Microsoft Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide

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Dynamics 365 Licensing Overview

Microsoft Dynamics 365 uses a role-based licensing model for individual apps aligned with standard business processes.

Typically, an organisation will pay per user/month/application, which provides the flexibility to scale up and down their business operations.

Dynamics 365 starts with a base app for each user. If required, additional apps can then be attached to this base at a discounted rate for users who require broader functionality beyond their base app.

For example, D365 Sales can be purchased as a base app, and D365 Customer Service could also be attached, enabling a user to manage leads/opportunities and cases.

There are also variations of app licences, for instance, where Sales and Customer Service apps offer Professional and Enterprise tiers.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys (formerly D365 Marketing) is an exception, where licensing is structured on a per-tenant basis.

Dynamics 365 Team licences grant limited read access to Dynamics 365 data and applications. These include entitlements to create and update information across some tables, including contacts and activities.

Dynamics 365 Pricing

Prices below are Per User, Per Month, apart from Customer Insights (formerly Marketing).

Sales

Sales Professional

Base Price: £53.40
Subsequent attach price: £16.40

Sales Enterprise

Base Price: £86.30
(price increase announced from October 2024)
Subsequent attach price: £16.40

Sales Premium

Base Price £123.30
(price increase announced from October 2024)
Subsequent app price: N/A

Customer Insights (formerly Marketing)

Per Tenant

Base Price: £1,397.30
Attached price for qualifying customers¹: £821.90

Includes:

10,000 interacted people
100,000 unified people
1,000 SMS Messages

Customer Service

Customer Service Professional

Base Price: £41.10
Subsequent attach price: £16.40

Customer Service Enterprise

Base Price: £86.30
(price increase announced from October 2024)
Subsequent attach price: £16.40

Teams

Teams Licence

Dynamics 365 Team Member: £6.60

Power Apps Licensing

Power Apps has its own licensing pricing, enabling users to access unlimited apps and Power Automate workflows.

Dynamics 365 and Power Apps use Microsoft Dataverse as a common data model to store data. This supports scenarios where a combination of employees may be licensed with access to role-based Dynamics apps and their colleagues using Power Apps to manage specific processes.

Dynamics Licensing Frequently Asked Questions

Can I buy an annual Dynamics 365 subscription?

Microsoft changed their licensing models in 2022 to the New Customer Experience (NCE), which provides greater flexibility.

This allows commercial organisations to gain pricing certainty by locking in licence prices for 12 and 36 months.

For the annual and the new 36-month agreement options, cancellations made after 72 hours will be billed for the remaining term. Additional licences can be added at any time, but licence numbers can only be reduced or cancelled upon the expiry of these terms.

A monthly subscription offers the flexibility to reduce licences any month at a 20% price premium. This allows for monthly seat reductions and cancellation of licences any month without further financial commitment.

Licences can be mixed and matched to match their demand so that an organisation may have a combination of licences on monthly, 12-month and 36-month terms.

What cloud storage is included?

Your Dynamics 365 data is stored in Microsoft Dataverse, which provides the following default capacities:

Dataverse for Apps Database: 10 GB (Transactional database storage for entity definitions and record data)

Dataverse for Apps File: 20 GB (Storing attachments on emails and notes in Dynamics 365 apps, including PDFs, documents and images)

Dataverse for Apps Log: 2 GB (Audit logs tracking records and attribute data changes)

Each Sales Enterprise and Customer Service Enterprise licence accrues additional storage entitlement as follows:

  • Dataverse for Apps Database Capacity: @ 250 MB per user
  • Dataverse for Apps File Capacity: @ 2 GB per user
  • Dataverse for Apps Log Capacity: n/a

Storage capacities and current usage are managed in the Power Platform Admin Centre.

Users cannot perform specific actions such as copying, restoring, creating, or recovering an environment if the capacity is exceeded.

Read more about Dataverse storage.

How do Dynamics 365 Sales Pro and Enterprise licences compare?

Both licenses allow sellers to create and manage Leads, Opportunities, Accounts, Contacts, Activities, Campaigns, Marketing Lists, Products, Price Lists, Quotes, Orders, and Dashboards. Both licenses offer basic case creation capabilities and enable users to connect Dynamics 365 with Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Excel, and Power BI.

