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.
office
Office for students — best value in 2026
Word, Excel and PowerPoint cover 95% of coursework. Students don't need Outlook, Teams or Access on day one — buying the right edition saves €80+ vs Microsoft 365.
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office
Office for small business (1–10 staff)
Owners under 10 employees usually overpay for Microsoft 365 Business when a perpetual Office Home & Business covers email and meetings without the per-user recurring cost.
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office
Office on Apple Silicon Macs
Native ARM64 builds of Office 2021 and 2024 run on M1/M2/M3/M4 with no Rosetta penalty. Here is the right edition for each Mac workflow.
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windows
Windows 11 for gaming PCs
Windows 11 Home covers 100% of Steam, Epic, GOG and Xbox PC titles. You only need Pro if you also want Hyper-V, BitLocker or a static IP for game-streaming.
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windows
Windows 11 Pro for developers
WSL2, Docker Desktop, Hyper-V and Windows Sandbox all need Pro or Enterprise. Home edition blocks Sandbox, group policy and BitLocker.
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windows
Windows 11 Pro for business endpoints
Active Directory, Entra ID join, BitLocker, AppLocker and Group Policy are the bare minimum to manage company laptops. Home edition does none of these.
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sql-server
SQL Server for startups
Standard Edition with Server+CAL licensing is the cheapest production path for teams of 5–25 developers and 10–100 named users.
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sql-server
SQL Server for enterprise workloads
Enterprise unlocks unlimited virtualisation, Always On AGs with multiple secondaries, Transparent Data Encryption and online index operations — required for OLTP above 24 cores.
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visual-studio
Visual Studio for engineering teams
Visual Studio Professional is the cheapest licensed IDE for teams shipping commercial software. Free Community is for individuals only above 250 employees.
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project
Microsoft Project for construction teams
Construction Gantt charts with critical path, resource leveling and baseline tracking — Project Standard 2024 covers a single planner; Project Plan 3 covers a remote team.
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visio
Visio for architects and AEC consultants
Floor plans, site diagrams, electrical and HVAC schematics with scaled stencils — Visio Standard handles single-floor jobs, Professional adds AutoCAD DWG import and validation.
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microsoft-365
Microsoft 365 for fully remote teams
Distributed teams need Teams, shared calendars, OneDrive sync and hosted Exchange in one bundle — Microsoft 365 Business Standard is the price/feature sweet spot.
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