Microsoft 365 Business Premium vs. Microsoft Office 2016 (discontinued)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
An integrated solution, designed for small or medium-sized businesses, bringing together the productivity of Microsoft Office with advanced security capabilities to help safeguard data from external threats and help protect against data leaks. With Microsoft 365 Business Premium, users can empower employees to be productive anywhere on any device. Get more done with AI built into the Office apps. Work better together with a hub for teamwork bringing your tools and people together in one place.…N/A
Microsoft Office 2016 (discontinued)
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Office 2016 is the familiar suite of Office products including applications such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for use on a single PC or Mac. The 2016 is no longer available for sale from Microsoft, and support is at an end since 2020.N/A
Pricing
Microsoft 365 Business PremiumMicrosoft Office 2016 (discontinued)
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Microsoft 365 Business PremiumMicrosoft Office 2016 (discontinued)
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Microsoft 365 Business PremiumMicrosoft Office 2016 (discontinued)
Considered Both Products
Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Chose Microsoft 365 Business Premium
They are similar but not the same and of course Microsoft 365 is the best in class
Chose Microsoft 365 Business Premium
We selected 365 due to cost, effectiveness, ease of use, and because it works well on PCs.
Chose Microsoft 365 Business Premium
In general, Office 365 provides a wonderful experience compared to the alternative. The main competitor - Google's G-Suite - provides a very similar feature set, but an interface that is far less clean and intuitive; it is, however, less expensive overall. The feature set of …
Chose Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Microsoft 365 Business is Microsoft Office on steroids, plus some. There are all the benefits of Office (reliability, no need for training in most cases) plus the benefits of cloud storage, email and calendar synchronization, and built-in data security. Office is great for …
Microsoft Office 2016 (discontinued)
Chose Microsoft Office 2016 (discontinued)
Microsoft Office 365 brings the same tools of Office 2016, but renewed. Office 2016 was sold for a one time, up front fee, on the other hand, Microsoft Office 365 is the new way Microsoft wants you to buy Office, you pay a monthly or yearly fee and get access to its latest …
Best Alternatives
Microsoft 365 Business PremiumMicrosoft Office 2016 (discontinued)
Small Businesses
Google Workspace
Google Workspace
Score 9.1 out of 10
Google Workspace
Google Workspace
Score 9.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Google Workspace
Google Workspace
Score 9.1 out of 10
Google Workspace
Google Workspace
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
Microsoft 365
Microsoft 365
Score 8.7 out of 10
Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Score 8.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Microsoft 365 Business PremiumMicrosoft Office 2016 (discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(108 ratings)
7.2
(64 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(1 ratings)
5.0
(3 ratings)
Usability
8.4
(57 ratings)
7.0
(3 ratings)
Performance
8.4
(41 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.4
(9 ratings)
8.0
(45 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
6.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Microsoft 365 Business PremiumMicrosoft Office 2016 (discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
Microsoft 365 Business Premium is well suited to any size organization and is a must-have for business purposes. It is a vital component for the majority of work software needs, as the Microsoft 365 Business Premium package has apps to handle needs that I didn't know we had. It is a great way to provide the required software programs to teams, especially those that work remotely due to the great sharing capabilities built into it. Furthermore, the nonprofit program provided our small nonprofit with vital components for our remote work, while allowing us to keep our donated funds going directly to our mission.
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Discontinued Products
I'd recommend [Microsoft] Office2016 for any business that has more than a couple of users, as the software is very scalable from just a small business to a large enterprise corporation. I don't know of any case where it might not be appropriate, as even home users and students use the software suite as well.
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Pros
Microsoft
  • Work in sync in different departments.
  • Being able to work from any device or computer. It is a very noble tool in different devices.
  • The work between the different programs (Word, Excel, Notes) that it offers is extremely light and good.
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Discontinued Products
  • Data manipulation. Excel takes the raw data we receive and allows us to digest it in ways that are useful to our business processes.
  • Communication. Outlook serves as our primary means of communication and setting up appointments.
  • Documentation. Word is the default standard when it comes to using a word processor and we are no different in this regard. Nearly every user has to use the application on a regular basis in order to accomplish their work.
