The best business laptops

The best business laptops might cost a bit. But they can help you or your employees remain productive, whether you're working from an office, or working from home. So in the long term, they're a great investment.

Here, we've drawn on our years of experience to pull together a list of the best business laptops available today. That means all the devices below all offer enough power and processing speed to run office software and display presentations, quickly and efficiently. Their batteries will be powerful enough to last a working day. They're also sleek and professional-looking; thin and light enough to be easily portable; large enough to easily view documents on, and with a keyboard comfortable enough to use for work.

If you have other specific uses for a laptop, though, check out our guides to best laptops for video editing and the best student laptops.

The best business laptops in 2023

Best business laptop overall

Dell is the top dog when it comes to making slim, stylish and utterly desirable Windows laptops, and the XPS 15 is their brilliant flagship. Take this device out in any office or meeting, and you'll get a lot of appreciative looks. But it's not just about aesthetics. Dell has packed the XPS 15 with some of the most powerful mobile components you'll find in any laptop right now, so it'll easily handle pretty much any task you need to use it for. It's so powerful that you can even play games on it pretty effectively, and it's great for photo and video editing too.

All this power is packed into a stylish body that's thin and light, making it ideal if you're often working out and about. Its 15.6-inch screen is bright and vibrant, and it's backed up by a comfortable keyboard and excellent speakers. All this, plus Dell's famous build quality and support, makes it expensive, but worth it.

Best business laptop for battery

Lenovo make excellent laptops for business use, and this new model is a great example of that. It's thin and light, with an excellent battery life, which makes it perfect for business people who travel a lot for work.

It packs a speedy Intel i7 CPU and Intel Iris Xe graphics, has some great built-in security features and can be fitted with up to 32GB of RAM. The build quality and after sale support means this is a laptop you can confidently use for work day in day out as well. 

However, for creatives, you may want to bear in mind that it only comes with integrated graphics. This means for graphic intensive tasks like 3D rendering and animation, or CAD use, this may not be for you.

Best business laptop for budget buyers

Short on cash? The Acer Swift 3 is a fantastic business laptop for people who want to keep costs down. It's one of the most affordable Windows laptops out there, but it doesn't skimp on performance. In fact, it can go toe-to-toe with more expensive laptops, even though some of its hardware is showing its age a bit (it was first released in 2020).

The keyboard and trackpad are both comfortable to use, and while the chassis is a little plain, it feels robust enough that you won't worry about carrying it around with you. The 14-inch 1080p screen means working on this laptop doesn't feel cramped, and it offers enough power to handle pretty much any day-to-day office task you require of it. For heavy-duty use, however, you'll want to splash out on something a bit more capable.

Best business laptop from Apple

Do you desire an Apple laptop above all else? Many do, partly as a fashion statement, partly because they're just so powerful and reliable. 

The MacBook Pro 13-inch (M2, 2020) is by far the best business laptop Apple has made, so if you have your heart set on using a MacBook for work, this is the one to get. It's super-powerful, thanks to its Apple-designed M2 chip, and has the longest battery life ever seen in a MacBook. This thing is seriously impressive when it comes to battery, and means you can work on it all day without needing to plug it in.

As is usual with MacBooks, it also has a gorgeous Retina screen, while offering a sleek and stylish design that Apple is renowned for. The Touch Bar, a slim touch display that runs along the top of the keyboard, is a great feature, as it displays context-sensitive buttons and shortcuts that change depending on the app you're using. With the right apps, it can be a real boon to your productivity. 

The only real downsides are the price and the lack of ports: just two Thunderbolt 4/USB-C ports (one of which is used for power), an audio jack and that's it. Read more with our MacBook Pro 13-inch (M2, 2022) review and our MacBook Pro vs MacBook Air comparison.

Best MacBook Pro alternative

Do you love MacBooks for your personal, but need to use Windows 11 for business reasons? If so, the Asus Zenbook 14X OLED is, in our experience, the closest device to Apple's powerhouse on the market today. The HDR OLED display is bright, sharp and colourful. The Intel i9 processor can match even the MacBook M2 processor in terms of fast performance. And while eight-ish hours of battery life isn't quite as much as a MacBook, most business people will find it generous enough. And on the plus side, it comes with an excellent touchscreen too. For more details, see our Asus Zenbook 14X OLED review.

