The Twins Challenge: Office 365 crushes Office 2019

Here’s a question I get a lot: What’s the difference between Office 2019 and Office 365? Aren’t they the same?

Well—actually, no.

In fact, while they have similar names, there’s a world of difference between the two. Office 365 includes fully installed Office applications—including the latest versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. And these apps keep getting better over time, with new capabilities delivered every month. Most importantly, Office 365 is connected to the cloud, so you can access your content from any device, coauthor with anyone in real-time (regardless of whether or not they’ve purchased a copy of Office), and use the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to create more impactful content with less effort.

On the flipside, Office 2019 also delivers full installs of the Office apps we know and love—but they’re “frozen in time.” They don’t ever get updated with new features, and they’re not cloud-connected. Also, Office 2019 doesn’t support real-time coauthoring across apps, and it doesn’t have the amazing AI-powered capabilities that come with Office 365.

To test our claim that Office 365 can save you time and make work easy (and fun!), we did something unprecedented: We pitted our own software suites—Office 2019 and Office 365—against each other in a head-to-head showdown. We challenged three sets of twins to complete the same tasks in both versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and filmed them along the way.

Want to get to know Office 365?

I think the results speak for themselves; visit the Twins Challenge website for ideas about how to start maximizing your time while creating your best work. AI-infused features—like Ideas in Excel and PowerPoint, Excel Data Types, Ink to Text, and more—will transform your productivity.

If you don’t have Office 365, we have a trial offer for one free month, so you can test it out before committing. We love Office 365, and we think you will too.