Microsoft Teams Rooms Basic vs Pro: which licence do you need?

Microsoft Teams Rooms ships in two licence tiers: Basic, free for up to 25 rooms per tenant with the core meeting experience, or Pro at roughly £36 per room per month with unlimited rooms, AI camera features and the Pro Management portal. Choose Basic for an estate of 25 rooms or fewer with no AI cameras and no need for proactive monitoring; choose Pro for anything larger, or for any estate you want managed centrally.

From the floor. The cost mistake clients make is buying Basic for 24 rooms today, then triggering Pro on every room once they cross 25, which is a step change of £36 a month times the whole estate. A 50-room growth path that starts on Basic and tips into Pro costs more in year three than starting Pro on day one if you already see the headcount trajectory. Model the licence cost on a 36-month curve, not on the room count this week. (Mark Brooks, Commercial Director)

Teams Rooms Pro licence: UK price and what it includes

Teams Rooms Pro is listed at about £36 per room per month in the UK, usually bought on an annual commitment through a Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider or an Enterprise Agreement; the exact figure moves with the billing term, the currency adjustment Microsoft applies each year and whether VAT is shown. For a 30-room estate that is roughly £13,000 a year. The licence includes the AI camera and audio features (auto-framing, speaker tracking, front row, intelligent capture), the Pro Management portal with proactive device monitoring, fleet firmware and update rings, room usage analytics, Teams Premium meeting features in the room, and eligibility for Microsoft-managed services. Each room needs its own Pro licence assigned to its resource account; there is no per-tenant bundle.

Teams Rooms Basic: what the free tier limits

Basic is genuinely free, but it is capped at 25 rooms per tenant, it switches off the AI camera features even when the hardware supports them, and it has no Pro Management portal, so monitoring falls back to the standard Teams admin centre and manual firmware updates. It suits a single-site organisation with a handful of rooms, standard bars without AI cameras, and an IT team happy to manage devices by hand.

Which licence do you need?

Choose Basic when the estate is 25 rooms or fewer, the hardware has no AI cameras (no Rally Bar Pro, Poly Studio E70, Neat Center or Cisco Room Bar Pro), the IT team can manage devices manually, and nobody needs room analytics. Most single-site SME deployments fit this profile.

Choose Pro when the estate is 25 rooms or more (Basic is hard-capped, so growth past 25 forces Pro on every room), AI cameras are specified, the IT team wants centralised firmware and configuration management, or the business wants proactive monitoring rather than reactive tickets. The Basic to Pro upgrade is a one-way change per room in practice: once Pro features are switched on, downgrading means re-provisioning. Plan licensing alongside hardware procurement; the Microsoft Teams Rooms page covers room-by-room licence assignment during installation.

For context, Zoom Rooms has one licence tier at roughly £45 per room per month with no free option. On a sub-25-room estate Basic wins on cost; on larger estates Pro and Zoom Rooms are near parity, and the video conferencing systems choice reverts to which platform owns the calendar.

Quick reference: Basic free up to 25 rooms, no AI cameras, no Pro Management; Pro about £36/room/month, unlimited rooms, AI cameras, central management; one-way upgrade per room; Zoom Rooms about £45/room/month single tier.