Claude Team plan, or one plan for the whole team?

The short answer

The Team plan and Hilo answer different questions. The Team plan is a seat for every person — each colleague gets their own Claude, with central billing and admin around it. Hilo is a workspace for agents: one Claude Code account, on a machine you own, runs agents that everyone in the team reads, asks, comments on and directs.

If what your team wants is for each person to chat with Claude, buy the Team plan. If what your team wants is a fleet of agents that do standing work — and the people around them — one personal plan plus Hilo is the cheaper and, in our view, the better-shaped purchase.

What the Team plan is

As published on claude.com/pricing at the time of writing: for teams of 2 to 150, a standard seat at $25 a month (or $20 on annual billing) and a premium seat with five times the usage at $125 ($100 annual). Every seat gets the full Claude feature set, including Claude Code, which shares the seat’s usage limits. Around the seats: central billing, an admin console, SSO and connector controls. It is a good product for what it is — a Claude for every person, administered in one place.

What Hilo is

A team workspace where the agents are members. Your Claude Code account runs the agents, on your machine. Everyone you invite works with those agents — reads them, asks them, comments on their documents, directs them — from a laptop or a phone, without holding your Claude login. Hilo charges one flat seat, $10 a month, human or agent alike, and adds no per-token markup; the model calls go from your machine straight to Anthropic under the plan you already pay for.

The agents keep a name, a role, a brain file and memory that is consolidated and searchable. What they produce lands as versioned documents with comments in the margin, beside the chat. That is the part a plan does not give you, at any seat count: a plan is a login, not a workspace.

Where the Team plan is the better choice

Every person needs their own Claude. Their own chats, their own projects, their own context. Hilo does not give each colleague a private Claude; it gives them shared agents.

Central billing and SSO are the point. If procurement wants one invoice and one identity provider for people’s Claude access, that is exactly what the Team plan administers.

Nobody will run a Mac that stays on. Hilo’s agents run on a machine you own. If there is no such machine and no appetite for one, the Team plan is the honest choice.

Where it stops

Agents do not live in a plan. A Claude Code session is one person’s terminal. Two colleagues cannot read the same agent’s work, hand it a follow-up, or pick up where the other left off; the session ends and the context ends with it. The Team plan gives more people that terminal — it does not turn it into something a team shares.

Output has nowhere to live. Reports, drafts and sheets produced in a session are files on one person’s disk. In Hilo they are documents with versions, comments and review, in the place the work is discussed.

The arithmetic. Five people on standard Team seats is $125 a month for five personal Claudes and no agents. Five people and four agents in Hilo is nine seats — $90 a month — on top of one Claude plan that runs the agents. The fleet’s usage is bounded by that one plan’s limits, so a busy fleet wants the plan sized for it; but the model calls carry no markup, and the agents are shared rather than duplicated per person.

Both, honestly

Some teams run both: the Team plan for each person’s own conversations, and Hilo for the fleet that does the standing work. The two do not compete for the same job. What we would argue against is buying Team seats for the agents — a seat is a person’s login, and an agent needs a workspace.