Microsoft 365 Comparison: E1 vs. E3 vs. E5

The basics

All enterprise packages include the recognized Office applications - PowerPoint, Word, Excel and OneNote - plus Outlook and Exchange.

E1 only includes web and mobile versions of the Office applications, not the full desktop versions that can be used offline, meaning E1 users are largely dependent on continuous internet connectivity.

E3 and E5 also include Bookings, a scheduling app for your customers to book appointments, Access, a database for creating business applications from templates or from scratch, plus an additional 50GB of storage within Exchange (100GB in total).

Meetings and Voice

All three plans include Microsoft Teams - the heart of Microsoft 365’s collaboration platform which has arguably been the main cause of Microsoft 365’s wide adoption through 2020.

The only difference between the plans in this area is that E5 - the largest of the plans - includes Phone System, which provides PBX capabilities in the cloud and is the foundation of Enterprise Voice.

Enterprise Voice allows Microsoft 365 users to make and receive calls from anywhere and, together with Microsoft Teams, delivers an all-in-one communication solution bringing together calls, chat, and meetings into a single application.

Files, content and intranet

All Enterprise packages includes SharePoint and OneDrive for business-wide and employee-specific data storage, plus Yammer, an internet app, Stream, which makes video content available across your organization, and Sway, an innovative platform for presentations. E3 and E5 also include Lists which helps users track and organize their tasks.

The core differences however in the available storage. E1 allows 1TB OneDrive cloud storage per user, while E3 and E5 provide 5TB initially and have the ability to expand to 25TB.

Task management

Here, all four packages are identical, with the jewels in the crown being Power Apps and Power Automate.

These applications allow users to create the automated solutions to the problems they face day-to-day. They can automate workflows within Microsoft 365, enable business logic to simplify tasks, and even integrate with Power BI and Microsoft Graph so automation can be powered by granular data insights.

Advanced analytics

E1 and E3 both include MyAnalytics - a tool that provides personal productivity insights based on your work patterns, examining focus, network, wellbeing and collaboration.

Meanwhile, E5 also offers Power BI Pro.
Power BI is a powerful, well-regarded and widely-used business analytics service. It provides interactive data visualizations and business intelligence based on data sources from within and outside Microsoft 365.

From here onwards is where the differences between the three packages become most stark. The additional capabilities of E3 over E1, and particularly the component pieces of E5 in data management, data security and compliance are what causes many to opt for E3 and E5, even when far below the 300 user supposed “entry point”

Device and app management

E3 and E5 include InTune, a key application for the control of the organization’s data. It ensures that all company-owned and enrolled personal devices that process corporate data are fully managed, overseen and up-to-date.

It provides crucial insights into the status of all enrolled devices, from security, efficiency and performance perspectives, while also allowing Microsoft 365 data to be protected even when accessed from non-enrolled devices. It is a key component of any Microsoft 365 data protection strategies.

Threat Protection, data protection and access management

E1 is arguably limited in its security functionality, providing simply Active Directory sync capabilities that underpin Single Sign On, plus the usual anti-malware, and mail filtering privacy and security features found in most Microsoft 365 packages.

Meanwhile E3 includes Azure Information Protection - a suite of important tools that allow data to be classified based on sensitivity, and for those tags to permeate through the Microsoft 365 environment so that data is always responsibly used. It also provides eDiscovery, mailbox hold and other email archiving capabilities, plus Defender - a complete endpoint security solution.
Most impactfully, E3 also includes Azure AD Multi-Factor Authentication - the Microsoft 365 native MFA solution. It is widely recognised that when MFA is deployed across every user, more than 99% of cybersecurity threats can be prevented, as most breach attempts rely on compromised credentials

E5 however also adds Advanced Threat Protection, which scans links within any Office documents or Teams chats, and attachments within mailboxes for any malware or viruses. It will also scan documents opened in Protected View. ATP also uses machine learning to continuously look for phishing attempts, and provides real-time reporting on detected.