The Office 365 pricing plans get a bit confusing.
There's personal Office 365, business Office 365, editions available for a one-time purchase, subscription versions, and multiple plans for all the above.
Current Office 365 subscriptions will become Microsoft 365 subscriptions at no additional charge as of April 21 — 365 Personal and Family will keep the price the same at $6.99 a month for one. Interactive chart of historical net worth (market cap) for Microsoft (MSFT) over the last 10 years. How much a company is worth is typically represented by its market capitalization, or the current stock price multiplied by the number of shares outstanding. Microsoft net worth as of December 22, 2020 is $1000B.
It's a lot.
To cut through the confusion and help you pick the best plan, we've sorted everything out below.
When looking at Office 365, pricing is separated into two main groups: personal and business. Let's go through the personal plans first.
Office 365 Personal Pricing
Microsoft does have several Office 365 plans for personal use:
Keep in mind that all the products are available on Mac except for Publisher and Access
Also, the prices are monthly if you pay for an entire year up front annually. Minecraft how much is it. There is monthly billing but the prices will be higher.
Here's how to think of the two plans:
- Office 365 Personal = Perfect if you only need Microsoft Office for yourself.
- Office 365 Home = Good option if you want to get your whole family access to the Microsoft Office suite.
If you're using Office 365 for non-commercial use, all you need to decide is how many people at your home need access. Nice and easy.
Is Office 365 worth getting for personal use?
I don't believe so. Even the personal plan comes to about $70 per year. That's a lot compared to a free Gmail account from Google which includes access to Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Not only does Google offer their products for free to individuals, they also have a reputation for being much easier to use than the Microsoft Office products. In most cases, Google's the better choice for personal plans.
Unclutter 2 1 4 download free. There are two situations where I would go with a personal Office 365 plan:
- I worked in an industry or organization that used predominantly Microsoft Office products and my company didn't have a subscription to an Office 365 business plan. In that case, paying $70 a year to avoid the hassle of having to convert documents back and forth is well worth the cost.
- I personally needed the extra power that Microsoft's products have. While Google has a reputation for having products that are easier to use, Microsoft's products have more advanced features. Especially if I was doing heavy spreadsheet work, I'd get a personal version of Office 365 just for Excel.
Office 365 Business Pricing
There are also business plans for Office 365.
The biggest difference between the personal and business plans is the business versions are built around users. You'll be able to easily add and remove users for your company. When a new employee joins, you'll log into the admin area of Office 365, add the user, and that employee will have full access to Microsoft Office 365. It's a lot easier than dealing with licenses for individual computers.
Now for something super confusing: Microsoft only licenses their business plans for commercial use, their personal Office 365 plans are only licensed for home use.
What does that mean? Twin star exorcists english dubbed.
Technically, you can't use a Microsoft Office personal plan for working in a business setting. Does anyone enforce this? Not really. Do lots of people buy personal versions and then work on their business anyway? Yup.
And how do you even define 'business' setting versus a 'home' setting? Lots of us work from home and have side projects. Is this allowed on personal office plans? Honestly, I have no idea. After spending a bunch of time trying to find exact definitions for what business and personal versions of Office are licensed for, I'm just as confused as when I started.
This is a vestige of the old Microsoft Office days when work was clearly split between home and office environments. Now that work has moved to the cloud and we can work from anywhere, all the lines have been blurred.
Thankfully, this is a non-issue for the most part. As soon as there are two people working at your business, you'll want to get on the business plans in order to get company email and easily manage users on your plan.
The Office 365 business plans compete directly with G Suite's plans. We have an in-depth article that breaks down the difference between them here.
All of the business plans include Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access.
The Office 365 plans do have one major weakness though. https://ear-free.mystrikingly.com/blog/create-disk-image.
How Much Is Microsoft Office
Every time I go back to the Office 365 business pricing, I think to myself: 'I must have gotten something wrong, why wouldn't they include email on their middle tier? It makes no sense.'
Then I check their pricing page and the middle plan (Business) still has company email missing.
When sitting up an office suite for your company, you also want to set up your company email. You'll want an easy way to create name@company.com email addresses for all your employees. G Suite pioneered this by bundling the Google Doc apps with Gmail. Giving a new person at your company an office suite and company email at the same time removes a ton of headaches.
