Office Home and Business 2024 and Office Professional Plus 2024 are two of the most popular versions of Microsoft Office, and there’s a good reason for that. They are the latest available with a perpetual license, that is, a one-time purchase without a recurring subscription (but you lose the ability to add new features).
There’s a third version, Office Home 2024, which is excluded from this comparison because it cannot be used for commercial purposes. Microsoft 365 is the cloud subscription version of Office 2024 with an update expected in 2027.
While Office Home and Business 2024 and Office Business and Professional Plus 2024 have much in common, they target different audiences. Office Home 2024 delivers essential applications for daily productivity, while Professional Plus 2024 offers a more robust set of features, ideal for power users or IT professionals.
TL;DR
| Row 0 - Cell 0 | Office Home and Business 2024 |
Office Professional Plus 2024 |
Word |
✅ |
✅ |
Excel |
✅ |
✅ |
PowerPoint |
✅ |
✅ |
OneNote |
✅ |
✅ |
Outlook |
✅ |
✅ |
Access |
✅ |
✅ |
macOS |
✅ |
✅ |
What they have in common
The good news first. There’s little to differentiate between the two. Both contain iconic flagship apps: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote. Sadly, Publisher, a popular desktop publishing software, has been removed from the line-up.
The bad news is that both will never get new features, just security patches and stability fixes. For example, Microsoft 365, the subscription version of Office, has a version of Word that is radically different from Word 2024, which is basically a frozen snapshot.
There’s no Copilot, no AI capability, no cloud integration with OneDrive or fancy new user interface to learn.
Remember as well that, for non-recurring software, one license covers exactly one PC or one Mac. If you want to run Office on a laptop and a desktop, you will need two licenses. Microsoft 365 allows up to five devices per license across a wider range of platforms (including Android and iOS).
How are they different?
Office Home and Business 2024 has a simpler installation process. Go to setup.office.com, log into a Microsoft account (MSA), enter the product key and click install. As such, the license is bound to your email; upgrade your PC and you just need to install Office and hey presto! You’re in.
Re-installations with Professional Plus 2024 are trickier, as you will need to keep hold of the raw text key and uninstall the old version before installing the new one.
Professional Plus 2024 also contains Access, a relational database management system that can be used for a wide range of use cases, from tracking inventory to reporting and everything in-between. It's an incredibly powerful tool, but has a steep learning curve. Ironically, Access, on its own is far more expensive than the entire Office suite.
If you use Mac (or a combination of Mac and Windows), then your only option is Office Home and Business, as Professional Plus is strictly Windows 10/11 only.
You cannot buy Office Professional Plus 2024 from Microsoft; instead, it is only available through so-called authorized Microsoft partners that have a tacit agreement with Microsoft to sell used Volume License (VL) products.
The biggest difference is the price. Believe it or not, based on an informal survey of 10 providers online (US and UK), Office Professional Plus 2024 is cheaper than Office 2024 Home and Business despite having an extra application.
LTSC vs LTSC: What’s the catch?
You will also notice that some vendors sell Office Professional Plus 2024 LTSC (for Long-Term Servicing Channel), which is designated as “for use in highly regulated or restricted environments that can't take feature updates”, in Microsoft’s own words.
That’s a fancy way of saying that it is geared towards businesses, government agencies and environments that demand absolute stability with no cloud access (air-gapped). There’s no difference between listing with or without LTSC (de facto Professional Plus is LTSC).
Calling out the elephant in the room, we must highlight the fact that almost all Office Professional Plus 2024 LTSC sold online is not the full package. These are recycled product keys that lack the business-grade support and administrative and security controls.
Unlike compliant LTSC deployments, installing Office on multiple devices won’t be much easier. While Microsoft actively limits the number of Office Home and Business 2024 licenses tied to an email, a cheap LTSC deployment will still require you to (a) download Office (b) manually copy and paste a unique key on all devices and (c) activate them.
And this gets worse for updates. While both can get updates directly from Microsoft, only genuine LTSC will allow you to freeze them at scale and prevent user override. For all intents and purposes, cheap LTSC installs are marginally better than their Home and Business brethren.
Microsoft Office Home and Business 2024 vs Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2024: Which one to buy
If you plan to use Windows only or need Access, Professional Plus 2024 is the only choice.
Otherwise, stick to Home and Business if your primary platform is Apple Mac.
Note that Microsoft Office 2024 will reach its official end of support on October 9, 2029. After that, all versions will get no more security updates, bug fixes or support which in theory leaves businesses vulnerable to security risks. Microsoft has confirmed there is no extended support for these products.
