Frontline Worker plan licenses

Overview

There are three plans for Frontline Workers as shown in the table below. Organizations choose Office 365 F3 when they want their users to use the Microsoft 365 for mobile apps and Microsoft 365 for the web and to have a good level of access to Online Services such as Exchange and SharePoint Online. Microsoft 365 F3 licenses users for Office 365 F3, EMS E3 and Windows 11 Enterprise E3.

Organizations choose Microsoft 365 F1 when users need a pretty limited set of functionality. You can see in the table below that there’s a gray tick for the Microsoft 365 for mobile/web apps – licensed users just have read-only access to documents. Additionally, these users have no email rights although, confusingly, there is actually an Exchange mailbox provisioned for users to enable the full Teams experience. Organizations that find that Microsoft 365 F1 would be the perfect solution if it only included email should additionally acquire an Exchange Online Plan 1 User SL for those users. You can find some advice for these users in the Product Terms on this page.

Microsoft’s Plan Comparison document is a splendid resource which is updated regularly and will assist you in finding out about the (seemingly endless) individual components that are included In the Microsoft 365 F1/F3 and Office 365 F3 plans.

History

There were changes to the line-up of the Frontline Worker plans in April 2020. Prior to that date, there were two plans – Office 365 F1 and Microsoft 365 F1. On April 1, 2020 these were renamed to the F3 versions, and a new Microsoft 365 F1 suite was launched with a subset of the features, as shown above.