Microsoft 365 Apps for Business vs Business Standard: The Plan With No Email

There is no page in the admin centre for creating a mailbox on Microsoft 365 Apps for business, and nobody has hidden it. The plan does not include one. Apps for business is the Office apps plus OneDrive storage, with no Exchange mailbox, no Teams and no SharePoint. Business Standard is the same desktop apps with all three of those included. So the choice rests on one question: where does your company email live, and where do you want it to live?

That tends to land as a surprise on whoever chose the plan with “Apps” in the name as the sensible way to get proper Word and Excel, then went to set up info@ for the website. If your email is on Microsoft, or should be, you need Standard or another plan with a mailbox. If it lives somewhere you have deliberately chosen to keep, Apps for business can be exactly right.

What is actually in each box

Apps for business covers:

• Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook installed on up to five PCs or Macs per person, plus five tablets and five phones
• the web versions of the same apps
• OneDrive storage for each person’s own files

Business Standard includes all of that and adds:

• an Exchange Online mailbox for each person, with calendar and contacts
• Teams for chat, calls and meetings
• SharePoint, which gives shared team files a proper home
• smaller extras such as Bookings for appointment pages

Both belong to Microsoft’s Business family, which is capped at 300 users. If you are working from an older quote, Apps for business used to be sold as Office 365 Business, which does little to make the difference obvious.

Why it is easy to buy the wrong one

The trap is built from things that look reassuring. Outlook is in the box, so an Outlook icon appears on every desktop. Signing up creates work accounts, and once your domain is added, people sign in as jane@yourfirm.co.uk — which looks exactly like an email address. But on this plan Outlook is only a mail program. It will happily open a mailbox hosted somewhere else, such as Gmail or a hosting company’s IMAP account, but there is nothing on the Microsoft side for it to connect to.

The mistake tends to come to light the first time someone tries to share a calendar, set up a Teams meeting or give a colleague a shared folder, and finds none of it there.

Where Apps for business is the right buy

It is a good plan when email has been settled somewhere else on purpose.

Take a business that runs on Google Workspace and is happy there, where two people need desktop Excel for heavy spreadsheet work, or desktop Word for documents that must keep their formatting when clients open them. Apps for business for those two, Workspace for everyone, is a sensible pairing. If you are still deciding between the two platforms more broadly, our Microsoft 365 vs Google Workspace comparison covers that choice.

It also works as a stopgap when your mail is with another provider you are not ready to leave yet, such as mailboxes bundled with your website hosting, and you need desktop Office now. Just treat the email move as a separate job with a date, rather than something the licence will sort out.

And it suits one person, or a very small team, who needs desktop Word and Excel and whose email genuinely does not need to change.

The common thread is a decision. If nobody decided to keep email elsewhere, and it was simply assumed to come with the licence, you want Standard.

Signs you need Standard instead

Choose Standard if you want company email hosted by Microsoft, calendars colleagues can see, Teams calls, and one shared place for team files instead of documents scattered across individual OneDrives. It is also where Microsoft’s mail protection sits, from spam and malware filtering to the click-time link checking Standard gained in mid-2026. Once you are on Standard, the next question is whether Premium’s device and data controls are worth adding; our Business Standard vs Business Premium guide takes that one on. For Basic and the rest of the family, see our overview of the Business plans.

You can bolt a standalone Exchange Online plan onto Apps for business to get mailboxes. Compare that against Standard before you do it, because you would still have no SharePoint and no Teams.

Moving from Apps for business to Business Standard

The licence change is the quick part. When everyone is moving, the admin centre can usually switch the whole subscription in one step: users get the new licences, nothing in OneDrive is lost, and the old plan is cancelled for you. If only some people are moving, buy Standard licences and reassign those users.

The email is the real project, and the order matters:

1. Create the mailboxes first. Assign Standard licences so every person has an Exchange mailbox before any mail is pointed at Microsoft. Microsoft’s own guidance is to set up all mailboxes before touching the MX record.
2. Bring the old mail across. Exchange has a dedicated migration for Google Workspace. From a traditional host, IMAP migration moves email folders but not contacts or calendars, so those need exporting separately.
3. Switch delivery. Changing your domain’s MX record sends all new mail to Microsoft 365 from that point; anything not migrated stays at the old host. If you already have an SPF record, merge Microsoft into it rather than adding a second one.
4. Reconnect Outlook and phones. Anything still pointing at the old host needs the Microsoft account added and the old one removed once you are sure mail is flowing.
5. Then sort the files. With SharePoint now available, move shared folders out of individual OneDrives into team sites while everyone is paying attention.

None of this is exotic, but the cutover is where mail goes missing if steps are taken out of order. If you would rather not run it yourself, it is the core of our business email setup work: mailboxes built first, mail migrated, records switched at a quiet time, and old devices tidied up afterwards.