Productivity Suite, Compared And Actually Priced

Search "productivity suite" on Google right now and the results are mostly industrial controller programming software. Not Microsoft, not Google, not an office bundle. Ladder logic editors for programmable logic controllers, from a company called AutomationDirect, taking four of the top six slots.

That's genuinely what the page looks like, and it means half the people who land here wanted one thing and half wanted the completely other thing.

Direct answer for the office-software half. If you're one person, LibreOffice is free and does the job. If you're a household, Microsoft 365 Family is $129.99 a year and covers up to six people with a terabyte each, which works out around twenty-two dollars per person per year. If you're a business that needs email on your own domain, Google Workspace or Microsoft's business tiers, and the per-seat price is where the real money goes. Prices below came off each vendor's own page on 28 July 2026.

If You Actually Meant The PLC Software

Short section, and then I'll leave it alone.

AutomationDirect's Productivity Suite is programming software for their Productivity1000, Productivity2000 and Productivity3000 controllers. Dockable panes, a ladder logic editor, a data view window, a task manager, plus a mobile companion called PACData. Their overview page says "Download the software today" and lists no price at all on that page, which usually means free-with-hardware, but I'm not going to state that as fact because they didn't.

If that's what you came for, that's the product, and nothing else in this article will help you.

What A Productivity Suite Even Includes

Everyone uses this phrase like it's settled and it isn't.

The floor is a word processor, a spreadsheet and a presentation tool. That's the 1990s definition and it still holds. Modern suites bolt on mail, a calendar, cloud storage, a chat app, and lately an AI assistant that the marketing page leads with and that most people turn off within a fortnight.

Where it gets confusing is that a suite and a pile of individual productivity apps now overlap heavily. Notion will happily be your documents and your wiki and your task list. Google Workspace will happily be your mail and your documents and your video calls. The old boundary between "office suite" and "the apps I use" has basically dissolved, and the only thing that still cleanly separates them is billing. Suites charge one price for a bundle. Apps charge separately, and that's how people end up spending six hundred dollars a year without deciding to.

The Prices, Off Each Vendor's Own Page

I loaded these today rather than quoting a roundup. Two of them wouldn't give me everything I asked for, which I've noted where it happened.

Zoho's other tiers didn't render prices for me at all, just the feature grids, so I've left them out rather than guessing. Same story with Todoist's paid plans on a different page the same morning. It happens more than you'd think when pricing tables are built in JavaScript.

The Currency Thing That Caught Me Out

Here's a detail I didn't expect to matter and now think is the most useful thing on this page.

Google Workspace's pricing page served me euros. Not dollars with a converter, euros as the actual listed price, because the page geolocates. Every US-dollar figure you've read in a Workspace comparison came off a version of that page the author saw and you might not. The promotional rates I was shown, EUR 6.12 and EUR 12.24 for the first twelve months on Starter and Standard, carry a stated window of 11 August 2026 through 11 August 2027, so they're temporary in a way a roundup published last year won't tell you.

Microsoft's page gave me dollars for the same session, so it isn't universal. But it does mean that when you compare a Workspace price against a Microsoft 365 price you found in an article, you might be comparing two different currencies without realising, and the exchange rate is doing part of the argument for you.

Check the price on your own screen before you commit. That's the whole lesson and it took me one confused minute to learn it.

Five Years Of A Household Suite

Suites are the kind of purchase that renews quietly for a decade, so the annual figure undersells the decision. I ran the five-year number instead.

The gap between Family billed annually and Family billed monthly over five years is $129.45. That's almost exactly one extra year of the annual plan, paid for the privilege of paying in twelfths. Put another way, monthly billers hand over roughly six years of money and get five years of software, which is a fairly steep charge for cash-flow convenience on a hundred-dollar product.

Also worth sitting with, $21.67 per person per year is very hard to beat for desktop Word and Excel plus a terabyte of storage, assuming you genuinely have six people to fill the slots. Most households don't, and then Personal at $99.99 is the honest comparison, and against free LibreOffice it starts looking like a lot of money for file compatibility.

What A Terabyte Costs You On Each Plan

I only worked this one out because I was annoyed at a storage warning, and then the numbers turned out to be more lopsided than any feature comparison I'd read.