Unfortunately, only the lowest and most expensive Office 365 business plans include company email. The middle plan does not.
This pricing has a major gap that we're forced to contend with. Here's how the 3 business pricing tiers really break down:
- Business Essentials = a nice, low price, but only web-versions of the product suite so you and your team can't take advantage of the extra horsepower from having Office 365 apps. Does have company email.
- Business = can get the full power from the product suite by having desktop versions but there's no company email.
- Business Premium = the only tier that has full desktop apps and company email. I'm basically forced to upgrade straight to this tier to use the core benefits of Office 365.
Another hurdle to watch out for: if you start with Business Essentials and use the company email, you won't be able to use the middle Business tier down the road since it lacks email functionality. In other words, the only upgrade path is to go from Business Essentials to Business Premium which will more than double your monthly bill. The only way around this is to manage email yourself, typically through your web host. Or you could skip Office 365 entirely and use G Suite which has Gmail available on all its plans.
Office 365 does have some legitimate strengths of G Suite, mostly around the power of their apps. Excel runs circles around Google Sheets. If you're doing serious spreadsheet work, it's worth choosing Office 365 just to get access to Excel.
But the lack of company email in the Office 365 Business plan makes the purchase decision more complicated. It practically forces companies into the Business Premium version from the beginning, doubling the price of the product.
I really wish that Office 365 offered company email on all its business plans, it'd make a much more compelling offer.
Is it still possible to buy Microsoft Office as a one-time purchase?
Yes, Microsoft has two versions available without a subscription.
- Office Home & Student = Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for $149.99
- Office Home & Business 2019 = Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint for $249.99
Each option comes with the current version of all the products but doesn't include upgrades like the Office 365 subscription plans. After a few years, you'll have to purchase Microsoft Office again in order to upgrade the products.
They also don't include OneDrive storage, Skype minutes, or cloud versions of the products. They're old-school one-time install licenses.
Should I choose the one-time purchase option instead of Office 365?
Getting an Office 365 subscription will almost always be the better choice.
For businesses, we don't consider the one-time purchase edition of Microsoft Office to be a viable option. The Office Home & Business edition is only licensed for one computer at a price of $250. That's a steep price for a single computer. If you plan on hiring any employees, you'll get forced into Office 365 just to get multiple users on your plan.
As a business, you'll also need to stay on top of software upgrades. The one-time purchase only gets you access to the current version of the Microsoft Office apps. After 2-3 years, your version will be out-of-date enough that you'll need to upgrade with another one-time purchase. Once you factor in these upgrades, the cost of a one-time purchase vs an annual fee is about the same.
For individuals, the situation has a bit more nuance. If you're trying to watch every dollar, I recommend going with Google's product suite by getting a free Gmail account. It's hard to beat a price of $0.
But what if you HAVE to get Microsoft Office and you need to keep costs as low as possible?
In this case, I'd go with the Office Home & Student option and avoid upgrading for 3-5 years. As long as you don't upgrade for about two and a half years, you'll come out ahead. You'll be saving money every year that you wait after that. When I was in college, I definitely stretched my Microsoft Office software past any normal upgrade cycle to keep my expenses down. Even today, I have a version of Microsoft Office 2011 on my Mac that I keep forgetting to upgrade. I don't recommend waiting this long but it can be done to keep costs down.
Otherwise, I'd get the Office 365 subscription and be done with it.
Microsoft (formerly Office) 365 for Education looks like a great deal. It comes with Microsoft's productivity suite with additional communication and collaboration applications. It's also advertised as free. In this post we'll be asking:
- Is it really free?
- What do you get?
- How does it compare with G Suite?
First things first. Is it really free?
Bottom line up front: Microsoft 365 Education is totally free.
There are three Microsoft 365 Education plans. The basic plan, A1, is entirely free for an unlimited number of individual users. The other plans do charge per user if you want to upgrade your educational organization to those plans to get the extra features. This is entirely optional, the fee education plan has a ton of great stuff.
What do you need to get access to Microsoft 365 Education?
