Microsoft 365 Business Basic Review: Web Apps Only, and Who That Suits

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Business Basic is a full Microsoft 365 tenant with the Office apps in a browser instead of on the machine: a 50 GB Exchange mailbox, a terabyte of OneDrive, Teams and SharePoint, and no desktop installation rights at all. Whether that is a hard limit or an irrelevance depends entirely on what the person does all day.

1. Buy it for staff who live in mail, Teams and shared files and read documents more than they build them: supervisors, dispatchers, retail and warehouse managers, most field staff.
2. Buy it if the mailbox is the point. It is a full Exchange Online mailbox with calendar and shared mailbox access, in the same tenant and admin centre as the expensive plans.
3. Buy it on older or low-specification hardware, where the browser handles ordinary documents on machines that would run the desktop suite badly.
4. Skip it for anyone who needs Access, macros, COM add-ins, serious Excel modelling or heavy mail merge, because those are desktop jobs.
5. Skip it for people who work with no connection. Files sync to the disk, but editing them still needs an installed application this plan does not licence.
6. Check whether the person only needs a mailbox. Exchange Online Plan 1 is a smaller licence, and shared mailboxes need no licence at all up to 50 GB.

Desktop Outlook is included in that restriction. Microsoft’s guidance is that using the Outlook desktop app, classic or new, with a Microsoft 365 organisational mailbox needs a plan that includes the desktop apps.

If that settles who gets which plan you can stop here. The rest covers what the browser genuinely cannot do, and the cheaper licences most firms forget to ask for.

Why it happens

Behind the low price sits a complete tenant. Each user gets an Exchange Online mailbox that Microsoft documents at 50 GB with a 50 GB archive, a terabyte of OneDrive, SharePoint team sites, Teams and the smaller services a tenant carries – Bookings, Forms, Lists, Planner. The administrative surface is identical to the plans above it: same admin centre, same Entra ID directory, same groups, same security defaults. A tenant built on Business Basic is not a lesser tenant, and putting better licences on individual people later rebuilds nothing.

What Basic does not carry is desktop installation rights, and that is the entire product decision. The web applications have become good enough that most people writing a memo, updating a rota or working through a straightforward workbook will not notice the browser. Co-authoring is better on the web than on the desktop, comments and version history work properly, and nobody has to email attachments around.

The list of things the browser cannot do is short and stable. No VBA macros. No COM add-ins, which rules out a great many accounting, CRM and engineering plug-ins. No Access, which is a Windows desktop application in the plans that include it. Weaker control over pagination and printing. Very large workbooks either decline to open for editing or become unpleasant to work in. Anything driven by a fussy template tends to disappoint.

Outlook is where people trip. It is tempting to assume the free new Outlook for Windows closes the gap, and for consumer or IMAP mail it may. For a Microsoft 365 organisational mailbox Microsoft’s own licensing guidance is explicit: to use the Outlook desktop app, classic or new, you need a plan that includes the desktop versions of the apps. Since July 2024 Outlook checks the licence on every account added to it, and a Business Basic account can be added as a secondary account only once a qualifying account is already signed in. Plan for the browser and the mobile app, not for a desktop client.

Offline is the sharper limit and the honest reason firms move people up. The OneDrive client will sync files to the disk so they are present when the connection is not, but opening them requires an application, and Basic does not license one. For staff who work on trains, at customer sites or anywhere with poor coverage, that single gap is the whole argument for Business Standard.

One thing has quietly improved. Microsoft now includes a lightweight, web-based Visio with most commercial Microsoft 365 plans, Business Basic among them, at no extra cost. It covers basic diagrams – flowcharts, block diagrams, Venn and pyramid diagrams – and it means a Basic user who occasionally needs to amend a simple diagram may need no Visio licence at all.

Full reference

Where Basic sits against the plans either side of it

The cheaper licences firms forget to ask for

• Shared mailboxes need no licence at all up to 50 GB, so info@, accounts@ and sales@ should not be consuming plans. A licence is needed only to exceed that size or to add an archive or litigation hold.
• Exchange Online Plan 1 is a mailbox-only licence and is smaller than Business Basic. It suits somebody who genuinely needs nothing but mail, at the cost of Teams, SharePoint and the rest of the tenant.
• Microsoft sells these suites in versions with and without Teams. Read the SKU name on the quote rather than assuming the shape of the plan you remember.
• Mixing plans in one tenant is supported and normal: Microsoft’s own guidance is that Enterprise, Business and standalone plans can be combined in a single account.
• The 300-seat limit applies across the whole Business family rather than to each plan. Microsoft’s wording is that an organisation provisioned for 250 Business Premium seats can provision only 50 more across the family.

How to test whether Basic fits a person

1. Take the three files that person opens most often.
2. Open them in the browser and try to do a normal hour of their work, not a demonstration.
3. Watch for macros, add-ins, printing at a set scale and any workbook that takes a visible pause to recalculate.
4. Ask them how often they work with no connection, and whether the answer is ‘never’ or ‘every Tuesday on the train’.
5. If all of that passes, Basic is the correct licence and the saving against Standard is real rather than a false economy.

What being on Basic does not cost you

• Security posture: the tenant still has Exchange Online Protection in front of mail, security defaults with multi-factor authentication, and the same conditional-access-capable directory once you licence it.
• Administration: the admin centre, groups, policies and reporting are the same ones the enterprise plans use.
• Future options: a user can be moved to Standard or Premium in the admin centre and the services follow the person, so nothing has to be rebuilt.
• Compatibility: files created in the web apps are ordinary Office files, and colleagues on the desktop suite see no difference.

When to move somebody up, in order of how often it happens

1. They need to work offline more than occasionally.
2. They need desktop Outlook against the Microsoft 365 mailbox.
3. They hit a macro, an add-in or an Access database.
4. Their Excel work outgrows the browser, usually large workbooks with long calculation chains.
5. They need conditional access, device management or endpoint protection, which is Business Premium rather than Standard.

Questions people ask about this