Microsoft Corp. today launched a new version of Microsoft Teams called Essentials, the first time the company has offered a standalone version of its popular online meeting solution.

Microsoft Teams Essentials sits between the free version of Teams and the full Office 365 experience. For $4 per month, Teams Essentials gives subscribers unlimited group meetings for up to 30-hours, meetings with up to 300 people and cloud storage of 10 gigabytes per user. It’s an upgrade from the free version of Teams that has a cap of 100 people per meeting and group meetings of up to 60 minutes with 5 gigabytes of storage.

Teams Essentials includes easy invitations that only require an email address. Users don’t have to sign up, sign in or install Teams to participate in a meeting. The service provides support for Outlook Calendar integration with Google Calendar integration coming soon.

In addition, Teams Essentials offers professional meeting tools and capabilities such as meeting lobby and virtual backgrounds, always available chats, assigning tasks to teams and creating polls to receive feedback.

“We know how difficult the past 20 months have been for small businesses,” Jared Spataro, corporate vice president of Modern Work at Microsoft, said in a statement. “They’ve had to demonstrate extreme flexibility to adapt, often with limited access to tools and technology. Teams Essentials is built specifically to meet the unique needs of small businesses, enabling them to thrive in this new era of work.”

Microsoft is pitching the service as the “most competitively priced online meetings and collaboration solution on the market,” and at $4 per month, it’s a relatively low price. A similar paid plan with group meetings for up to 30 hours at Zoom Video Communications Inc. costs $14.99 per month, while the basic plan on Google Workspace is $6 per month.

That said, the next option up from Team Essentials is the Microsoft 365 Business Basic plan that costs $5 a month. For an extra $1 month a month above Team Essentials, users gain support for team meeting recordings with transcripts, 1 terabyte of storage per user and web and mobile versions of Office Apps.

Those apps are not Teams alone but also include Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, Outlook, Word, Excel and Powerpoint. For $1 extra per month, that’s arguably a much better value than subscribing to Teams Essentials.

Image: Microsoft