All you need to get started with Microsoft 365 Education is a valid school email address. You can enter it right on the Office Education homepage.
What's included in the plan?
Microsoft 365 brings all of Microsoft's core productivity and collaboration tools to the cloud. Email, group chat, and group collaboration within projects across multiple applications are all supported.
With the exception of Publisher, these apps are device-agnostic and can be accessed from anywhere, with storage on the Cloud in OneDrive.
The basic, free version of Microsoft 365 Education brings together the core apps in their online-only forms, meaning there's no desktop app. Users do get the desktop version of OneNote.
There's no limit to the number of users, and the plan includes Class and Staff notebooks, Professional Learning Community (PLC) groups, compliance solutions with a unified eDiscovery center, rights management, data loss prevention, and encryption.
Microsoft calls this their ‘A1' plan: entirely free for faculty and students, it includes: How to share imovie project.
Outlook
Outlook is Microsoft's business and organizational email, the equivalent of Gmail. Outlook Web Access (OWA) is free to anyone, and like Gmail is to G Suite, it's your ID for the rest of the Office ecosystem. For A1 plan users in Microsoft 365 Education, there's a 50GB inbox limit. There's unlimited email storage with In-Place archiving and legal hold.
If you already have a standard Outlook account you can connect it to OWA by enabling Outlook Anywhere in File>Account Settings>Exchange>More Settings>Connection.
Word
Microsoft's flagship word processing and desktop publishing application. The Microsoft 365 version offers instant simultaneous collaboration. A1 plan users get the web version.
Excel
Collaborate, create spreadsheets, get visualizations and use AI to get additional insights. On the A1 plan, you get the web version only.
Powerpoint
Create, edit, and collaborate on presentations and slideshows with animations, cinematic motion, 3D models, and a library of graphics and templates. Web version only.
OneNote
A note-taking app that allows hand drawing and annotation using a stylus, collaboration, and organization. The A1 plan gives you access to the desktop app.
Teams
Teams is a collaboration hub for Microsoft 365 users, with meetings and group chat, admin functions, and third-party apps.
OneDrive
Microsoft's cloud storage tool, OneDrive lets users set time limits on links, scan documents, whiteboard with their phones, and save the results as documents. There's also data loss management and encryption. Microsoft 365 Education users get unlimited OneDrive storage.
Stream
Microsoft's take on YouTube, Stream lets users make, share, and interact with videos across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Excel spreadsheet for mac.
Flow
Flow lets users automate tasks quickly and easily across applications without writing any code.
And how do you even define 'business' setting versus a 'home' setting? Lots of us work from home and have side projects. Is this allowed on personal office plans? Honestly, I have no idea. After spending a bunch of time trying to find exact definitions for what business and personal versions of Office are licensed for, I'm just as confused as when I started.
This is a vestige of the old Microsoft Office days when work was clearly split between home and office environments. Now that work has moved to the cloud and we can work from anywhere, all the lines have been blurred.
Thankfully, this is a non-issue for the most part. As soon as there are two people working at your business, you'll want to get on the business plans in order to get company email and easily manage users on your plan.
The Office 365 business plans compete directly with G Suite's plans. We have an in-depth article that breaks down the difference between them here.
All of the business plans include Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access.
The Office 365 plans do have one major weakness though. https://ear-free.mystrikingly.com/blog/create-disk-image.
How Much Is Microsoft Office
Every time I go back to the Office 365 business pricing, I think to myself: 'I must have gotten something wrong, why wouldn't they include email on their middle tier? It makes no sense.'
Then I check their pricing page and the middle plan (Business) still has company email missing.
When sitting up an office suite for your company, you also want to set up your company email. You'll want an easy way to create name@company.com email addresses for all your employees. G Suite pioneered this by bundling the Google Doc apps with Gmail. Giving a new person at your company an office suite and company email at the same time removes a ton of headaches.
Unfortunately, only the lowest and most expensive Office 365 business plans include company email. The middle plan does not.
This pricing has a major gap that we're forced to contend with. Here's how the 3 business pricing tiers really break down:
- Business Essentials = a nice, low price, but only web-versions of the product suite so you and your team can't take advantage of the extra horsepower from having Office 365 apps. Does have company email.
