Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint come two ways, and the choice trips up a lot of UK businesses. Microsoft 365 is a subscription you pay for monthly or yearly, with the apps plus cloud services that keep evolving. Office 2024 is a one-off purchase, sometimes still called the perpetual licence, that you buy once and own forever, frozen at the features it shipped with. Neither is simply better; they suit different situations. This guide compares the two honestly, on cost, features, devices and support, and helps you decide whether to keep paying or pay once.
The core difference: renting versus buying
Microsoft 365 is a subscription. You pay per user per month or per year, and in return you get the desktop apps, the right to install them across several devices, and a bundle of cloud services such as mailbox hosting, OneDrive storage and the collaboration tools, all kept continuously up to date. Stop paying and the apps drop to a read-only state, because you were renting access, not buying the software outright.
Office 2024 is the opposite model: a one-time payment for a specific version that you own indefinitely. It installs the classic desktop apps on a single PC or Mac, and it never changes. There is no recurring fee, but equally no new features, no included cloud storage and no hosted email; it is the applications alone, frozen at their 2024 release. Microsoft positions it for people who explicitly do not want a subscription.
What you get beyond the apps
The biggest practical gap is everything that is not the four familiar apps. Microsoft 365 bundles the services modern teams lean on every day, and that bundle, not the word processor, is usually the real reason businesses subscribe. Office 2024 deliberately leaves all of it out; you would buy those services separately or do without.
Here is what the subscription adds that the one-off purchase does not:
- •Hosted business email with a large mailbox, rather than supplying your own mail system
- •Cloud storage per user for files, with real-time co-authoring across the company
- •The collaboration and meetings platform most teams now run on
- •Continuous feature updates and the latest security improvements
- •Install rights across multiple devices per user, not a single fixed PC
The money, looked at honestly
On pure software cost, the maths is a straight race between a recurring fee and a one-off price. A perpetual licence has no ongoing charge, so over a long enough period, if you never upgrade, it can be cheaper for the apps alone. The crossover point typically lands a few years in, after which continued subscription payments exceed the one-time cost, assuming you would otherwise stay on the same frozen version.
But comparing app-to-app misses the point for most businesses, because the subscription includes email, storage and collaboration you would otherwise pay for elsewhere. Add those back and the one-off licence rarely comes out ahead for a team that needs them. Where the perpetual licence genuinely wins is a narrow case: a handful of users who only need the desktop apps, on fixed PCs, with email and storage handled some other way. If you do subscribe, keeping the right mix of plans matters, which our Microsoft 365 licensing optimisation guide covers.
Support, security and the quiet end-of-life clock
Subscriptions are evergreen: you are always on the current, supported, patched version with no upgrade project to plan. A perpetual licence is supported only for a fixed window from its release, after which it stops receiving security updates, and running unpatched productivity software is a genuine risk once that date passes. With one-off Office you are signing up to a future migration, even if it feels cheaper today.
Security posture also differs because the subscription's cloud services bring identity, device and data protections that a standalone install simply does not have. For most UK businesses the supportability and security of the evergreen model outweigh the saving on the apps, but the right answer depends on your mix of users. If buying licences at all is the question, our deeper guide on buying Microsoft licences in the UK compares the purchasing routes.
So which should you choose?
Choose Microsoft 365 if you want email, cloud storage and collaboration bundled, value being always current and supported, or have a mix of devices and remote workers, which describes most organisations. Choose Office 2024 only for a defined set of users who need the desktop apps and nothing else, on fixed machines, where a one-off cost genuinely suits, such as a shared workshop PC or a kiosk.
A blended approach is perfectly valid: most staff on a subscription, a few special-case machines on perpetual licences. The decision rarely turns on the headline price of Word and Excel; it turns on whether you need the services around them and how you feel about a future upgrade. Weigh it the same way you would any SaaS versus owned-software choice.