The Three Plans at a Glance
Anthropic's business plans exist on a spectrum from individual professional use to full enterprise deployment. Understanding where your organisation sits on that spectrum — and where it's heading — is the key to making the right choice. Choosing the wrong plan isn't just a waste of money; it's a deployment blocker when your security team discovers features you thought you had aren't included.
- All Claude models (Opus, Sonnet, Haiku)
- Extended context window
- Priority access during peak hours
- Projects and persistent memory
- No admin console
- No SSO / SAML
- No audit logs
- No usage analytics
- No data retention controls
- Everything in Pro
- Team admin console
- Centralised billing and invoicing
- Shared projects across team members
- Higher message limits than Pro
- Usage analytics dashboard
- No SSO / SAML integration
- No SCIM provisioning
- No audit logs
- No custom data retention
- Everything in Team
- SSO / SAML integration
- SCIM user provisioning
- Audit logs and activity trails
- Custom data retention policies
- Domain-level access controls
- Dedicated customer success manager
- Formal SLA (99.9% uptime)
- Custom usage limits
- DPA and GDPR addendums
Feature-by-Feature Comparison
The plan cards above give you the headline picture. This table goes deeper — specifically on the features that matter most when deploying Claude inside a corporate IT environment where security, governance, and compliance teams have requirements that must be met.
| Feature | Pro | Team | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|
| Access & Models | |||
| Claude Opus 4 access | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Claude Sonnet and Haiku | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Extended context window (200K tokens) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Cowork mode (agent + file + tool access) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Priority model access during peak | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Administration | |||
| Admin console | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Centralised billing / invoicing | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Usage analytics dashboard | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Per-user usage controls | ✗ | Limited | ✓ |
| Department-level access controls | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Identity & Security | |||
| SSO / SAML 2.0 integration | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| SCIM automated user provisioning | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Audit logs / activity trails | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Domain-level enforce access | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Anthropic does not train on data | Opt-out | Default off | Default off |
| Compliance & Legal | |||
| Data Processing Agreement (DPA) | ✗ | Self-serve | Negotiated |
| GDPR / CCPA addendums | ✗ | Standard only | ✓ |
| Custom data retention policies | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| SOC 2 Type II report available | On request | On request | ✓ |
| Formal SLA (uptime guarantee) | ✗ | ✗ | 99.9% SLA |
| Support & Success | |||
| Dedicated customer success manager | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Priority technical support | ✗ | Standard | Prioritised |
| Custom usage limits / expansion | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
Which Plan Is Right for Your Organisation?
The honest answer depends on three questions: How many users? Does your IT/Security team require SSO and audit logs? Are you in a regulated industry? If yes to either of the last two, the answer is Enterprise regardless of headcount. Here's the decision framework:
Individual contributors and small teams
1-4 users. No IT governance requirement. You're paying personally or through expense reports. You need access to Claude Opus and higher message limits. You don't need centralised billing or an admin console.
Teams of 5-99, IT-managed but non-regulated
You need centralised billing, a shared admin console, and usage analytics. Your security team is comfortable without SSO. You're in an industry where audit logs aren't a regulatory requirement. Team is the sweet spot for growth-stage companies and department-level deployments.
100+ users, regulated industries, enterprise IT
Your CISO requires SSO. Your Legal team requires a negotiated DPA. You're in financial services, healthcare, legal, or government. You need audit logs for compliance. You need a formal SLA for production systems. Enterprise is the only plan that checks these boxes.
The SSO Question is the Deciding Factor
In practice, the single feature that most reliably determines whether an organisation needs Enterprise over Team is SSO. Large organisations cannot allow employees to create individual Anthropic accounts and log in with personal credentials. IT needs to provision and de-provision accounts through their identity provider (Okta, Azure AD, Ping Identity). That requires SAML 2.0 integration and SCIM — both Enterprise-only.
If your IT security policy mandates that all SaaS tools integrate with your corporate identity provider, you need Enterprise. There's no workaround on Team. This is the most common mistake we see: organisations starting on Team, deploying to 200 users, and then discovering they need to migrate to Enterprise because IT won't allow the non-SSO deployment to continue. Our Claude Enterprise implementation service handles this migration, but it's much easier to start on the right plan.
Regulated Industries: Enterprise Is Non-Negotiable
If you operate in financial services, healthcare, legal, insurance, or government, the conversation about plans is very short: you need Enterprise. Here's why, specifically for each regulatory context:
Financial Services (FCA, SEC, FINRA). Audit trails for AI-assisted decisions are increasingly a regulatory expectation. When a trader or analyst uses Claude to synthesise research, that interaction needs to be logged. Team has no audit logging. Enterprise does. For FSI deployments, also check whether your data residency requirements are compatible with Anthropic's available infrastructure.
Healthcare (HIPAA). Using Claude with any data that could include protected health information (PHI) requires a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with Anthropic. Anthropic provides BAAs on Enterprise contracts. Not on Team. Full stop.
Legal Services. Legal privilege and client confidentiality create strict requirements around data handling. Law firms deploying Claude for contract analysis or legal research need data processing agreements that explicitly address privilege and confidentiality — negotiated DPAs that are only available on Enterprise.
For a deeper look at regulated industry deployments, see our article on Claude for regulated industries.
Need Help Choosing the Right Plan?
Our Claude Strategy & Roadmap service includes a plan selection consultation — matching your security requirements, headcount, and use cases to the right Anthropic plan and negotiating the best commercial terms.
Book a Free Strategy Call →Negotiating Enterprise Pricing
Enterprise pricing is custom and negotiated annually. A few things worth knowing before you enter the negotiation:
Anthropic prices Enterprise contracts primarily on seat count and usage volume. The per-seat rate decreases materially at higher volumes — organisations with 500+ seats negotiate significantly better rates than those with 100 seats. If you can commit to a 2-year term rather than annual, Anthropic will discount further.
The other lever is product bundling. If you're deploying both Claude Enterprise (for knowledge workers) and Claude Code (for developers), negotiate both in a single contract. The combined ARR gives you more negotiating leverage than two separate contracts.
Anthropic has a formal sales process for Enterprise. Expect the contract cycle to run 4-8 weeks — longer if your procurement team requires a security review, competitive bidding process, or legal redlines. Start the commercial process in parallel with your technical evaluation, not after it. See our full 90-day deployment playbook for how to structure this correctly.
Enterprise vs API: Which Should You Choose?
- Claude Enterprise: For knowledge workers using Claude through the claude.ai interface (and Cowork, Code, Chrome extensions). Seat-based licensing. Admin-managed.
- Claude API: For engineering teams building custom applications on Claude. Token-based pricing. Developer-managed. No seat concept.
- Most large organisations need both — Enterprise for knowledge workers, API for engineering. These are separate contracts and separate pricing conversations.
Migrating from Team to Enterprise
If your organisation started on Team and needs to move to Enterprise, Anthropic's process is straightforward but requires coordination. Your existing Team conversations and Projects can be preserved. The migration primarily involves: provisioning SSO in your identity provider, enabling SCIM in Anthropic's admin console, and notifying users of the new login flow.
The friction points in migration are typically on the IT side — getting SSO configured correctly, verifying SCIM provisioning for all user groups, and handling edge cases like contractors or external users who don't have corporate identity provider accounts. Our team has managed this migration for several clients; the typical timeline from decision to completion is 2-3 weeks with dedicated IT resource.