Office License for Business: Which Suite for Your Company’s PCs?

Office license for business: which suite for your PCs?

Choosing an Office license for business is not decided on a feature list: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook cover the same daily tasks from one version to the next. What really changes is the license model, the number of PCs to cover and the period over which you spread the cost. Three profiles come up again and again.

• Freelancers and very small businesses, 1 to 5 PCs: one perpetual license per computer is enough. You pay once and the suite remains usable for as long as the machine runs.
• Small and mid-sized businesses, 10 to 100 PCs: the reasoning becomes a cost per PC. A pre-owned perpetual license costs a fraction of a contract renewed every year.
• Mobile, multi-device teams: if your colleagues switch between laptop, tablet and mobile devices, a subscription, with apps always up to date and online storage, remains the more consistent choice.

Good to know: email hosted on your own domain name comes from a hosted mail service, such as Microsoft’s business subscriptions. A perpetual license does install Outlook, but Outlook is an email client: it connects to your existing mailboxes, it does not provide them.

Comparing Office licenses for business

Each line is a genuine Microsoft license, delivered by email with its key, the instructions to download the suite from Microsoft and an invoice with VAT. On the two (5 PC) product pages, you choose between a single-PC license, a 2-PC license and a 5-PC pack; the price shown on each product page is the reference.

Support timeline: Microsoft publishes security updates for Office 2024 until October 2029. Office 2021 and Office 2019 have reached the end of Microsoft support (October 2026 and October 2025): they install and activate normally, but no longer receive security fixes. For a new deployment meant to last, Office 2024 is the sensible base.

Professional Plus or Home and Business: which edition for which job?

Both editions are licensed for business use, unlike Office Home and Student, which Microsoft reserves for non-commercial use. The difference lies in the applications:

• Office Professional Plus adds Access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook: useful if your team maintains small databases, client files or internal tools built on Access. The 2021 and 2019 versions also include Publisher.
• Office Home and Business keeps to the essentials, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, without Access. It suits teams whose work is documents, spreadsheets, presentations and email.

In both cases, one license equips one computer, and a 5-PC pack equips five. Choose the edition per job profile rather than for the whole company: an accounting PC running Access-based tools does not need the same suite as a reception desk.

What does one PC really cost over three years?

That is the figure that matters to a manager or an IT lead. Take a team of twenty people working on Windows.

• Perpetual licenses: twenty Office 2024 Professional Plus licenses at 24,90 € each, paid once. Over three years, the cost per PC and per year is a third of that price, then nothing more in the following years until a newer version becomes necessary.
• Subscription: the expense comes back every year and follows your headcount; in return, you get new features as they arrive, online storage and mobile apps.

Perpetual licenses win as soon as the PC fleet is stable and usage is pure office work: data entry, accounting, quotes, reporting. Subscriptions keep their edge when real-time collaboration and continuous version upgrades are strategic. Many companies mix both: perpetual licenses on desk-bound PCs, a subscription for management and sales staff. We look at this trade-off in detail in our comparison of a perpetual Office license versus a subscription, and our guide to Microsoft 365 Business Standard and Premium covers the subscription side.

Compliance, invoicing and fitting into your IT

A traceable purchase for your accounts

Reselling a software license already placed on the European market is lawful: the Court of Justice of the European Union settled it in the UsedSoft ruling (C-128/11). Your company receives an invoice with VAT and keeps proof of purchase for each key. In a license compliance audit, this file (invoice, product reference, number of PCs equipped) is precisely what you will be asked for.

Compatibility with your PCs and business tools

• Windows 10 and Windows 11 support the 2019, 2021 and 2024 editions; plan 4 GB of RAM and about 4 GB of disk space per PC.
• Your VBA macros, Excel add-ins, document templates and connectors to an ERP or invoicing software keep working: the file formats have not changed.
• Installation is done PC by PC from Microsoft’s official download link, with no license server or special infrastructure to set up.

Hesitating between two editions or equipping a large number of machines? Our support team answers by email 7 days a week, within 2 hours on average. All references are gathered in our Office catalog.