Office 2013 Versus Office 365: Which One Is Better for Your Business? (Part 2)

By the DynaSis Team

Last week, we talked about your options and considerations for purchasing and installing Office 2013. This week, we’ll discuss Office 365 and give you some financial comparisons.

Office 365
For a fee ranging from $12.50 - $22 per user, per month (billed annually), you can license the full version of Office for each of your employees. Best of all, the installation is good for five devices. So, if you have workers that need Office on a desktop at work, a desktop at home, a laptop, a tablet and a smartphone, one monthly fee will cover them all. That can make Office 365 a bargain. If your employees don’t need Office in multiple locations, it’s not such a deal.

With the Office 365 Small Business Premium Edition, up to 25 employees can have desktop (PC or Mac) versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access, Publisher and Link, plus online access to most applications from any computer, mobile access to Word, Excel and PowerPoint, plus cloud perks such as a hosted website, a team intranet site, online conferencing and cloud file storage.

If you don’t need Android or iPhone access or desktop installations, you can opt for Office 365 Small Business, which for $5 per month, per user (billed annually), gives you web-based and mobile (Windows Phone only) versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint (plus the cloud perks). If you have more than 25 users, you’ll have to bump up to Office 365 Midsize Business (starts at $15 a month for up to 300 users), but it also includes Active Directory integration and self-service business intelligence.

Which Is the Best Choice?

Renting Office adds up, but you’ll automatically get upgrades, fixes and new versions. As we mentioned above, if your employees do not need access to Office on multiple devices, then Office 2013 is less expensive over a three-year period for those that want desktop installations ($399.99 per user for Office 2013 Professional versus $450.00 for Office 365 Small Business Premium or $540 for Office 365 Midsize Business).

If your employees are content using office only via a web browser, Office 365 is less expensive ($180.00) over a three-year period than all but Office 2013 Home and Student ($139.99). And, if upfront outlay is your prime consideration, then jumping to Office 365 is certainly the way to go. You can always opt later to switch to Office 2013 or its successor.

The virtual CIOs at DynaSis can help you evaluate exactly what you need as part of your Windows XP upgrade. (If you haven’t planned for that yet, time is running out. We really hope you’ll read this article and call us, today.) Either way, we’ll be happy to help you make the move to cloud productivity with Office 365.