Microsoft's Office applications have long been the de-facto option for productivity. Apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are the Kleenex of their respective tasks. If someone tells you to make a PowerPoint, they often mean a slide deck of any sort, and Excel is likewise shorthand for spreadsheets. Because they're so essential to students, workers, and plenty of people in between, Microsoft has found new ways to monetize them over the years. Today, there are two paths by which you can access them: either by buying them outright with Microsoft Office 2024, or by paying a monthly subscription to access not only those main apps, but a whole slew of other Microsoft apps and services as well. If you need to use one or more of Microsoft's apps, it can be hard to tell which is the best option.

Although Microsoft's 365 rebrands and naming schemes are often confusing, both Microsoft 365 and Office 2024 have different limitations, and appear to be respectively targeted at two different types of user. To understand which is right for you, we'll break down what you get with each of these options, and then contrast the differences between them.Here's everything you need to know to decide whether you should get Microsoft 365 or Microsoft Office 2024.

Microsoft 365 is the Washington software giant's main subscription service, bundling all of the company's most popular apps and services together for a monthly fee. Microsoft 365 offers personal plans for an annual fee of $70 or $7 monthly, or family plans for $100 annually or $10 monthly. Those plans come with the holy trifecta of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, as well as Outlook for email. They also include Microsoft Defender for security, Microsoft Editor for AI-powered grammar and spelling assistance, Microsoft Clipchamp for basic video editing, Microsoft OneNote for note taking, Microsoft Teams for business communications, Microsoft Forms for creating online surveys and polls, and Microsoft Access for database management. Each subscriber also gets 1 TB of OneDrive cloud storage. These apps and benefits can be installed or used on any device where the subscribing Microsoft account is logged in.