News

Microsoft Unveils Office 2021 and Office 365 Prices

• By Kurt Mackie
• 10/04/2021

Microsoft shared prices for its "perpetual-license" Office 2021 products and its subscription-based Microsoft 365 products for consumers and small businesses in a Friday announcement.

Individuals and organizations will need "both a Microsoft account and an internet connection" to use Office 2021 or the Microsoft 365 products, the announcement noted. Office 2021 and Microsoft 365 productivity suites can run on either Windows 10 or on the newly available (as of Oct. 5) Windows 11 operating system.

Microsoft is highlighting the inclusion of Microsoft Teams for personal use in both the Office 2021 and Microsoft 365 products. Real-time co-authoring is another feature that was touted for both products.

An Office 2021 and Microsoft 365 product comparison page can be found here.

Office 2021 Products
Office 2021 perpetual-license products for consumers and small businesses are available for purchase as of Oct. 5 from Microsoft or retailers. That same availability holds true for the Mac product versions, too.

Here are the prices for the new consumer and small business Office 2021 perpetual-license products for PCs and Macs:

• Office Home and Student 2021 for $149.99. It comes with "Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Microsoft Teams for PC and Mac."
• Office Home and Business 2021 for $249.99. It adds "Outlook for PC and Mac and the rights to use the apps for business purposes" on top of the apps listed above.

Office 2021 users can sign up for free OneDrive accounts, which provides access to 5GB of storage.

Perpetual-license Office 2021 users just pay once for the product, but the product doesn't get new feature updates (like Microsoft 365 products). Eventually, the perpetual-license products may not be able to run on a new Windows release. For instance, the announcement warned that "Office 2013 won't be supported on Windows 11."

Office 365 Products
New Microsoft 365 productivity products for consumers and small businesses are available as of Oct. 5 for purchase via Microsoft subscriptions.

Here are the prices for the new consumer and small business Microsoft 365 subscriptions:

• Microsoft 365 Personal for $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year.
• Microsoft 365 Family for $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year, which supports "families and households of up to six people."

Both of these Microsoft 365 subscriptions give users access to "premium versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, OneDrive, Microsoft Editor, and Microsoft Family Safety for PC, Mac, and mobile," the announcement explained. In addition, the PC versions of these Microsoft 365 subscriptions come with "Access and Publisher for PC."

Microsoft 365 subscribers get access to 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage, as well.

The subscription-based Microsoft 365 offerings give users the rights to create and edit files as long as they are subscribers. Their files become read-only versions if they end the subscription by not paying their monthly or yearly fees.

Office LTSC
Last month, Microsoft commercially released Office LTSC (long-term servicing channel), a different kind of perpetual-license version of the product.

Office LTSC is just for systems that can't tolerate frequent updates. It's considered to be a nonsubscription type of product, despite getting regular feature updates for a total of five years.