What’s the difference between Microsoft 365 and Office 2021?īeyond pricing, the big difference between Microsoft 365 and Office 2021 is the sort of functionality you can expect over time. That’s about $24 per year alone, and for a fraction of what you get on even the Microsoft 365 Personal plan.
Normally, a OneDrive standalone plan costs $1.99 per month for 100GB. Microsoft 365 Personal is $69.99 per year, but only includes software access for one person, and 1TB of storage. Microsoft 365 Family, for example, is priced at $99.99 per year and includes software for up to 6 users, and up to 6TB of OneDrive cloud storage. However if you’re willing to shift your digital life to Microsoft’s cloud, then things like bundled OneDrive start to make more sense. If you’re just looking for a word processor, then paying a monthly fee – or for a yearly subscription, which Microsoft offers a discount on – probably doesn’t make sense. How much value you get out of a subscription to Microsoft 365 really depends on how much of the software and services you actually commit to. The software giant’s push around Microsoft 365 subscriptions, after renaming Office 365 in 2020 to better reflect the nature of the packages it offers, seemed designed to push upfront purchases out of the way.
For a long time, though, Microsoft’s commitment to offering that has been questioned.
