Microsoft 365

Subscription bundle of the Office applications with mail, storage, meetings and organisational identity

As of 30 August 2026, Microsoft 365 starts at $7/month. Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook with hosted mail, SharePoint, OneDrive and Entra ID identity, sold as consumer, business and enterprise plans. Softwr lists it under Productivity.

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Overview

What Microsoft 365 does

Microsoft 365 is a subscription bundle of the Office applications together with the hosted services behind them. Consumer plans cover the applications and OneDrive storage for one person or a household of up to six. Business plans add hosted Exchange mailboxes, SharePoint, OneDrive for work and device management, and stop at 300 seats. Enterprise plans continue above that with progressively more security and compliance capability. You get installed desktop applications for Windows and macOS, mobile apps, browser versions, and Microsoft Entra ID as the organisation's directory. Teams is now sold alongside the suite rather than automatically inside it for newer customers, and Copilot is a separate per-user add-on. What you are actually buying is not the applications. It is the identity and the file estate. Entra ID becomes the account every other service in the organisation authenticates against, SharePoint and OneDrive become where the documents live, and Exchange becomes where the correspondence lives. Once those three are in place the cost of leaving is not the licences, it is re-federating every connected application and migrating years of mail and files, which is why the conversation in almost every organisation is about which tier rather than about whether. It is bought by nearly every organisation with employees, and by consumers who want installed Office applications. The trade-off is the tiering, and it is the most reliably underestimated cost in business software. Business plans cap at 300 seats, so growth forces a migration precisely when it is least convenient. The capabilities an organisation eventually needs, meaning retention policies, data loss prevention, advanced eDiscovery, insider risk and the stronger identity controls, sit at the top tier or in add-ons. That means the real price is discovered after a compliance requirement or a customer questionnaire arrives, not at the point of purchase.

What people use it for

Any organisation that wants mail, documents, meetings and identity from one supplier on one bill.
A company standardising on single sign-on, where Entra ID becomes the account other services authenticate against.
Regulated work that needs retention, legal hold and eDiscovery across mail and documents, provided the tier that includes them is actually bought.
A household that needs installed Office applications on several machines rather than browser-only editing.

The honest half

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Microsoft 365.

Business plans are capped at 300 seats, so an organisation that grows past that must move to Enterprise plans, which changes both the price per user and the feature mix at the moment it can least afford a migration project.
The compliance capabilities most organisations eventually need, including retention, data loss prevention, advanced eDiscovery and insider risk, sit at the top tier or in add-ons, so the real cost surfaces after an audit or a customer questionnaire rather than at purchase.
Annual term subscriptions commit you for the year and month-to-month terms cost measurably more per seat, so the flexibility to reduce seats during a quiet period is bought at a permanently higher rate.
Entra ID becomes the identity for everything else the organisation uses, which is the hardest kind of lock-in to put a number on, because leaving means re-federating every connected application rather than simply replacing a word processor.
The licensing model is complicated enough that most organisations are either over-licensed or quietly non-compliant, and reconciling it usually requires a partner or a specialist, which is a recurring cost that never appears in the advertised per-user figure.

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of Microsoft 365

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

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Pricing

What Microsoft 365 costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

Microsoft 365 Business Basic

$7 /mo

Email and calendar with 50 GB mailbox
Web and mobile versions of Office apps
Microsoft Teams included
1 TB cloud storage per user
Up to 300 users supported

Microsoft 365 Business Standard

$14 /mo

Desktop versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook
Email and Teams
1 TB cloud storage per user
Up to 300 users supported

Microsoft 365 E5

$60 /mo

Comprehensive security and compliance
All productivity apps
Advanced analytics
AI capabilities
Teams included

Capabilities

Features

Office applications
Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook as installed desktop software plus browser and mobile versions
Hosted services
Exchange mailboxes, SharePoint sites and OneDrive on business and enterprise plans
Teams
Chat, meetings and calling, sold separately from the suite for newer customers
Microsoft Entra ID
The organisation's identity directory and single sign-on provider
OneDrive storage
1 TB per user on most business plans
Device management and endpoint protection
Intune and Defender capabilities from Business Premium upwards
Purview compliance
Retention, data loss prevention and eDiscovery, with the more capable versions at the highest tier
Copilot
A per-user add-on subscription rather than part of the base licence
Consumer plans
Personal for one person and Family for up to six

Answered, with sources

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

What is the difference between Microsoft 365 and Office?

Office was a one-off licence for a specific version. Microsoft 365 is a subscription covering the applications and the hosted services together, and when payment stops the applications drop to a reduced state rather than continuing as they were.

Is Teams included?

Not automatically for newer customers. Microsoft unbundled Teams and now sells it alongside the suite, so check what a given quotation actually covers.

What happens to our files if we stop paying?

The documents remain yours and can be downloaded, but access to hosted mailboxes and sites ends after a retention window, so leaving requires a planned export rather than a cancellation.

Is Copilot part of the subscription?

No. It is a per-user add-on on top of the base licence, generally with its own term commitment, and it is priced per seat regardless of how much any individual uses it.

Keep looking

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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Microsoft 365, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.

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