Has Microsoft Office Online Been Replaced by Microsoft 365?

Author: The AMVIA Team | 5 min read · Mar 2026

What is the short history of Office Online?

Microsoft Office Online launched in 2010 as a free, browser-based version of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Anyone with a free Microsoft account could create and edit documents online without installing Office. It was Microsoft's answer to Google Docs and Sheets, which were winning users as free web alternatives to the installed suite.

The naming grew more tangled over time. Microsoft 365 — originally launched as Office 365 in 2011 — was the paid subscription, while Office Online stayed the free browser option. The two co-existed with different capabilities: one free and limited, one paid and business-grade.

What actually happened to Office Online?

Office Online was not retired — it was renamed and pulled deeper into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. The browser versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote are now called the Microsoft 365 web apps, reached at microsoft365.com (previously office.com). Same apps, new label.

The free tier survives. Anyone with a personal Microsoft account (Outlook.com, Hotmail, and similar) can use the web apps free, with limits. The full web experience — more functionality plus commercial use rights — sits with paid Microsoft 365 subscribers. Microsoft documents the current web app experience at learn.microsoft.com.

Free Office Online vs Microsoft 365 subscription: what is the difference?

The web apps look near-identical for free and paid users, but the licensing and surrounding services are not. Free is for personal productivity. A Microsoft 365 subscription adds commercial use rights, business email, shared storage, co-authoring and admin control — the things a business actually needs to run safely.

Microsoft 365 Business Basic costs £4.60/user/month, Business Standard £9.60/user/month and Business Premium £16.90/user/month (ex VAT, annual), per Microsoft's UK pricing. The jump from free is not just features — it is the legal right to use the apps for work, plus the controls to govern your data.

Can your business use the free Office Online for work?

No, not properly. The free web apps are licensed for personal, non-commercial use only. For a business, even entry-level Business Basic (£4.60/user/month) gives correctly licensed web apps alongside Exchange email, SharePoint, Teams and 1TB OneDrive per user — so the free route is wrong for business even where the features would technically stretch.

There is a governance problem too. Free personal accounts have no admin controls, no IT management, no audit logging and no compliance features. If staff leave, a business running on free personal accounts has no way to control what happens to the data those accounts hold. That is a real risk, not a theoretical one — it surfaces constantly in our Microsoft 365 security audits.

• No central admin or offboarding control
• No audit trail of who accessed what
• No data loss prevention or retention policy
• No enforced multi-factor authentication
• Data effectively owned by individual employees, not the business

Microsoft 365 Personal and Family: are they for business?

No. Microsoft 365 Personal (around £60–85/year) and Microsoft 365 Family (around £80–105/year), based on Microsoft UK list pricing as of 2026, provide installed Office apps and the full web experience — but they are licensed for personal, non-commercial use only. They are the wrong fit for any UK business.

UK businesses should be on a Business plan: Basic, Standard or Premium. Using a personal Microsoft 365 subscription for company work creates both a licensing gap and a data governance gap. We see it regularly during tenant audits, and untangling it after the fact is far more painful than starting on the right plan. A managed Microsoft 365 service keeps licensing, security and backup aligned from day one.

Office or Microsoft 365: what is the current naming?

Microsoft rebranded Office 365 to Microsoft 365 in 2022 and has been updating product names since. The desktop apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) are still widely called Office apps, but the suite and subscription are now Microsoft 365. Some SKUs — like Office 365 E3 — became Microsoft 365 E3.

The rebrand is largely cosmetic; the products and features carried over unchanged. What did shift is scope: the suite now spans Teams, the Power Platform, security tooling and AI features, which is why Microsoft dropped "Office" as the umbrella name. For most businesses the practical takeaway is simple — the name on the tin changed, the licensing decisions did not. Pairing the right plan with managed IT support is what turns the suite into something you can actually trust.