Best big-screen business laptop

If you're after a business laptop with a large screen then the LG Gram 17 is our top pick, because despite its size, it remains thin and light enough to easily carry around. 

Packed with some of the latest mobile tech around, including 11th generation Intel processors, Iris Xe graphics, 16GB of RAM and speedy SSD storage, this is a great performer. Battery life is also phenomenal, easily lasting around 12 hours on a single charge. Best of all, it's also incredibly light at just 2.98 lbs (1.35 kg), yet doesn't feel at all flimsy. You honestly won't expect a laptop with a 17-inch screen of feeling this light, which is a credit to LG's engineers.

Best business laptop for graphic designers

If you're a graphic designer your day-to-day business is more about spreadsheets and emails; you also want a laptop that can cope with demanding creative software such as Adobe Photoshop. You'll want a beautiful pin-sharp display, with 100% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut. And you'll be looking for special features for creatives too.

All these needs will be meet by the ASUS ProArt Studiobook OLED (H7604). It's packed with high-spec components that run everything quickly without overheating. In the words of our reviewer: "[It's] ideal for everything from basic image editing to 3D rendering. It laughs at 4K video, plays games, flies through raw image processing and looks good while doing it." Its OLED display is bright and sharp packs in touchscreen functionality, and to speed up your workflow further, there’s a built-in dial that can be customised to whichever creative app you’re running. For more details, read our full Asus ProArt Studiobook OLED review. 

Best value Apple laptop for business

The MacBook Air (M2, 2022) is similar to the MacBook Pro, above, but about $100/£100 cheaper. It's another great choice for business use, thanks to its powerful Apple-designed M2 chip. Its fanless design also means that it is pretty much completely silent when in use. And as with previous MacBook Airs, it features a gorgeous thin and light design that makes it easy to carry around with you, which makes it a great choice for businesses people who like to travel a lot. 

The fanless design means it can't quite keep pace with the MacBook Pro in heavy use cases, but for day-to-day use, the MacBook Air is a great affordable alternative to the MacBook Pro 13-inch. For more details, read our MacBook Air (M2, 2022) review and our MacBook Pro vs MacBook Air comparison.

Best value Windows laptop for business

The Asus ZenBook 13 is a couple of years old now, so it's on the affordable side. But it's a business laptop that can easily go head-to-head with most Apple MacBooks when it comes to pure design and power. 

You can choose between an AMD Ryzen 5000 series processor, or Intel 11th gen CPU, and both of these offer excellent performance. It also has an absolutely stunning 13.3-inch OLED screen and one of the best battery lives around. You can configure it up to 32GB of RAM and up to 1TB of SSD storage, which makes this a brilliant laptop for working on, especially if you want to multitask, or store lots of large files. And that means it's a great choice for creatives looking for a classy business laptop.

How to choose a business laptop

Some of the most popular and respected brands of business laptop include Dell, HP, Lenovo, Apple and Microsoft. But how do you choose between them? Well, essentially it means balancing your needs and budget: there's no point in spending thousands on a device if one that costs a few hundred can deliver all you need. 

So think carefully about what you'll be using the laptop for. If you only need it for basic tasks like email and web browsing, you can get away with a less expensive model. But if you need it for more demanding tasks like video editing or programming, you'll need to invest in a more powerful machine.

Once you know your budget and needs, it's time to start comparing specs, most importantly the processor, RAM and storage. The faster the processor, the better the performance, and the higher the RAM, the more you can multitask more effectively. Storage is where your files and programs are stored, so if you need to store a lot of data, more is better. 

Also think about what size screen is better for your purposes. A larger display means you can see more of your spreadsheets at once, and the easier it will be to put two windows side by side. Having said that the larger and bulkier the laptop, the bulkier it'll be to carry, so there's a trade-off to be made there. 

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