Free Tier of Teams for Consumers and Small Business

• A free tier of Teams offers many of the service’s core features to consumers and small business.
• The offer is available only to consumers and businesses without an Office 365 tenancy.
• Limitations make the free tier unsuitable for enterprise customers and could lead to compliance risks.

The Microsoft Teams chat and communication platform now offers a free tier to compete with similar offers from competitors like Slack. The free tier of Teams offers much of the core functionality of the paid service but has limitations that make it unsuitable for large enterprise customers outside of controlled proof-of-concept testing. Auditing, reporting, and eDiscovery features needed by organizations with regulatory and legal requirements are not part of the free tier of Teams.

An e-mail address is required to register a free Teams instance, but the offer is not available to users with e-mail addresses that are part of an Office 365 tenancy or managed by Azure Active Directory (AAD). Government and academic e-mail addresses are also ineligible.