Microsoft 365 Education A1 vs A3 vs A5: Which Plan Fits Your School

Microsoft describes the entry tier as Office 365 A1 and states that it donates Office 365 A1, including web and AI tools, at no cost to eligible institutions. Its fuller phrasing on the same page is that Microsoft donates Office 365 A1 for Education to eligible institutions, for educators and students, at no cost to ensure equitable access for learning and building skills for the future. Read that as Microsoft's statement about Microsoft's own program: Microsoft defines who is eligible and Microsoft administers the determination. Nothing on this page is a representation that any particular school, district or institution qualifies.

Microsoft 365 Education A3 is described as the right solution for institutions that need features from Office 365 A1, plus desktop apps, security, and device management. Microsoft 365 Education A5 is described as its most comprehensive plan, featuring everything A3 offers, plus unified communications, analytics, advanced security, and management tools. Those two sentences are a fair map of the table: A3 is the tier where installed applications and the management stack become entitlements, and A5 is the tier where the deeper identity, analytics and compliance components stop being add-ons.

All three descriptions are quoted from Microsoft's education plan-comparison page as read in September 2026. Microsoft revises that page without notice, so confirm the current wording at the source before it goes into a requisition.

The largest single change is where the Office applications run. On A1 Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook are listed as online only; on A3 and A5 they are listed as desktop and online. For a school that is entirely browser-based on managed devices with reliable connectivity, that difference may be academic. For one that needs installed applications — offline work, heavy spreadsheets, staff who live in Outlook, or assessment environments that cannot depend on a network — it is the whole decision, and no amount of add-on purchasing changes the A1 row.

The second change is management and endpoint security. Microsoft Intune and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint are listed as add-ons on A1 and as included on A3 and A5, and Microsoft Purview follows the same pattern. Minecraft Education, Microsoft Clipchamp and Microsoft Viva move the same way. A district that has already decided it will run Intune and Defender should price the A1-plus-add-ons route against A3 rather than assume the free tier is the cheaper answer — that comparison is a quote conversation, not something this page can settle, because Microsoft publishes no pricing on the page these facts come from.

Two things do not change between A1 and A3, and both are easy to mis-scope. Microsoft Forms and Microsoft Stream are listed as online only on all three tiers, so stepping up does not turn them into installed applications. Microsoft School Data Sync is listed as desktop and online on all three, so roster synchronisation is not the reason to leave A1.

One cell on Microsoft's comparison is worth naming precisely because it is empty. Microsoft Entra ID is listed as desktop and online on A3 and A5, and Microsoft publishes no value at all in the A1 column — as read in September 2026 it is the only feature row on that page with a blank cell, and no footnote explains it. That is not the same as the capability being excluded, and it is not the same as it being included; it is Microsoft declining to state one. Anyone scoping identity at A1 should get that answer from Microsoft or from a licensing quote rather than from a table that does not carry it, which is why this page reproduces the blank as "Not stated" instead of filling it in.

On Microsoft's comparison, A5 is a narrower step than A3 was. Exactly two rows in the table above change from add-on on A3 to included on A5: Microsoft Defender for Identity, and Power BI Pro — which Microsoft lists as an add-on limited to desktop on both A1 and A3, and as desktop and online on A5. Everything a teacher touches in a classroom is already present at A3.

There is a qualification on that first row, and on a school licence it is the important half. Microsoft footnotes three of its A5 security cells — Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Identity and Microsoft Purview — with "Student use benefit not included. Option available for discounted purchase as a standalone license." So the A5 entitlement for those three, as Microsoft publishes it in September 2026, is not a whole-population one: student coverage is a separate purchase. In a district where students are most of the licence count, that changes what "included at A5" is worth, and it belongs in the comparison before the tier is chosen rather than after.

That shape matches Microsoft's own framing of A5 as adding unified communications, analytics, advanced security and management tools on top of everything A3 offers. In practice the institutions that reach for it are the ones with a security or compliance function that will actually operate those components — an identity-threat capability nobody monitors is licensed, not deployed. If the answer to "who runs this day to day" is nobody yet, A3 plus a deliberate add-on is usually the more honest position than A5.

Microsoft Sentinel is the row that stays an add-on at every tier, A5 included. So is Microsoft 365 Copilot, and so are agents grounded in your tenant's Microsoft Graph data. No education tier includes them, and a plan decision cannot be used to acquire them.

Microsoft lists the Learning Accelerators — Reading Progress and Reading Coach, Search Progress and Search Coach, Speaker Coach, Reflect, Education Insights and Math Progress — as desktop and online across A1, A3 and A5. The accessibility tools are listed the same way: Immersive Reader, Translator, Narrator, voice typing and live captions are present on every tier.

That matters for how the decision gets framed internally. The instructional and accessibility layer is not the thing you are buying when you move up a tier, and a business case built on "we need Reading Coach" or "we need Immersive Reader" is arguing for a tier the school may already have. The tier decision is about installed applications, device management, and how much of the security and analytics stack is an entitlement rather than a line item.

It carries no pricing. Microsoft publishes none on the comparison page these facts are drawn from, and a plan price quoted second-hand on a reseller page is stale the day it is written.

It makes no eligibility determination. Microsoft decides which institutions qualify for the donated Office 365 A1 program and for education pricing generally, and it does so against its own criteria. Reproducing Microsoft's description of that program is not the same as telling a school it qualifies, and this page does not do the second thing.

It does not track add-on availability over time. "Available as an add-on" is a licensing state that Microsoft changes — the Copilot and agent rows in particular have moved repeatedly — so treat every cell above as a September 2026 reading of one Microsoft page and confirm the current state at the source before a purchase order references it.