Microsoft 365 E3 vs E5 - Which Is Right for You?

Microsoft 365 includes a vast selection of licences that allow you to unlock as much, or as little, of the platform's potential as you need. This can be a good thing, but with so many services available and so many licences to choose from, it can quickly get confusing deciding which licences are best for you!

In this article, we'll be exploring two of the most common licence bundles - Microsoft 365 E3 and Microsoft 365 E5 - to help you select the best licence for your requirements and how you can get the most out of them.

E3 & E5 Commonalities

The M365 range of licences combines the three core areas of Microsoft's Cloud platform: Office 365 for productivity, Windows for device management, an Enterprise Security and Mobility for security. If you're interested in all three areas, then the Microsoft 365 Enterprise licences are the best option for you.

Office 365

Under O365 falls all of the productivity and collaboration-focused tools that your organisation needs, including email, SharePoint or file management, the Office apps, and supporting apps such as Lists, Forms, and Stream. In addition, Power Apps and Power Automate come with both Microsoft E3 and Microsoft E5 as standard, allowing you to build custom workflows and apps for your business.

It's worth highlighting that Teams used to be included as standard with both, however it now needs to be purchased separately.

Windows

For devices, Microsoft 365 licences include Windows licensing in both packages, including Intune and Autopilot, to allow you to enrol and manage your company devices. Intune allows you to easily inventory devices in your organisation, enforce security policies, deploy apps, and more. Autopilot allows you to automatically enrol new devices into your Microsoft 365 environment, meaning you can have new devices delivered directly to users rather than having to manually configure them at your desk before shipping them out.

Enterprise Mobility and Security

Enterprise Mobility and Security (a.k.a EMS) comes with a wide range of security features to help you keep your organisation secure. At the foundation of this is Secure Score, which evaluates your environment and provides recommendations for what actions you can take to bolster your security. EMS includes security capabilities that target all areas of Microsoft 365 including identities, devices, apps, shadow IT, encryption, and more.

These features also include real-time monitoring and powerful analytics tools via the Defender Security Centre to best understand where threats are coming from.

E3 & E5 Differences

The high-level differences between E3 and E5 focus on automation and analytics with regards to security.

Azure Information Protection

Azure Information Protection (AIP) is a tool that allows people to tag documents which then applies security settings depending on the chosen tag, ensuring only those authorised can view the document even when it's shared externally.

With E3, the document in question has to be tagged manually but with E5 you can configure AIP to automatically apply tags when specific conditions are met, such as if the document contains sensitive information.

Audio Conferencing & Phone Systems

A key set of features that we use heavily here at Perspicuity are Audio Conferencing and Phone Systems. When combines, these features take Teams to a whole new level. Audio Conferencing enables dialling-in for your Teams meetings, allowing everyone to join via their phones. Phone Systems allow for PBX and routing calls through teams, meaning you no longer need to have a phone on every desk in your office. We stopped using physical phones to take calls many years ago, and it's been a welcome change!

Power BI

With Microsoft 365 there is a lot of data you can store and access within your environment, and it can get confusing as to what data can be analysed and how. Power BI is the tool best suited for this, allowing you to surface data about your environment, mix and match data, and generate reports in a variety of styles and formates to make the data more accessible and readable.

Microsoft E3 comes with a basic version of Power BI that lets people create simple reports, but for the full experience you'll need Power BI Pro, available in Microsoft E5.

Microsoft Copilot

As Microsoft continue to expand and develop Copilot across the Microsoft 365 suite, E5 includes more sophisticated AI features than E3.

In Power BI, Copilot can provide more insightful analytics about your reports and data and, for security, Copilot is deeply integrated across Defender to improve threat protection and automated responses. For compliance, this includes the aforementioned automated tagging of documents as well as insider risk management and access reviews supported by AI.

So, Which One Should I Pick?

While E5 offers many capabilities that E3 does not, you might not need all of them - and given the insignificant price increase, a full upgrade may not be cost effective. Fortunately, many E5 features are available as standalone licences and can be added to E3.

For instance, if you're interested in automatic document tagging for sensitive data, you can pair E3 with Azure Information Protection Plan 2 to get that feature at a much lower cost than fully upgrading to Microsoft E5.