What Is the difference between those two?
Office Professional is for the home - 1 licence for 1 device, comes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, plus Publisher and Access.
Office Professional Plus is for businesses and is a LTSC product. Comes with the same as above plus Teams. You can only get it via volume licensing agreement.
None of the above comes with "cloud" features, or feature updates.
You can only get Professional Plus via volume license subscription, if the organization decides not to renew the subscription, or you leave the organization, the license is no longer valid. If you are offline for a prolonged period, your Office could go to a reduced function mode due to unable to access the organization's activation server. The subscription also includes feature updates.
Office Professional as a one time purchase has a perpetual license. There is no need to periodically connect to another server to validate license.
For past few versions you could only get the MSI installer from Professional Plus and the retail licenses are Click to Run only. Then MSI is gone in 2019.
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What programs are included in Microsoft Office 2021 Professional?
What are the differences between Microsoft Office 2021 and Office 365?
What is included in Microsoft Office 2021 Home & Student?
Office 2021 Professional is available to single customers.
Office 2021 Professional Plus is available to companies and organizations as a volume license (multiple copies). It includes all the applications of Office 2021 Professional, plus Teams.
Both are sold with a 'perpetual license': you pay once and you can use it thereafter without extra payments. This is different from Microsoft 365, which is a subscription product: you pay a monthly or yearly fee.
Which one best for institutions?
You're right, there are quite a few discussions here about Office Professional Plus 2021 being used with personal Microsoft accounts, even though it's typically distributed through volume licensing.
Hopefully, someone from the community who’s in that situation can chime in and share their experience directly.
Hi, I'm John! I will help you with this.
Professional is for individual customers, while Professional Plus is for businesses and organizations via volume licensing.
The "Plus" version usually includes additional features aimed at enterprise use, like Microsoft Teams integration, and access to cloud services such as SharePoint and Exchange. The standard Professional edition is focused more on the core desktop apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, etc.
So, in terms of features, they’re almost the same, the "Plus" but it does reflect how the product is meant to be used and managed.
I really hope this information is helpful!
Should you need further information please let me know.
Regards,
John J.D.