Planning to buy Office 365 for personal use but can’t decide if you need Office 365 Home or Personal? I am going to help you to explain what the differences are between these two Office 365 plans for home users.
Office 365 Home and Personal are renamed to Microsoft 365 Family and Personal.
Read everything about the new plans in this article. New features, new name, same price.
Office 365 Home or Personal are both a great choice when it comes to buying a new Office license. You won’t only get the familiar Office apps (like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), but also access to all cloud features that Office 365 has to offer. Allowing you, and your family to take full advantage of Office 365.
Office 365 Home vs Personal
So lets first start with a clear comparison between the two. Later we will go more into detail and give you some guidelines when to buy what.
In the table below you will find the more important features of Office 365 and the differences between Office 365 Home vs Personal.
| Office 365 Home | Office 365 Personal | ||
| $99.99 per year | $69.99 per year | ||
| Core Details | |||
| Number of user | 6 | 1 | |
| Number of installs | Unlimited | Unlimited | |
| Supported devices | PCs/Macs, tablets, and phones | PCs/Macs, tablets, and phones | |
| Office Apps | |||
| Office Online | |||
| Word, Excel, PowerPoint | |||
| Outlook | |||
| Publisher and Access (pc only) | |||
| Standard Services | |||
| OneDrive Storage | 6TB Total (1TB Per user) | 1TB | |
| Skype | 60 Skype min p/month p/user | 60 Skype min p/month | |
| Updates & Support | |||
| Security updates | |||
| Feature updates | |||
| Support | |||
| More info | More info | ||
| Buy | Buy | ||
What you can see is that you can use one Office 365 Home license with 6 users, members of your household or friends, and Office 365 Personal can only be used by a single user.
The features that you get are the same, there is no difference in the amount of OneDrive storage or Skype calls one user has.
Office 365 Home
The Office 365 Home plan is for non-commercial use and the best plan for family members or households in general. You can assign up to 6 user accounts to the same Office 365 Home plan. Each user gets it’s own account and can install the Office apps on an unlimited amount of devices.
The only limitation here is that each user can only be active on 5 devices at the same time. Which is more than enough ;). You can manage your family members in Microsoft Family and share the license with your family members from here.
The price of Office 365 Home is $99.99 per year or $9.99 per month.
OneDrive Storage
One of the most asked questions is how it works with the OneDrive storage within the Office 365 Home plan. Each user, thus family member, gets there own OneDrive with 1Tb of storage. You can’t divide the storage your self, so it’s not possible to give one family member 2Tb of storage and another only 500Gb.
What you can do is share files with your family members. So if you want to store your holiday pictures in OneDrive, you can do that in the account from one family member and share the folder with the others.
Each OneDrive is personal, so by default, you can’t see the files or folders from the other members. But you can share them of course if you want.
Skype
Just like OneDrive, each user gets 60 Skype minutes per month. With these Skype minutes, you can call to mobile phones in 8 counties and to landlines in more than 60 countries.
Office 365 Personal
With Office 365 Personal you will get the same apps and features as with Office 365 Home. Only then for one single user. You can install the Office apps, just like with Office 365 Home, on an unlimited amount of devices. But you can only use up to 5 devices at the same time.
You could use Office 365 Personal together with another family member, but keep in mind that you can only create one user account and both family members have access to the same files and emails in Outlook.
In can imagine that this could work perfectly fine if you only want to share Office with your husband or wife. With the 5 active devices limitation, you could install it on two desktops and to mobile phones without any issues.
The price of Office 365 Personal is $69.99 per year or $6.99 per month.
Office 365 Personal or Home?
If you are planning on using Office 365 with your family members, then really go for the Office 365 Home plan. With a price of $99 a year, it’s a really good value for money. Especially now you get 1Tb of OneDrive storage per user.
Only if you are not intended to share the license with others, then the Office 365 Personal plan is a perfect option.
