Which Claude Plan Does My Company Need?

If your staff are using Claude — or thinking about it — you need to know which plan is safe for your business. The answer depends mostly on one question: will anyone use Claude with customer or employee data?

The table below shows where each plan stands on the three questions that matter for most companies.

What this means in practice

If your team only uses Claude for general productivity — writing, brainstorming, summarising public information, learning new topics — a consumer plan (Pro or Max) is fine, as long as staff are trained not to paste in confidential or personal data.

If your team uses Claude for anything involving customer data, employee data, financial records, or internal documents with personal information — you need a plan on the commercial side of the table. Consumer plans are not legally suitable for this, even if you turn off the training toggle.

Quick guidance by company size

• Small companies (1–20 employees): Teams (Premium) is usually the simplest fit. You get the data protection contract, the training prohibition, and Claude Code access in one subscription.
• Medium-sized companies (20–250 employees): Teams (Premium) or Enterprise, depending on how much central control you need over accounts, logs, and retention settings.
• Large companies and regulated sectors: Enterprise or a direct API arrangement. Enterprise adds configurable retention, Zero Data Retention options, and HIPAA availability. For organisations that require EU data residency, Claude must be deployed via AWS Bedrock or Google Vertex AI in an EU region — Anthropic's own infrastructure does not currently offer an EU residency option. See footnote 5.
• Educational institutions: Claude for Education is a university-wide programme available through Anthropic's education sales team. It covers students, faculty and staff under commercial terms.
• Developers using Claude Code: Note that Claude Code is the same tool regardless of plan, but the legal terms that apply to it depend on how your developers sign in. If they log in with a personal account, consumer terms apply to everything the tool touches — including source code and internal files. Using an organisation API key puts Claude Code under commercial terms.

Footnotes

1. Training. On Free, Pro and Max plans, a toggle called "Help improve Claude" controls whether Anthropic can use conversations for model training. It is turned on by default at signup. Users must actively turn it off. On commercial plans, training on customer data is contractually prohibited — it is not a setting that anyone can change.
2. Data protection contract. Under EU and Icelandic data protection law, any company that lets a third party handle personal data on its behalf must have a written data protection contract with that third party (known as a Data Processing Addendum, or DPA). Anthropic provides this automatically with commercial plans. It is not available on consumer plans.
3. Safe for customer or employee data. Without the data protection contract, your company cannot show regulators or auditors that it has the required paperwork in place. This matters regardless of whether training is switched off — the legal question is about having the contract, not just about what Anthropic does in practice.
4. Education. Claude for Education is a discounted university-wide plan covering students, faculty and staff. Pricing is not published and access is arranged through Anthropic's education sales team. It operates under commercial terms with the same DPA, EU SCCs and no-training contractual protection as the other commercial plans.
5. EU data residency. Anthropic's own infrastructure does not currently offer EU data residency for any product or plan. All data on Claude.ai (Free through Teams) and on the direct Anthropic API is stored in the United States. The API offers two inference geography options — "us" (US-only inference) and "global" (may run in any region for performance) — but "global" is not the same as guaranteed EU residency, and stored data is in the US in either case. Workspace storage is US-only and cannot be changed after creation. Anthropic has stated that additional inference regions will be added over time, but no EU option exists at the time of writing.
   To get guaranteed EU residency for Claude today, organisations have two routes, both of which deploy Claude through a third-party cloud partner: (a) AWS Bedrock, which offers Claude in eu-central-1 (Frankfurt), eu-west-1 (Ireland), eu-west-3 (Paris), eu-north-1 (Stockholm), and other EU regions; or (b) Google Vertex AI, which offers Claude in EU regions including Belgium. Both options require a commercial agreement with the cloud provider (AWS or Google) and route through their respective DPAs and EU Standard Contractual Clauses, in addition to Anthropic's terms.
   This is what the ⚠️ in the matrix represents: EU residency is achievable for Enterprise, Education and API customers who are willing to deploy via AWS or Google rather than directly through Anthropic. It is not available at all for the consumer plans (Free, Pro, Max) or the Teams chat product, because those don't have a cloud-partner equivalent.