Sales Enterprise users can work across unlimited custom tables (entities). Sales Professional is limited to 15 custom tables that can be created and modified in a Dynamics environment.

Additional Microsoft Copilot capabilities are included with Sales Enterprise at no additional cost. The full range of Copilot features are available by purchasing Copilot for Sales, which brings together Copilot for Microsoft 365 with seller workflows in Dynamics 365. 

Sales Hub functions and services unavailable to Sales Pro users include sales goals, territory management, forecasting, product families, knowledge base, embedded intelligence and business units.

Sales Professional licences receive the same default cloud storage entitlements as Sales Enterprise, but Pro licences do not accrue additional storage capacity.

Also, Sales Professional does not include entitlement for Customer Voice surveys. Sales Enterprise has a default capacity for up to 2000 survey responses per tenant/month.

Read our licence comparison post to learn more.

How is Dynamics 365 Customer Service Licensed?

Both Customer Service licence types allow users to create and manage cases, contracts, entitlements, Service Level Agreements, contacts, accounts and lead records in Dynamics 365.

D365 Customer Service Pro is for teams who don’t need the expanded functionalities of D365 Customer Service Enterprise. The Professional licence is restricted to a maximum of 15 custom tables. Customer Service Enterprise provides unrestricted use.

Further caps for the Professional licence include:

  • Dashboards – limited to a maximum of 5 per table
  • Personal Forms and Views – maximum of 2 per table
  • Customise Business Processes – up to 5 per table
  • Queues – up to a maximum of 15

The following Enterprise entitlements are unavailable with a Professional licence: D365 Customer Voice survey response capacity, embedded intelligence (including Copilot), running Power Apps in the same environment, configuring and viewing the schedule board and accruing additional cloud storage per user.

Read our post to learn more about the differences between Enterprise and Pro licences.

How is Dynamics 365 Marketing licensed

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys is the new name for Dynamics 365 Marketing. This is licensed as Dynamics 365 Customer Insights on a per-tenant basis, including access to the Customer Insights – Journeys and Customer Insights – Data applications.

Reduced “attach” pricing is available to existing Dynamics customers with a minimum of 10 users of qualifying licences. These include Customer Service Pro or Enterprise and Sales Pro or Enterprise.

Customer Insights includes default capacity for 10,000 Interacted People in Customer Insights – Journeys per tenant/month and 100,000 Unified People in Customer Insights – Data per tenant/month. Capacity for four scheduled data refreshes is included.

Interacted People refers to contacts, leads, or profiles interacted with via channels like email or SMS in Customer Insights – Journeys. Unified People refers to unique customer profiles created by unifying data in Customer Insights – Data.

Additional capacity can be purchased as needed for both applications independently. This allows flexibility to scale up the application aligned to your usage needs. The licenses also provide capacity for scheduled data refreshes and environments. Purchasing add-on capacity does not increase the number of segments, KPIs, or allowed data refreshes. Please refer to Microsoft licensing documentation for full details on license capacities and add-ons.

How can I manage my licences?
Licences can be administered through the Power Platform Admin Center. A Microsoft partner will be able to support you and offer licensing guidance to ensure compliance with Microsoft’s terms and help you identify potential savings. For example, you may have a licence for Sales Pro for a user in your business, whereas a Teams licence could be sufficient based on their actual usage.
How are Dynamics 365 web portals licensed

Power Pages offers ready-made templates enabling low code websites to be quickly deployed that provide inbuilt integration with Dynamics 365 applications. Please read our article about Power Pages licensing to find out more.

Is there a Dynamics 365 licensing guide?

You can download the detailed Microsoft Dynamics 365 licensing guide, updated monthly.

Expert Licensing Help

At ServerSys, we have been managing licensing for organisations for many years.

We don’t just purchase licenses on your behalf, but will work closely with you to create the best strategy to ensure that you don’t overpay and remain compliant in line with Microsoft’s licensing terms.

If you are considering switching from your current partner, we offer a free review of your licensing. Contact us today with your Dynamics licensing questions.

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