- Business = can get the full power from the product suite by having desktop versions but there's no company email.
- Business Premium = the only tier that has full desktop apps and company email. I'm basically forced to upgrade straight to this tier to use the core benefits of Office 365.
Another hurdle to watch out for: if you start with Business Essentials and use the company email, you won't be able to use the middle Business tier down the road since it lacks email functionality. In other words, the only upgrade path is to go from Business Essentials to Business Premium which will more than double your monthly bill. The only way around this is to manage email yourself, typically through your web host. Or you could skip Office 365 entirely and use G Suite which has Gmail available on all its plans.
Office 365 does have some legitimate strengths of G Suite, mostly around the power of their apps. Excel runs circles around Google Sheets. If you're doing serious spreadsheet work, it's worth choosing Office 365 just to get access to Excel.
But the lack of company email in the Office 365 Business plan makes the purchase decision more complicated. It practically forces companies into the Business Premium version from the beginning, doubling the price of the product.
I really wish that Office 365 offered company email on all its business plans, it'd make a much more compelling offer.
Is it still possible to buy Microsoft Office as a one-time purchase?
Yes, Microsoft has two versions available without a subscription.
- Office Home & Student = Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for $149.99
- Office Home & Business 2019 = Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint for $249.99
Each option comes with the current version of all the products but doesn't include upgrades like the Office 365 subscription plans. After a few years, you'll have to purchase Microsoft Office again in order to upgrade the products.
They also don't include OneDrive storage, Skype minutes, or cloud versions of the products. They're old-school one-time install licenses.
Should I choose the one-time purchase option instead of Office 365?
Getting an Office 365 subscription will almost always be the better choice.
For businesses, we don't consider the one-time purchase edition of Microsoft Office to be a viable option. The Office Home & Business edition is only licensed for one computer at a price of $250. That's a steep price for a single computer. If you plan on hiring any employees, you'll get forced into Office 365 just to get multiple users on your plan.
As a business, you'll also need to stay on top of software upgrades. The one-time purchase only gets you access to the current version of the Microsoft Office apps. After 2-3 years, your version will be out-of-date enough that you'll need to upgrade with another one-time purchase. Once you factor in these upgrades, the cost of a one-time purchase vs an annual fee is about the same.
For individuals, the situation has a bit more nuance. If you're trying to watch every dollar, I recommend going with Google's product suite by getting a free Gmail account. It's hard to beat a price of $0.
But what if you HAVE to get Microsoft Office and you need to keep costs as low as possible?
In this case, I'd go with the Office Home & Student option and avoid upgrading for 3-5 years. As long as you don't upgrade for about two and a half years, you'll come out ahead. You'll be saving money every year that you wait after that. When I was in college, I definitely stretched my Microsoft Office software past any normal upgrade cycle to keep my expenses down. Even today, I have a version of Microsoft Office 2011 on my Mac that I keep forgetting to upgrade. I don't recommend waiting this long but it can be done to keep costs down.
Otherwise, I'd get the Office 365 subscription and be done with it.
Microsoft (formerly Office) 365 for Education looks like a great deal. It comes with Microsoft's productivity suite with additional communication and collaboration applications. It's also advertised as free. In this post we'll be asking:
- Is it really free?
- What do you get?
- How does it compare with G Suite?
First things first. Is it really free?
Bottom line up front: Microsoft 365 Education is totally free.
There are three Microsoft 365 Education plans. The basic plan, A1, is entirely free for an unlimited number of individual users. The other plans do charge per user if you want to upgrade your educational organization to those plans to get the extra features. This is entirely optional, the fee education plan has a ton of great stuff.
What do you need to get access to Microsoft 365 Education?
All you need to get started with Microsoft 365 Education is a valid school email address. You can enter it right on the Office Education homepage.
What's included in the plan?
Microsoft 365 brings all of Microsoft's core productivity and collaboration tools to the cloud. Email, group chat, and group collaboration within projects across multiple applications are all supported.
With the exception of Publisher, these apps are device-agnostic and can be accessed from anywhere, with storage on the Cloud in OneDrive.
