Office 365 Pricing Plans for Business - What's the Difference Between E1 and E3 Licenses?

Microsoft offers several pricing plans for business customers. There are plans for small business, Enterprise, non-profit organizations and Education, but the most common question we get is “what is the difference between the E1 and the E3 license?”. Currently the E1 plan is $8.00 per user per month and E3 plan is $20.00 per user per month. So the big question is what do you get for the additional $12.00 per user per month? There are several differences, but by far the biggest difference between the two plans is that the E3 subscription plan includes the local installation of the full Office Pro Plus suite on up to 5 PCs or Macs per user. This includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, and OneNote. This means that if your organization is several versions behind on MS Office and do not have MS Software Assurance, you now have an alternative to purchasing expensive new licenses for each user. For an additional $12.00 per user per month, you get to “rent” MS Office and each user can install on up to 5 PCs or Macs (including home use). The version of MS Office Pro Plus that is installed is identical to the off the shelf version with one exception. When a user launches one of the Office applications, their account is checked against Office 365 to make sure that they have a valid account. If a user leaves the organization and has a copy installed on a home PC, it will no longer work once that user’s account has been disabled in Office 365. Note: accounts are transferable.

So if your organization is considering a MS Office upgrade, E3 may be worth looking into.

Other features that are included with E3 plans that are NOT included with E1 plans:

Office on tablets and phones for the fully installed Office experience on up to 5 tablets and 5 phones per user
Enterprise management of apps with Group Policy, Telemetry, Shared Computer Activation
Self-service Business Intelligence to discover, analyze, and visualize data in Excel
Compliance and Information Protection including Legal Hold, Rights Management and Data Loss Prevention for email and files
Compliance Center tools to support eDiscovery, including mailbox and internal site search, legal hold, and predictive coding and text analytics capabilities depending on subscription type

Office 365 Pricing Plans for Business – What’s the Difference Between E1 and E3 Licenses?

Office 365 Pricing Plans for Business – What’s the Difference Between E1 and E3 Licenses?