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Cons
Microsoft
  • adding calendar invitations is not straight forward
  • copying folders from SharePoint libraries to an external drive should not be relying on the available space on the C drive
  • administering mailboxes for our company is convoluted forcing me to hunt for settings and options
  • lack of flexibility on the location of the OST and PST files
  • the new version should not do away with PST files but rather improve their reliability.
  • the PST internal structure is inefficient. the PST file should be able to shrink automatically when one delete emails.
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Discontinued Products
  • Office 2016 professional edition can be priced for a single user license, it would be nice to see a drop in the pricing.
  • Office 2016 home edition is a better price but does not include outlook 2016, so it is not a good fit for the workplace environments.
  • Office 2016 can run slowly on older systems, so you need to make sure you have a machine that is 4 years old or less for it to run smoothly.
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Likelihood to Renew
Microsoft
It is part of the organisation now. It provides and rich feature set and requires a relatively low amount of administration.
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Discontinued Products
We believe that office 2016 offers the best value when it comes to features included out of the box. The software is used in its entirety by our organization and is easily supported by our staff of IT technicians. Users find this software to be easy to learn and easy to use with minimal learning curve.
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Usability
Microsoft
The basic apps are straightforward and easy to use, especially since they have been around so long. I'm referring to the basic apps like Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, OneNote, etc. Other features such as Microsoft Teams and Sharepoint Sites, Sharepoint Lists, Sharepoint Groups, etc. all require a higher level of knowledge to both implement and use properly
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Discontinued Products
It's fairly easy to use, but the automatic formatting or capturing of formatting when pasting is wonky - especially when there are outlines or other bullets/numbered lists. Fixing and sizing up tables can be annoying, and there are sometimes formatting issues that we just absolutely cannot fix for some reason
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Performance
Microsoft
In the last 5 years, Microsoft has come a long way. The performance of the products has become more and more user-friendly and it seems that the feedback provided by the user community is being listened to and worked on. The processes are very fast and seamless. There are negligible errors and doesn't slow the systems down.
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Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Microsoft
As mentioned elsewhere in the review, Microsoft has historically paid attention to community feedback and issues, but timeliness can improve, and so can the addressing of long-standing issues about which many users have said "I have this issue too!" but no official solution exists. For issues that do have a solution, however, the solution is usually not difficult to find, and the explanation of features on Microsoft's website can mitigate many problems.
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Discontinued Products
I am an MS feedback hub participant and they certainly don't pay enough attention to several bugs several people raise it in the portal. For the enterprise, it seems to me based on my prior experience that yes, they have a dedicated team to support operations. For mid to small companies or single users, it has been a struggle. So, you are pretty much with MS Blogs and others.
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Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
Before migrating to Microsoft 365 Business Premium, we possessed an in-house exchange server. Therefore, it was difficult for us to look at alternatives to Microsoft for a solution – we did look at the Google Suite of products, but the transition for us seemed less cumbersome to stay with Microsoft from a staff and administrative perspective. While the G Suite does offer us many outstanding products and services, we also didn’t feel that Gmail is up-to-par as a corporate solution the way Exchange/Outlook/OWA are – this alone was also a driving force for our end-users, as there was minimal transition for them to move from an on-premise solution to an off-premise solution. The additional features of SharePoint, Teams, Project, and so many other applications within Microsoft 365 also helped us make a strong case to stay with Microsoft and expand what we were using. The end-user and mobile protections of InTune have also put us at ease when issuing laptops and mobile phones to an almost fully-remote end-user base.
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Discontinued Products
We use Microsoft Office 2016 because at the time it was the best tool for us, but now with full attention to cloud products, we may be thinking of migrating our solution to a cloud service.
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Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • We can now keep work going from anywhere. It doesn't matter if we are on a job site or sitting in the office or working from home for a day or two we don't have to miss a beat.
  • It has unified how we store information so that everything isn't stored on individual computers
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Discontinued Products
  • Microsoft Office 2016 saves me a lot of time daily. I have functions and macros set up that calculate and show me a lot of things just from a couple of my inputs. This would take full days sometimes if not for that.
  • Apart from time, it saves me money, I manage data in Excel, I don't have to buy software specifically for that.
  • Sooner or later my company will have to switch to new edition, which will hurt revenues because of a subscription model.
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