MS Office or Office 365 for Mac?

Office 2021 is 1 time purchase, perpetual license for 1 PC or Mac - $249.99 - meaning that you can keep it forever on whatever Mac you install it on. You get security updates but no feature updates. And at some point two things will happen: 1) MS ends support for each release in 3 years; so, support for Office 2021 will end this year; and 2) some day you will probably upgrade to a version of macOS that Office 2021 will no longer run on. Also, if you replace your Mac you may well not be able to install or migrate Office 2021 to the new computer.

Office 365 is subscription - single user ($69.99/yr) or family users ($99.99/yr). Either way, you can install & run it on up to 5 PCs and/or Macs. Support & new features are ongoing and automatic as long as you subscribe, through future versions of macOS and new PCs or Macs. You can install, remove & reinstall to your heart's content. If you drop the subscription the apps will still work but there will be no updates and you will not be able to Save documents/worksheets/presentations etc. (Not sure what happens with Outlook mail, however.)

Office 365 from the Mac App Store - You can install Office for free and use the apps on all your Macs under your Apple ID except you cannot Save documents unless you subscribe. I don't have any personal experience with the Mac App Store versions, so I don't know the cost, but I suspect it the same as the regular subscription. Once subscribed the benefits are similar to the ordinary subscription except that updates are not pushed; if an update is available, you decide if/when you want to install it.

Here's an article from Macworld that provides more detail on the differences between them:

Microsoft Office for Mac: Microsoft 365 vs Office 2021 buying advice

As I expected, that article didn't even mention the Mac App Store option.

Here are a couple of pages from Microsoft describing the differences:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/microsoft-office-and-the-mac-app-store-ad2293a8-f5aa-4652-ae3f-83dda906d748

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/microsoft-office-activation-and-the-mac-app-store-a699bd24-a8f1-4f40-9d19-9b6b6034ec51

But remember that Microsoft is trying to discourage the Mac App Store option. They have to have it, because (in my experience at least) up to 40% of Mac users only purchase through the Mac App Store. What Microsoft describes as the bad parts of the Mac App Store are what I consider the good parts.

The biggest difference is that I don't have constant updates. I update when I need to, but I'm the one that decides when that happens and on what terms. I also don't have those extra background tasks running in the background. Funny how it runs just fine without those.

For you, there are two big issues to be worried about. You have to worry about the Office version, but also your macOS version. Do you intend to upgrade to macOS 15 (or some other version) this year? If so, will Office 2021 work on that version? And for that matter, what about Office 2024? If it works, does it work well? Or is it buggy?

These days, people have gone absolutely insane with updates. Everything has to be the absolute latest version. Yet the developers (from Apple itself and all 3rd party developers) simply can't keep up with their own schedule. Personally, I like to stay out of that mess. I recently updated to Ventura. My office apps work fine now, so I have no need to update them.

All I wanted to do was let people know that the Mac App Store is a great option for some people. I didn't realize it until recently and I'm very pleased. Your needs may be different. But I think the Mac App Store is the best of both worlds - flexible, less junk, same features, same price, updates if and when I need them, but on my terms.

Great question!

How about a 3rd option - Office from the Mac App Store. It's the same product, same price, but without all of the background tasks that are always running. You update it when you want to update it. No more "verifying" dialogs. No more extra apps that Microsoft thinks you need.

I switched to the Mac App Store version this year and I'm very pleased.

You will need the current version (and licensing) for your choice of Microsoft 365 (subscription) or Office 2021 for Mac on Monterey or later. I have Office 2021 Home and Business installed on macOS Sonoma. It cost me around $30 - $34 when purchased from the StackSocial site.

You should have an existing, active Microsoft account as the StackSocial purchase process will request that you sign into the account so they can register your purchase with Microsoft. That is important as at some point in the future, if you want to remove MS Office from one Mac and install it on another, you can sign into your Microsoft account and click Install on that purchase history. I did that moving from a 2021 MacBook Pro M1 Pro to the current M2 Mac Mini Pro with Sonoma.

The Office 2021 for Mac applications can be configured to use the local drive by default when configured in the Open and Save As panels. The application's Preference's Save panel offers Autosave, but it seems to favor OneDrive, and SharePoint Online when configured.

Installing Office 2021 on Monterey, Ventura, or Sonoma will continue to have new application updates pushed to you. The first time you know this has happened is when you normally launch the application and a 2-second GateKeeper scan occurs because of the new application version detection.

When installing Office 2021 for Mac, the installer gives you a custom installation option of nixing Outlook, OneNote, and the OneDrive applications.

AMO_Seattle wrote:

Thank you, but it seems to me that Office from the App store only has the 365 option, and I'm seeing a lot of criticism of it in various reviews. I'm hoping for feedback with more detailed assessments of the different available choices.

I'm not really sure what you mean by that. Do you mean those single-purchase licenses that VikingOSX mentions above? Aren't those tied to a single computer? I guess that would be one extreme end of the spectrum, with Office 365 insider-stream whatever being the other end.

Do you have specific criticisms that you want to discuss? I'm pretty sure the Mac App Store option is so significantly different that many of those criticisms might not apply. And the Mac App Store isn't that popular so it probably wouldn't be mentioned. Many people probably aren't aware of it.