Every one of these plans bundles cloud storage, and the amount varies by a factor of two hundred while the price varies by a factor of three. So I divided.

That last row is not a typo. Thirty gigabytes for eighty-odd euros a year is a rate that would be absurd if storage were what you were buying, and it obviously isn't. Starter sells you mail on your own domain and an admin console, and the storage is a rounding error they threw in. Fine. But it does mean that if you picked Starter because it was the cheap Workspace tier and you're now bumping into the storage ceiling, upgrading isn't a small decision, and the tier above it costs exactly double.

Compare that against a Family subscription split six ways and the spread is on the order of a hundredfold, though I'm setting euros next to dollars there, so take it as a shape rather than a precise multiple. Different products for different situations, obviously. Still worth knowing which end of that range you're standing on.

Free Suites Are Not A Consolation Prize

I want to push back on the framing where free suites are what you settle for.

LibreOffice is on version 26.2.5, ships for Windows, macOS on both Intel and Apple Silicon, and Linux in rpm and deb, under the Mozilla Public License v2.0. It opens the Microsoft formats. It has a real spreadsheet. The current release notes mention Markdown support and connectors in Calc and Writer, which is not the feature set of a project coasting.

The actual reason people pay is not capability. It's that a document you send to someone else has to survive the trip, and the last five percent of formatting fidelity in a complicated .docx is where free suites still lose. If you send documents to clients for a living, that five percent is worth $99.99. If you write things for yourself and export to PDF, it isn't, and you're paying a compatibility tax on a problem you don't have.

What I Run, And It's Boring

My honest setup is mostly plain text files and a browser. Not because that's optimal, but because I run a lot of things out of one repository and every extra format is another thing to convert later.

The one place I do pay is publishing, since I self-publish on KDP and that pipeline wants real .docx files with real styles, not something approximate. That's the compatibility tax I just described, and I pay it knowingly rather than pretending free tools cover it.

For everything else I'd rather have the file on my disk. I generate most of my own assets locally on an M4 Pro, so the marginal cost of another draft or another version is basically electricity, and I've noticed that changes how you work. When each extra document costs nothing you make more of them and throw more away, which turns out to be better than being careful.

I'll admit I don't have a controlled experiment here. I've never run a year on Microsoft 365 and a year on LibreOffice side by side and measured anything. Nobody has, and anyone claiming otherwise is guessing with confidence.

Things People Ask About Suites

Is Microsoft 365 worth it over the free web versions? If you need the desktop apps offline, or you're deep in Excel, yes. The free browser versions of Word and Excel exist and they're fine for light editing. The desktop apps are a different product in practice, particularly Excel, where the gap is not small.

Can Google Workspace replace Microsoft entirely? For a lot of small teams, yes, and the thing that decides it is usually email on your own domain rather than the documents. Where it breaks down is complicated spreadsheets and anyone who lives in Excel macros. Sheets is good. It is not the same tool.

What's the cheapest way to get a working suite? Free. LibreOffice for documents, whatever mail you already have, and a browser tab for quick text. I've written about the browser notepad options separately, and for disposable notes they beat both suites outright because there's nothing to install and nothing to cancel.

Do I need a suite at all? A surprising number of people don't. If your work is writing, code, or anything that ends in a PDF, a text editor and an export step covers it. Suites earn their money in offices where documents get passed around and edited by five people, which is a specific situation, not a default one.

Which suite for a Mac? Both work fine, and Apple's own Pages, Numbers and Keynote are free and already installed, which the comparisons forget every single time. There's more on that in the Mac productivity apps rundown.

How I'd Actually Choose

Start free. LibreOffice or the Apple apps or the free web versions, whichever your machine already has. Use it for a real month, on real work, with real deadlines.

Then pay only when something specific breaks. A file that arrives mangled at a client, a spreadsheet that won't open, a shared calendar you genuinely need. That's a reason. Wanting the professional-feeling option is not a reason, and it's the one that costs people a hundred a year for a decade.

If you want the wider view of where suites sit against everything else in this category, the productivity software overview covers the rest of the landscape, including the individual apps that end up costing more than any suite does.