Visio 2019 shipped in September 2018 as Microsoft's perpetual diagramming application. It is licensed independently of Office and never bundled into any Office edition. The 2019 release added AWS shapes alongside the existing Azure stencils, freehand drawing with digital pens, modern wireframing templates, and the database reverse-engineering wizard for SQL Server. Extended support ended 14 October 2025.
Standard (basic shapes — flowcharts, organisational charts, network diagrams, basic floor plans) and Professional (adds rack-mounted equipment, SharePoint workflows, IEEE engineering, BPMN 2.0, UML 2.5, data linking to Excel / Access / SQL, AutoCAD import, container shapes, validation rules). Visio for the web is included with Microsoft 365 Business Standard and above, but does not replace the desktop application for serious diagramming.
Retail (one device, transferable), Visio LTSC 2019 via Volume Licensing, or Visio Plan 1 / Plan 2 subscription (cloud — Plan 2 includes the desktop client). The perpetual licence is the right choice for occasional diagrammers; the Plan 2 subscription is cheaper over a five-year horizon if Visio is used daily.
Mainstream October 2023; extended October 2025. Replacement is Visio 2024 (perpetual) or Visio Plan 1/2 (subscription). Files are forward-compatible — a .vsdx authored in 2019 opens cleanly in 2024 and the web client.
Relative fit of each licensing channel for typical buyers of this product. Calibrate against your own scale and renewal strategy.
Office is sold two ways: perpetual (one-time, version-locked, no cloud services) and Microsoft 365 (per-user subscription with the desktop apps, OneDrive, Exchange, Teams). Pick by how stable your environment is, not by sticker price alone.
The small set of decisions that determine whether you overpay, fail an audit, or land in the right place.
Three reference deployments — find the closest match and adapt rather than starting from zero.
None of these are tricks — they are the same levers Microsoft's own licensing specialists pull on every renewal.
These four signals show up in every counterfeit-licence case we have seen. If any of them is present, walk away — no discount makes it worthwhile.
OEM keys are distributed only pre-installed on hardware and stay bound to that device for life. A separately sold OEM key is almost certainly leaked, harvested from scrapped hardware, or fully counterfeit.
Microsoft entitlement always leaves a paper trail — a Volume Licensing Service Center record, a CSP invoice, a sealed Retail box with a COA, or a Microsoft Store order. No proof = no defence in an audit.
Classic symptom of a MAK key that has exceeded its activation pool, or a KMS key being abused outside its volume programme. Microsoft revokes these centrally; the activation grace period is short.
Legitimate CSPs and LARs transfer the licence into your Microsoft 365 / Azure / VLSC tenant under your domain. If the seller insists on activating 'for you' on their account, you do not own anything.
Quick definitions — the full glossary lives at /en/glossary if you need to dig deeper.