Microsoft Outlook vs Outlook Express

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Outlook and Outlook express are both email clients developed by Microsoft.

Comparison chart

Microsoft Outlook versus Outlook Express comparison chart
	Microsoft Outlook	Outlook Express
	current rating is 3.36/5 1 2 3 4 5 (99 ratings)	current rating is 3.21/5 1 2 3 4 5 (85 ratings)
Intended user	Business/corporate user	Home user
Calendar	Yes	No
Task List	Yes	No
Journal	Yes	No
Automatic back-up (archive)	Yes	No
Programmable using VBA	Yes	No
Message Rules	Sophisticated rules for incoming as well as outgoing mail	Incoming mail filters only
Junk Mail feature	Yes; sophisticated	No
Network-oriented	Message store and settings CAN be stored on a server	Message store and settings cannot be stored on a server
Included with IE and Windows	No	Yes
Protocols supported	SMTP, POP3, IMAP4, HTTP, MAPI, LDAP, MHTML, NNTP, MIME, and S/MIME, vCalendar, vCard, iCalendar, and full support for HTML mail.	SMTP, POP3, IMAP, and HTTP, LDAP, MHTML, HTML, S/MIME, NNTP
Interoperability	can be used in combination with MS office (like Word to perform mail-merge in e-mail or to automate outgoing mail messages)	Does not interact with other programs except for creating a new mail message when a program requests it.
File format	.pst	.dbx
Available on	Windows 7 and later	Windows XP

How to choose?

When choosing between Outlook Express and Outlook, users and organizations should base their usage decision on the following criteria:

Outlook Express Choose Outlook Express if:

You require only Internet e-mail and newsgroup functionality (for versions of Windows later than Microsoft Windows 95, versions of Windows earlier than Microsoft Windows 95, Macintosh, and UNIX platforms).
You use or plan to use Office 98 for Macintosh, and you want to take advantage of the integration of Outlook Express with this version of the Office suite.

Outlook

Choose Outlook if:

You require advanced Internet standards-based e-mail and discussion group functionality.
You require integrated personal calendars, group scheduling, task, and contact management.
You require integrated e-mail and calendaring, cross-platform clients for versions of Windows later than Microsoft Windows 95, versions of Windows earlier than Microsoft Windows 95, and Macintosh platforms.
You use, or plan to use Office 97, Office 2000, Office XP or Exchange Server and want to take advantage of the integration of Outlook with this version of the Office suite, and the integration with Exchange Server.
You require robust, integrated run-time and design-time collaboration capabilities.

References

About the Author

Nick Jasuja has over 15 years of technology industry experience, including at Amazon in Seattle. He is an expert at building websites, developing software programs in PHP and JavaScript, maintaining MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, and running Linux servers for serving high-traffic websites. He has a bachelor's degree in Computer Science & Engineering.