Which Microsoft 365 plan includes...? 12 features you need to know where belong

Conditional Access. Requires Entra ID P1. Included in: Business Premium ($22), E3 ($39), E5 ($60), E7 ($99). Cheapest plan: Business Premium. Not available in Business Basic, Business Standard, F1 or F3. Without Conditional Access you only have Security Defaults, all-or-nothing MFA with no granular control.

Defender for Endpoint. Comes in two tiers. P1 (basic endpoint protection) is in Business Premium and E3. P2 (advanced with automated investigation and response) is only in E5 and E7. Business Premium has its own variant: Defender for Business, a simplified version for up to 300 users.

Defender XDR. Microsoft's unified detection platform that correlates signals from endpoints, email, identity and cloud apps. Only in E5 ($60) and E7 ($99). Not available in E3, not even as an add-on.

DLP (Data Loss Prevention). Basic DLP for Exchange and SharePoint is in Business Premium ($22) and E3 ($39). Endpoint DLP covering local files, clipboard and print requires E5 ($60). Many organizations think they have DLP with E3, and they do, but only for cloud data.

eDiscovery. Standard eDiscovery (search and export) is in E3. Premium eDiscovery (legal holds, advanced filtering, review sets) requires E5. Relevant for organizations with legal obligations or GDPR deletion requests.

Sensitivity Labels. Manual labeling (user chooses "Confidential" themselves) is in Business Premium and E3. Automatic labeling (system scans and classifies) requires E5. The difference matters: manual labeling depends on users remembering to do it.

Microsoft 365 Copilot. Only included in E7 ($99). For all other plans (Business Standard, Business Premium, E3, E5) it can be purchased as an add-on at $30/user/mo. Requires minimum Business Standard as baseline, does not work with Business Basic.

Copilot Chat. Free web-based AI chat in all Microsoft 365 licenses including F1 and F3, with commercial data protection. Answers questions based on web data but has no access to your company data. It is not the same product as Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Security Copilot. AI-assisted security analysis. Not included in any Microsoft 365 plan. Purchased separately on a consumption basis: ~$4/SCU/hour, where SCU (Security Compute Unit) is how Microsoft bills Security Copilot usage. Minimum purchase is typically 1 SCU provisioned per month.

Agent 365. AI agent platform. $15/user/mo as add-on or included in E7. Not available in E3 or E5 without add-on.

Desktop Office apps (Word, Excel, Outlook). Not in Business Basic ($7) or F1/F3. Requires minimum Business Standard ($14). This is the most common reason for choosing Standard over Basic.

Intune (MDM/MAM). Included in Business Premium ($22), E3 ($39), E5, E7 and F3 ($10). Not in Business Basic, Business Standard or F1. From July 2026, selected Intune Suite features are added to E3/E5 (Remote Help, Advanced Analytics, and Intune Plan 2), the full Intune Suite with Cloud PKI and Advanced Analytics remains a separate add-on.

Teams Phone. Cloud telephony directly in Teams. Only in Office 365 E5 ($41), M365 E5 ($60) and E7 ($99). Not in E3, not even as an included feature. Requires a separate calling plan or Direct Routing.

Power BI Pro. Included in E5 and E7. All other plans only have free Power BI access with limited functionality. Power BI Pro can also be purchased as a separate add-on at $14/user/mo.

This article covers 12 of the most searched features. But Microsoft 365 has over 60 features spread across 8 plans, and new ones are added regularly.

If you already know which plan you're considering, you can also compare two plans side-by-side or use the optimizer to get a personalized recommendation.