Microsoft 365 Business Premium is the most feature-rich email hosting provider we’ve tested, which stands to reason seeing as how it’s been around such a long time. The service makes domain and email setup easy for any sized business and has lots of migration and importing tools if you’re coming from another platform.
Local and web versions of the full Microsoft Office suite are included, as well as access to Microsoft’s more advanced tools like SharePoint and Intune for device management. You can also purchase a wide variety of add-on services, such as Microsoft 365 Business Voice, and these offerings are available from Microsoft or its large partner ecosystem. It may be more expensive, but for its feature list alone, it’s an obvious Editors’ Choice winner.
Microsoft 365 Business Premium Pricing
The service starts at $20 per user per month. That can add up quickly for larger organizations, but as mentioned its encyclopedic list of features makes the money worthwhile. Business Premium also has generous bedrock features at that price, which include 50GB of email hosting and 1TB of Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage in addition to domain hosting. That’s an excellent overall list, though our other Editors’ Choice pick, Google Workspace Business Standard, leads the pack with a whopping 2TB of mailbox storage.
More attractive to most businesses, especially in the new and distributed hybrid work model, is that you not only get the desktop, mobile, and web versions of the Microsoft Office 2019 suite but also the full version of Microsoft Teams plus team collaboration through SharePoint hosting. The bundled Intune app handles device management, so you’ll be able to enforce hardware policies for home BYOD scenarios, which is something no other email hosting competitor offered.
You’ll also get two forms of additional security. First is Microsoft Azure Information Protection (AIP). This is a content classification app that lets you tag documents with different classifications and assign varying levels of protection and access to them based on those tags. The second security measure is Microsoft Defender for 365. It’s a 365-optimized version of the Microsoft Defender Security platform that provides antivirus and malware protection to data and endpoints. Microsoft hasn’t pulled any punches, and you can try the service free for one month by visiting the company’s website. For the money, the Business Premium tier will likely be the most popular purchase for most businesses.
However, if all that is too rich or unnecessary for you, there are lower-cost options. A Microsoft 365 Business Basic edition is only $5 per user per month and includes Microsoft Teams, but relegates users to the web and mobile versions of the Office apps with no desktop versions included. The next cheapest is Microsoft 365 Apps, which will run you $8.25 per user per month but includes only the Office Premium apps (desktop and web) and OneDrive storage. Collaboration with Microsoft Teams and SharePoint is not part of this tier.
Finally, the Microsoft 365 Business Standard tier should work for many smaller shops. This starts at $12.50 per user per month and includes everything in the Premium version except for Azure Information Protection, Defender, and Intune. While the prices are listed as per-user-per-month, all tiers require an annual commitment.
Compared to our other Editors’ Choice winner, Google Workspace Business Standard, Microsoft 365 Business Premium is certainly more costly, especially since Google provides such massive mailbox storage for just $12 per user per month for its Standard tier. However, Google’s bundled apps aren’t nearly as comprehensive as Microsoft’s, especially for data, user, and device management. It may cost more, but Microsoft 365 is still the more powerful platform.
Setting Up Business Premium
As with any email hosting service, getting set up is often the hardest part. However, Microsoft has done a nice job of cutting through the traditionally cumbersome parts because it uses a guided setup process. It walks you through all of the major steps, such as downloading Office to every client, adding your domain name (including the option to migrate from another host), setting up Teams, and then enabling data loss prevention (DLP), which protects against anyone leaking your sensitive data. As a final step, you can configure protection for mobile app users by enabling data encryption and enforcing things such as re-authentication after a certain number of minutes.
Since the copy of Office you install is already pre-linked with your account, there isn’t much in the way of setup beyond running the installer and, on rare occasions, providing your log-in details. I really liked that you can do this for up to five devices per user. In today’s world, it’s not uncommon to have a desktop, laptop, and several mobile devices, so having a license that covers them all is not only convenient but saves money, too.
Managing users is straightforward, too. Once you add a user, you’ll be on the hook for an additional per-user-per-month charge, but beyond putting in some basic information and setting an initial password, there isn’t much else to do.
If you need more granular control of your environment, as most larger businesses will, there’s a handy admin center. This is where you’ll fine-tune settings like threat management, mail flow rules, device policies, and similar IT chores. Another nice touch is that Microsoft 365 Business Premium already has standard best practices configured when it comes to security and user management. That means most small and midsized businesses (SMBs) can simply set up and go, knowing the service will cover their basic IT needs out of the box.
If you need more or something different, you can always change things in the admin center. While this part of the service is definitely intended for IT professionals, the admin center is very well organized. I could quickly find what I was looking for and access the appropriate management tools.
Email Client and Collaboration Tools
While PCMag provides a deep dive on Microsoft 365’s Office suite tools, an email hosting review wouldn’t be complete without looking at email and collaboration tools. These are more important than ever now that we’re all moving toward the new hybrid normal.
Collaboration in Microsoft 365 Business Premium is essentially about Microsoft Office combined with Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint. If you’ve used these apps separately, you’ll love how they work together here. As far as the email client goes, the heart of the user experience is, of course, Microsoft Outlook.
Most users have some experience with Outlook on the desktop, but with 365 Business, the really exciting stuff is happening in the web client. A recent addition, Microsoft Edit, is Microsoft’s answer to Grammarly. It works across all the apps in the Office suite, but only on the web side. There’s another handy feature that lets you quickly add files related to a conversation thread without having to go and search for the thread. Currently, this only works on OneDrive documents, but it’s nice to have if you happen to be using the web client.
