Microsoft 365 F1 vs F3: Licensing Frontline Staff Who Share Devices

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The gap is email and editing. Microsoft 365 F1 gives Exchange Kiosk for the Teams calendar only and read-only web and mobile Word, Excel and PowerPoint. F3 gives a 2 GB Exchange Kiosk mailbox, editable web and mobile versions of those applications, and Windows 11 Enterprise E3. Neither installs desktop Office, and both are licensed per user rather than per device.

1. Buy F1 for staff who need a rota, an intranet and Teams but no company mailbox and no ability to edit documents.
2. Buy F3 the moment a worker needs a company email address, or needs to edit a document rather than read one.
3. Buy F3 rather than F1 if the device needs Windows 11 Enterprise E3 rights. F1 does not include them.
4. Do not licence a shared kiosk once for three shift workers. Both plans are per user, and three people on one screen is three licences.
5. Do not use either plan for anyone who needs installed Word, Excel or Outlook. That is Business Standard or an enterprise plan.
6. Use a device licence, not a frontline user plan, for a meeting room system or common-area phone with no assigned person.

Both plans include Microsoft Intune Plan 1 and Microsoft Entra ID Plan 1, which is often the real reason an organisation licenses frontline staff at all rather than leaving the devices unmanaged.

If you can sort your frontline list into people who need a mailbox and people who do not, the split is the answer and you can stop. Below is exactly what each plan contains, what it does not, and where a frontline plan is the wrong shape entirely.

Why it happens

Both frontline plans exist for the same reason: a shift worker sharing a screen should not cost what an office worker with a laptop costs. Microsoft sells them without a seat cap, unlike the 300-user business family, and neither includes the desktop Office applications. The difference between them is narrower than the numbering suggests, and it comes down to two things: whether the worker gets a mailbox, and whether they can edit.

Microsoft 365 F1 provides Exchange Kiosk for Teams calendar only – there is no user mailbox behind it – and read-only access to the web and mobile versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. It includes SharePoint Kiosk with 2 GB of OneDrive storage, Microsoft Intune Plan 1 and Microsoft Entra ID Plan 1. It does not include Windows 11 Enterprise rights. It is, in effect, a collaboration and identity licence for people who consume rather than produce.

Microsoft 365 F3 adds the two things that matter. The Exchange Kiosk mailbox becomes a real one with 2 GB of mailbox space per user, and the web and mobile versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint become editable. It also carries Windows 11 Enterprise E3 – though note that Microsoft describes Windows Enterprise E3 as delivered in Microsoft 365 F3 as the E3 feature set minus the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, Windows LTSC and Windows Autopatch. SharePoint Kiosk, the 2 GB of OneDrive storage, Intune Plan 1 and Entra ID Plan 1 are the same on both plans.

Full reference

What each plan contains

The mailbox is the decision, and 2 GB is the number

Everything else about these two plans is close enough that arguing about it wastes time. F1’s Exchange Kiosk exists so the Teams calendar works; there is no user mailbox to send from or receive into. F3’s Exchange Kiosk mailbox is 2 GB, which the Exchange Online service description also gives for Office 365 F3, with no archive mailbox on either plan. Sort your frontline list into people who need to be emailed and people who do not, and the licensing follows.

Be realistic about what 2 GB holds. It is a working mailbox for operational traffic – shift changes, dispatch notes, a supplier confirmation – not a place to keep five years of correspondence. If somebody’s role requires retaining mail, they need a plan with an archive, and no frontline plan has one.

Device management is usually the real reason to buy

Both plans include Microsoft Intune Plan 1 and Microsoft Entra ID Plan 1, which is what turns a pile of shared tablets into a managed estate: enrolment, configuration profiles, compliance policies, application deployment, conditional access and remote wipe. Organisations frequently arrive at these plans wanting cheap email and stay for the management, and that is the right way round. An unmanaged frontline device holding company data is a larger exposure than a mailbox nobody has.

One consequence worth planning for: conditional access and compliance policies apply to the person signing in, not the shared screen, which is exactly why both plans are per user. A device shared across three shifts needs three licences, and a design that tries to avoid that by using one shared account defeats the identity controls you bought the plan for.

Where a frontline plan is the wrong shape

Three cases push you off these plans. Anyone who needs installed Word, Excel or Outlook needs Business Standard or an enterprise plan, because neither frontline plan includes the desktop applications. Anyone who needs a real mailbox with an archive needs the same. And hardware with no assigned user – a meeting room system, a common-area phone, a digital sign – needs a device licence for that hardware rather than a user plan assigned to a fictitious account.

The reverse also holds and is worth checking before you default a group to Microsoft 365 Business Basic. Where the work is a rota, an intranet and Teams on a shared screen, a frontline plan costs less per head than Basic and is the correct licence rather than a compromise. Sort the workforce by what the role actually does before you sort it by what plan you already buy.

Teams variants and what 2026 added

Since 1 April 2024 Microsoft sells Microsoft 365 F1, Microsoft 365 F3 and Office 365 F3 in both Teams-inclusive and no-Teams configurations, with Microsoft Teams Enterprise available separately for organisations that take the no-Teams versions. Existing customers on Teams-inclusive plans can continue with them and renew or upgrade as before. Microsoft’s 2026 packaging update added Copilot Chat capability and Copilot Chat analytics to both F1 and F3, rolled out from June 2026 and completed by 1 August 2026, so check what your tenant actually reports rather than an older comparison table.

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