Review
Six accounts, a terabyte each, and a suite most people use 10% of. Whether Microsoft 365 is worth it depends on one question: do you need real Excel?
The Family plan is one of the better-value subscriptions in software: six people, six terabytes and the full desktop apps. Buy it for Excel and storage. If your household lives in Google Docs, you will not miss it.
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Nobody reviews Microsoft 365 by feature list — the apps are thirty years old and everyone knows what Word does. The interesting question is whether the subscription still earns its place next to genuinely good free alternatives. We ran a household of five on the Family plan for six months to answer it.
Google Sheets is fine and it is not the same tool. Pivot tables, Power Query, large datasets, add-ins, keyboard-driven modelling — desktop Excel handles all of it without slowing down, and anyone whose work involves numbers will feel the difference within an hour.
If nobody in your household opens a spreadsheet more complex than a budget, this argument disappears entirely and so does most of the value.
A terabyte per person, six people, with automatic phone photo backup. Compared with buying iCloud or Google One storage separately for a family, the plan often pays for itself on storage alone.
Co-authoring works and is still a step behind Google Docs in smoothness — occasional sync hesitation, more dialogue boxes. Copilot, sold separately, is strong in Excel where it can explain and build formulas, and thin in PowerPoint where the output looks like every other generated deck.
Students and households already living happily in Google Docs, anyone whose only needs are documents and light spreadsheets, and Mac users content with Pages and Numbers. The free web versions of Word and Excel cover occasional use perfectly well.
Good value if you use Excel properly or need family storage; unnecessary if you do not. The Family plan is the only version worth buying — Personal costs almost the same for a sixth of the accounts.
| Personal | $9.99/mo or $99.99/yr, 1 person, 1TB |
|---|---|
| Family | $12.99/mo or $129.99/yr, up to 6 people, 1TB each |
| Apps | Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, OneDrive, Defender |
| Platforms | Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, web |
| Copilot | Paid add-on per user |
| Offline use | Full desktop apps, no connection required |
Scores from our own testing. Prices are launch RRP in USD.
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