How Much Does Microsoft Teams Cost in 2026?

Teams is two different products depending on who you are. For Microsoft 365 shops, it's a no-brainer. You're already paying $6-12.50/user/mo for Office apps, email, and 1 TB of OneDrive storage. Video conferencing is just... there. Included. The free plan gives you 60-minute group calls — 20 minutes longer than Zoom's free tier — and the Essentials plan at $4/mo is the cheapest paid option in this entire category. Not close. For everyone else, Teams is a harder sell. The app is heavy. The interface throws channels, chats, files, and calls at you all at once, and if all you want is to hop on a video call, it feels like driving a semi-truck to the grocery store. Zoom and Google Meet are much lighter for pure video use. Here's the real catch: Copilot, Microsoft's AI assistant that does meeting summaries and action items, costs $30/user/mo on top of your existing plan. That's not a typo. For a 15-person team, that's $450/mo just for AI features that Zoom includes free with its $13.33/mo Pro plan. You'd spend $650/mo on Teams Business Basic + Copilot versus $200/mo on Zoom Pro with AI Companion included. The persistent chat and channels are genuinely great for teams that live in the app all day — it replaces Slack for a lot of organizations. And the SharePoint/OneDrive integration means files shared in a meeting automatically land in the right folder. But if you're a small team that just needs reliable video calls and doesn't use Word or Excel daily, you're paying a Microsoft tax for features you won't touch.