Teams integration, our AI Internal Chat turns your messy Teams workspace into an intelligent, instant-answer engine for your employees.

A view of the eesel AI Internal Chat integrated within Microsoft Teams, offered as an alternative solution to challenges not covered by standard Microsoft Teams pricing.

Here’s how it makes a real difference:

• It connects to everything, not just microsoft stuff. Microsoft's Copilot is stuck inside the Microsoft bubble. eesel AI goes way beyond that, connecting to all the places your company knowledge lives. It learns from Confluence, Google Docs, Notion, PDFs, and your help desk, plus all your Teams conversations. This creates a single source of truth that your internal AI can rely on for accurate answers.

• You're in complete control. You can tell the AI exactly which knowledge sources to use. You can limit it to specific channels, documents, or knowledge bases to make sure its answers are always on-point and accurate. This stops the AI from guessing or giving vague, unhelpful responses.

• Get started in minutes, not months. Forget about booking demos and waiting for a sales rep to call you back. eesel AI is built to be self-serve. You can connect your knowledge sources and launch a powerful AI assistant right inside Microsoft Teams all by yourself, in less time than it takes to drink your morning coffee.

• Simple, predictable pricing. After the headache of Microsoft's pricing maze, our approach will feel like a breath of fresh air. eesel AI's pricing plans are straightforward and transparent. You get all our core products, AI Agent, Copilot, and Internal Chat, under one simple plan based on how much you use it. No hidden fees, no surprises.

What's the bottom line on Microsoft Teams pricing?

Microsoft Teams is, without a doubt, a powerhouse for collaboration. But its pricing has become confusing and fragmented. The costs can climb fast once you start adding the features most businesses really need, like advanced AI or phone lines.

And while Teams is great for keeping your team connected, it accidentally creates a huge knowledge silo. Instead of shelling out a premium for a generalist AI like Copilot, a specialized tool like eesel AI offers a smarter, more focused, and more affordable way to unlock all that trapped knowledge and make it useful, right inside the app your team already uses all day long.

Ready to make your company's knowledge instantly accessible? You can deploy an AI assistant in Microsoft Teams with eesel AI today.