The basic, free version of Microsoft 365 Education brings together the core apps in their online-only forms, meaning there's no desktop app. Users do get the desktop version of OneNote.
There's no limit to the number of users, and the plan includes Class and Staff notebooks, Professional Learning Community (PLC) groups, compliance solutions with a unified eDiscovery center, rights management, data loss prevention, and encryption.
Microsoft calls this their ‘A1' plan: entirely free for faculty and students, it includes: How to share imovie project.
Outlook
Outlook is Microsoft's business and organizational email, the equivalent of Gmail. Outlook Web Access (OWA) is free to anyone, and like Gmail is to G Suite, it's your ID for the rest of the Office ecosystem. For A1 plan users in Microsoft 365 Education, there's a 50GB inbox limit. There's unlimited email storage with In-Place archiving and legal hold.
If you already have a standard Outlook account you can connect it to OWA by enabling Outlook Anywhere in File>Account Settings>Exchange>More Settings>Connection.
Word
Microsoft's flagship word processing and desktop publishing application. The Microsoft 365 version offers instant simultaneous collaboration. A1 plan users get the web version.
Excel
Collaborate, create spreadsheets, get visualizations and use AI to get additional insights. On the A1 plan, you get the web version only.
Powerpoint
Create, edit, and collaborate on presentations and slideshows with animations, cinematic motion, 3D models, and a library of graphics and templates. Web version only.
OneNote
A note-taking app that allows hand drawing and annotation using a stylus, collaboration, and organization. The A1 plan gives you access to the desktop app.
Teams
Teams is a collaboration hub for Microsoft 365 users, with meetings and group chat, admin functions, and third-party apps.
OneDrive
Microsoft's cloud storage tool, OneDrive lets users set time limits on links, scan documents, whiteboard with their phones, and save the results as documents. There's also data loss management and encryption. Microsoft 365 Education users get unlimited OneDrive storage.
Stream
Microsoft's take on YouTube, Stream lets users make, share, and interact with videos across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Excel spreadsheet for mac.
Flow
Flow lets users automate tasks quickly and easily across applications without writing any code.
Skype
We've all met Skype. It's the most familiar video calling and conferencing tool out there. Office A1 users get Skype for Business which gives you additional features including call recording and up to 250 attendees on conference calls.
Sway
Sway lets you create visual, interactive stories, offering ready-made design packages and web and device integrations to make design and production easier and faster.
Forms
Forms lets you collect data, post self-marking quizzes, and quickly ask groups questions to gather responses. It integrates tightly with Excel to deliver data and insights.
Yammer
Yammer is Microsoft's internal social network for organizations. It's aimed at filling the same niche as something like Slack or doing the same job as a Facebook page but with better functionality and security.
Other Microsoft 365 Plans
So far we've talked about the A1 plan, Microsoft's basic, free Microsoft 365 Education plan. There are two other plans come with more features but they aren't free.
The A3 Plan
A3 comes with the desktop versions of all the core Microsoft productivity apps, available for up to five Macs and/or PCs per user and up to five mobile devices per user.
You also get the full desktop version of Outlook. Inboxes are capped at 100GB, and there's unlimited personal OneDrive storage, video meetings with up to 10,000 people on Skype Meeting Broadcast and Microsoft 365 Cloud App Security to deliver risk assessment and insight into threat potential.
The additional tools include:
Access
Microsoft's Access lets Microsoft 365 users create their own business applications.
Publisher
Publisher lets you build image-plus-text materials including ads, newsletters, and brochures. But it's only available on PC.
Bookings
Users visit the Bookings page for a faculty member and book the service and time they need. That information is forwarded to the faculty member's inbox and calendar.
A5 Plan
The A5 plan comes with enhanced versions of the tools and functionality on the A3 plan, plus a new tool, Microsoft BI. Users can control how support accesses their inbox with Customer Lockbox, and there's enhanced visibility and control over your Microsoft 365 environment using personal and organizational analytics, post-breach cyberthreat investigation, and remediation.
Users can also create meetings with a dial-in number that attendees can join by telephone with Audio Conferencing.
Power BI
Power BI is a business analytics tool that delivers insights, data visualizations, and lets multiple users share and collaborate on reports.