If we have a gripe with Microsoft 365, here it is: A web client should work across any browser, but Microsoft has really only focused on Windows and macOS. If you try and use a Microsoft 365 Office web app via a Linux browser, you’ll almost certainly experience compatibility problems. Yes, the apps are usable overall, but you get a much smoother experience on the two commercial operating systems. Hopefully, this will change now that Microsoft is working to better integrate Linux with Windows.
Even considering only the commercial operating systems, macOS is still noticeably behind Windows when it comes to how Outlook functions. Organization and advanced features are definitely lagging, which really shouldn’t be the case anymore. Microsoft has also focused more on advancing its web version of Office than the desktop equivalents.
For example, aside from the Edit feature mentioned above, Redmond has made a very convenient change to the calendar. If you’ve had to schedule a video conference during the pandemic, you’ve probably had to do it for a larger number of people than usual, which means sifting through a long list of schedules until you find an open slot that works for everyone—typically two or three months after you wanted to have the meeting. Outlook can now do that grunt work for you, using artificial intelligence (AI) to recommend times that will work best based on everyone’s availability. If someone can’t make it, there’s a structured way to suggest alternate times. That’s great, but it only works in the Outlook web client, not the desktop version.
Integration with Microsoft Teams is a given, but nevertheless important. There’s a one-button option to add a Teams meeting to any meeting event. It’s worth noting that invitees don’t need to have the Teams client to attend, though that does give the best experience.
SharePoint is another Microsoft 365 component that’s probably underutilized by most customers because getting it up and running can be overwhelming. But if you need a centralized location to organize, plan, and collaborate on documents with change management enabled, this is the way to do it. It’s also got task and workflow management, so it can be a little difficult to decide where to start, and you may need IT’s help, but once you’ve got a plan for using SharePoint, other functionality will grow organically.
Administration and Security
Microsoft does a good job with both security and privacy. Two-factor authentication is pervasive and there are a variety of data protection features beneath that. In the admin center, you can set up DLP policies that look at data and automatically classify what they recognize—creating a rule, for example, that classifies a file as private whenever the DLP policy finds a Social Security number in it. You can also specify operations like auto-encrypting a document or restricting access and user rights.
On the email side, there’s Microsoft 365 Message Encryption and Exchange Online Archiving. The former adds encryption and access rights to your emails so only the intended recipient is able to view them. It’s included with Microsoft 365, but it’ll work across Gmail and other email systems as well.
Exchange Online Archiving lets administrators set email archiving and retention policies. You can designate emails of a specific age to be automatically deleted or stored securely in the cloud, and you can do it based on content policies. For example, a healthcare organization could automatically delete most older emails, while securely archiving only those it needed to pass a future HIPAA audit. While no service is bulletproof when it comes to security, Microsoft puts up a great fight.
This all happens in the admin center, but this view offers more than just security. You’ll come here to manage devices and add, delete, or modify user identities. There’s also a nice dashboard right up front where the system will alert you to any problems or pressing needs associated with your account. Service downtime, a security issue, user problems, DLP queries—it’ll all be surfaced here along with the tools you’ll need to address things. Finally, IT administrators that move around a lot can also get access to the admin center via a Microsoft 365 mobile app, available on both iOS and Android. The app provides instant visibility into any alert, though you’ll need access to the full web admin app to address more complex problems.
If maintaining regulatory compliance is part of your job, know that Microsoft has data centers distributed across the U.S. and Northern Europe. All of them have undergone SOC auditing and achieved SOC 1 Type2, SOC 2, and SOC 3 compliance status. And if you’ve got a HIPPA Business Associate Agreement (BAA) in place, the service will cover HIPAA for you, too.
There’s a much longer list of regulations that Microsoft 365 supports, but the more important news centers around the Compliance Manager. This is a workflow-oriented risk assessment tool that will help you manage all the nitty-gritty details of whatever regulation you need to support. Once you’ve set it up, that’ll include things like data controls and retention, security policies, and audit trails, to name a few.
Compliance Manager constantly scans those parameters and gives you an overall Compliance Score in your dashboard. Any problems are surfaced as alerts, and you can drill down into them for a detailed explanation and the Compliance Manager’s recommendation for fixing it. This will be something of a bear to set up, but once you’ve got it running, it can drastically lighten your IT compliance load.
Third-Party App Integration
Microsoft used to win this category hands down, but Google Workspace and other email hosting players are catching up fast. Still, for the moment, we’re giving Microsoft an edge here due to a partner system that’s not only huge but very mature.
Sure, you’ll find the usual names like Workspace, Slack, Trello, and Zapier on the list, but there’s a whole library of other apps and integrations you can bolt-on for specific kinds of tasks, workloads, or vertical business needs. That library is so vast largely because Microsoft has traditionally pushed its development tools hard and made them available practically for free to anyone building Windows-compatible software. That created a happy developer base that even today few other companies can match.
The Gold Standard
Overall, Microsoft 365 Business Premium is the choice to beat in the email hosting category. Even with the big advances made by Google, Microsoft’s offering still has significantly better features and its web-to-desktop experience is unrivaled. Its tools let you do everything from managing email to collaborating across teams using messaging, document sharing, and voice or video conferencing.
Even strictly from an email hosting perspective, Microsoft 365 remains a leading contender. Setup, user importing and management, and a granular level of data security, loss prevention, and compliance management all come in a combination you just can’t find elsewhere. Yes, it’s more expensive than its rivals, but you really get what you pay for: an exceptionally well-rounded and secure end-to-end business productivity solution that’s an easy pick for our Editors’ Choice award.
