Best Value Laptops for Small Business Owners

Two jobs, one budget, and a machine you might be buying five of

Buying for a small business is a different exercise from buying for yourself. The question is not what the best laptop is, it is what the best laptop is when you may need several of them, when nobody is going to be impressed either way, and when the thing that costs you money is downtime rather than a slow export.

There are two jobs to cover: the actual work, and everything else. The answers are £548.97 and £400, which leaves most of the budget untouched.

Running the business

Best laptop for running a business and buying for staff without overpaying under £700 - is ACER Aspire Go 15 15.6" Laptop - Intel® Core™ i7, 512 GB SSD, Silver

Guide price: £548.97

This laptop is well-suited for your office and business tasks, with its Intel Core i7-13620H processor to keep you moving through your working day. Strong multi-core performance means it stays responsive with many tabs and Excel open, and 16 GB of RAM lets you keep spreadsheets, email and a browser full of tabs going at once.

For a business buying in quantity this is the right shape of machine. A Core i7 and 16 GB of memory under £550 means five of them costs about £2,745 rather than the five thousand you might have budgeted, and the memory can be doubled to 32 GB later if a particular role needs it - which is the single most useful thing you can upgrade on a working laptop.

512 GB of storage and a colour-accurate Full HD 1920 x 1080p screen are both fine, and that colour accuracy means anyone doing social media graphics in Canva or Photoshop is not working blind. Up to 9.5 hours of battery covers a working day. At 1.8 kg it is not a travel machine, so if someone on the team is on trains constantly, buy them something else.

Everything else

Best laptop for everyday business admin and streaming that just works under £700 - is HP ChromeBook 15" - Intel® Core™ i3 N305, 8GB, 128GB, FHD

Guide price: £400

This laptop is well-suited for your everyday and entertainment tasks, with up to 11 hours of battery life so it lasts through the day without charging, and a 144 Hz refresh rate for smoother scrolling and streaming.

For a shared or secondary machine there is a real case here beyond the price. ChromeOS is close to maintenance-free, updates do not interrupt anyone, and if it is lost or broken nothing of consequence was stored on it - the 128 GB of storage more or less enforces that discipline.

The limits are hard, though. 8 GB of memory is not enough for serious spreadsheet work, and anything that needs installed Windows software will not run. Treat it as an appliance, not a workstation.

Best laptop for everyday business admin and streaming that just works under £900 - is HP Omnibook X Flip 14" Next Gen AI Laptop -AMD Ryzen™ AI 7, 16GB, 1TB, Touchscreen, with pen

Guide price: £899

This laptop is well-suited for your everyday and entertainment tasks, with up to 10 hours and 45 minutes of battery life so it lasts through the day without charging, and a 120 Hz refresh rate for smoother scrolling and streaming.

The £499 step up turns an appliance into a laptop that can do anything: 16 GB of memory, 1 TB of storage, a colour-accurate 14-inch 3K (2880 x 1800) touchscreen with a pen, 1.39 kg, on Windows 11 Home.

For a business, the pen and touchscreen are the interesting part - signing off documents, marking up a drawing, taking a note in front of a customer. Whether that is worth £499 depends entirely on whether anyone will use it.

The short version

Buy the £548.97 ACER Aspire Go 15 for anyone doing real work, and buy as many as you need - the upgradeable memory means they age better than the price suggests. Add the £400 HP ChromeBook 15" for a shared or front-of-house machine. The £899 HP Omnibook X Flip 14" only makes sense if the touchscreen and pen solve a specific problem you already have.