

Perpetual licensing means that once you’ve licensed, for example, Office 2013, you own it forever and you receive security patches and updates for that version of Office, specifically Office 2013 until its support lifecycle ends. MSI versions of Office have major versions such as Office 2013, Office 2016 and Office 2019 and are licensed using Volume Licensing and are perpetual licenses.

Microsoft 365 Apps is installed using Click-to-Run technology, while Office 2019 is installed using Windows Installer technology (MSI).Įach installer has a different way of handling versions of Office. Both can be downloaded and installed on a user’s PC or Mac, however, the installer which is bundled with each of these versions is massively different. Microsoft 365 Apps and Office 2019 sound less similar and allow us to differentiate easily between the two editions of Office. Office 365 Pro Plus and Office 2019 sounds similar, which means it’s quite easy to confuse the two. For the rest of this article, I’ll be referring to it as Microsoft 365 Apps while reminding you of the old name to keep confusion to a minimum.


“for enterprise” or “for business”, this version of office is also known as the “click to run” version of Office containing the Office applications Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and others. Office 365 Pro Plus is now known as Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise or Microsoft 365 Apps for business.įor the sake of this article, I want to point out that irrespective of the Microsoft 365 Apps edition, i.e. Microsoft also renamed the online version of Office which is bundled with certain SKUs of this service from Office 365 Pro Plus to Microsoft 365 Apps. On April 21 2020, Microsoft renamed Office 365 for SMB to Microsoft 365. For the sake of clarity, I’ll be writing about these as either the Office 365 edition recently renamed – more on this below – or the Office 2019 edition. However, the edition of Office and the available features within those apps can change dramatically based on its origin and the installer used. Microsoft Office is a bundle of products that include the very familiar Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. In this post, we will look at the differences between the standalone version of Office 2019 and Office bundled with Office 365, what the main differences are, and how to choose between these versions.