Calling Plans
A5 plan users can also use Calling Plans that let you tie domestic and international telephony into your Microsoft Microsoft 365.
Should students use Microsoft 365 instead of G Suite?
This posts does a complete breakdown on G Suite for Education.
For students, Microsoft 365 has one clear advantage: individuals can sign up immediately.
Whether you're a student or a teacher, if you want G Suite, the whole school has to sign up, and there's a 14-day waiting period before you get access. Microsoft 365 doesn't have any such restriction, you can sign up right now as long as you have a valid email address from an educational institution.
Let's look at how the two offerings break down once you do sign up.
Productivity
Historically, G Suite made online versions of Microsoft's ubiquitous business, school, and personal productivity apps, then Microsoft moved its apps online and matched Google's collaboration features. Now, Microsoft 365 and G Suite are similar in many ways.
The major difference is what kind of user they're best for. Microsoft apps are best for power users. G Suite apps are best for beginners. It's worth noting that the more advanced functionality that once distinguished Excel, such as conditional formatting, is being rolled out gradually in Sheets. As that happens, though, Microsoft isn't sitting still: they're adding more functionality to their own tools.
Similarly, Microsoft Word has more advanced bibliography features and spelling and grammar checking — all things likely to be useful to students. But Docs is simpler and it's easier to find the main tools.
Microsoft 365 Online applications (the ones you get with the free version, A1) don't allow you to edit offline. You must be connected to the internet. G Suite's apps are online by default; offline editing can be enabled by an admin.
There's not much you can do with one that you can't do with the other. Office will probably give you a more polished product, Google will probably deliver faster and have a shorter learning curve. But both are supported by extensive how-tos and huge support libraries and third-party videos.
Communication
G Suite has Google Hangouts, which allows anyone with a link to join a video call. Hangouts has a chat window inside it where you can share text and links and send files — much like Skype.
By comparison, Microsoft offers both Skype and Teams, which has better file-sharing and instant messaging and also incorporates project management features. Skype is familiar to most users, while Teams can be a base of operations in a way that you'd need to use several Google apps to equal. You also get Yammer, for which there is no G Suite equivalent. It's possible that some users will find these communications apps overlap or are already using best-in-class competitors like Slack.
Office has the standard business email tool, Google has the standard webmail tool. Gmail is simpler, more intuitive, but has fewer native features. It's easier to search for emails in Gmail, but Outlook's integration with the rest of Microsoft 365 is tighter. Ultimately, neither ecosystem has a decisive edge here.
Storage
There's no competition: every Microsoft 365 Education user gets unlimited personal cloud storage. So does every G Suite for Education user.
Administration
Admins control the settings for all the G Suite accounts in their organization. Office's permissions are a little more nebulous. G Suite requires that admins sign up their whole organization; Microsoft 365 lets you sign up by yourself.
Security and privacy
Microsoft 365 has impeccably secure data centers, and everything inside the Microsoft 365 ecosystem is encrypted at rest and in transit through SSL/TLS. Office Advanced Threat protection offers defense against spam, malware and other kinds of attack. File-and-volume encryption is achieved through IPsec and TLS, with 2FA as an additional bulwark.
G Suite also has impeccably secure data centers. While it uses solid security throughout, it's less compliant than Office in some areas: Google Contacts and Groups aren't HIPPA compliant, for instance.
Microsoft 365 has a slight edge here and is likely to retain it since Microsoft doesn't have a business model based on advertising and hence on user data.
Pricing
G Suite has a free option, G Suite for Education, and an option that costs a few dollars a month. Microsoft has the same.
How Much Is Microsoft Family
Here's how the pricing between G Suite and Microsoft 365 educational plans compare.
G Suite education plans:
Microsoft Company Worth
- G Suite for Education = Free
- G Suite Enterprise for Education = $4 per user per month
And the Microsoft 365 education plans:
- A1 = Free
- A3 = $2.50 per month for students, $3.25 per month for faculty
- A5 = $6 per month for students, $8 per month for faculty
G Suite has a price advantage — one that adds up rapidly in larger educational institutions. On the other hand, Office delivers a more enterprise-friendly, cohesive package.
