Use cases

Pick the right Microsoft license for your job

Hand-picked product recommendations grouped by what you actually do — coursework, gaming, dev, sysadmin, fieldwork.

Every recommendation pairs a primary licence with a cheaper or richer alternative, so you can pick what fits your budget without giving up the features you actually use. Categories below cover individuals, small teams, students, IT pros and gamers.

How we pick licences

We test each edition on a representative workload (e.g. a 200-page thesis in Word, a 12-player Minecraft Realms session, a 6-VM Hyper-V lab) and only recommend the smallest licence that covers it. We never bundle features you do not need, and we always flag the upgrade trigger — the one feature that would push you to the next tier.