Best business laptops 2024: 5 top picks for office, hybrid or work-from-home

The best business laptops in 2024 deliver powerfully productive performance while staying thin and light at around three pounds or less. Whether you have a small business or an enterprise-grade corporation, we’ve got you covered. I’ve reviewed laptops for more than seven years, so consider me and the rest of the Laptop Mag team your outsourced team of dedicated laptop experts. We review more than 100 laptops annually to help you find the best business laptops.

What’s different about finding the best business laptops? You can’t shortchange security and durability: The best business laptops typically come with fingerprint sensors, IR cameras, and security chips, and many have military-grade durability.

These are key components that differentiate business laptops from typical consumer laptops. We rigorously test the best business laptops from every major manufacturer to judge their blend of portability, performance, battery life, and more. 

The HP Spectre x360 14 is our current pick for the best business laptop. It ticks all of the boxes above and offers a gorgeous display, excellent performance, and over 11 hours of battery life in a flexible 2-in-1 form factor. 

However, if you prefer Lenovo, Dell, Acer, or Apple, there are compelling options at varying price points from all of them.

Read on for a look at our top picks, and we’ll find the perfect fit for you.

The Quick List

Curated by

Curated by

Sean Riley

Sean Riley has covered a wide variety of gadgets during his 14 years as a tech journalist, coming to Laptop Mag in 2020. As the managing editor, Sean participates in every laptop review published on Laptop Mag, whether as a reviewer or editor. Sean works from home but travels regularly for work, including trips to Laptop Mag‘s office, so he has ample opportunity to test the latest business laptops in many settings. 

The best business laptops in 2024

Best Business Laptop Overall

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The HP Spectre x360 14 (2024) is the best 2-in-1 business laptop available today, thanks to its blend of performance and battery life. It edged just beyond 11 hours in our Laptop Mag Battery test, which is nearly an hour beyond the premium category average. Add in the beautiful OLED panel, the comfortable keyboard, and the sleek design, and you can see why this laptop tops our business charts.

Rami Tabari reviewed this laptop for us. After over six years of reviewing laptops for Laptop Mag, he can be hard to impress, so it means everything that he opened his review by saying, “A culmination of greatness comes along once in a while to grace my presence, and today that’s the HP Spectre x360 14 (2024).”

Performance is more than enough to juggle all the browser tabs you forgot to close during the day, along with every productivity app in your arsenal. It scored 12,358 on the Geekbench 6.1 test, which was on par with or beyond its nearest competitors, the ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen 3 (Core i7-1360P, 11,133), Acer Swift Go 14 (Ultra 7 155H, 12,434), and MacBook Pro 14  (M3, 11,968).

If you need to make regular video calls the Spectre has an ace up its sleeve with a legitimately good 4K webcam built-in. It’s not perfect, our reviewer did see some grain in the image making video calls from their home office, but it’s always improving thanks to software updates and AI enhancements and it’s a massive upgrade from the typical laptop webcam.

Add in excellent enterprise-grade security from its discrete Trusted Platform Module (TPM) and convenient login via its 9MP IR camera or fingerprint reader and you have a business laptop that justifies its admittedly high price.

See our full HP Spectre x360 14 (2024) review.

Best Budget Business Laptop

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The Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen 5 delivers fantastic value for a budget-conscious business. I’ll get the caveat out of the way right at the top, the battery life is its weakness at 7 hours and 48 minutes in our testing. So regular travelers will need to look elsewhere, but if you are at a desk or typically have access to an outlet this is a worthwhile tradeoff for the rest of what you get.

Our reviewer was particularly impressed by this laptop’s laundry list of security features: “the ThinkPad E14 comes with features like a discrete trusted platform module (TPM) 2.0, an optional FHD hybrid IR camera required for Windows Hello, and Smart Power On.” In many industries, this level of security is a must, so it’s great to see it on a budget business laptop.

The ThinkPad E14 beat out the mainstream laptop average in both our Geekbench 6 testing (8,000 vs. 7,812) and our SSD transfer test (1,257MBps vs. 924.18MBps), a notable feat for a business laptop typically found for around $750. It nearly matched our previous overall pick, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 11’s Geekbench score, while outscoring the vastly more expensive HP Dragonfly Pro on the SSD transfer test.

As you would expect from Lenovo, the keyboard is a super responsive chiclet style that should allow you to type quickly and comfortably all day. Lenovo also boasts MIL-STD 810H certification on this affordable laptop, so don’t worry that you’re getting a cheap build due to the low cost.

While you can find a laptop for under $500, most business users will be better served by stretching that budget to reach the ThinkPad E14 Gen 5.

See our full Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen 5 review.

Best Long-Lasting Business Laptop

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The HP EliteBook Ultra is the poster child for a couple of massive shifts in laptops in 2024, and while that isn’t a reason to make it your next business laptop, the combined results of these two factors may convince you.

The first is the true arrival of AI PCs after something of a false start in 2023. While AI PC features will evolve over the coming years, Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC push and AI software from all over the industry are leveraging this hardware today. What hardware? The latest laptop chips featuring powerful neural processing units (NPUs), like the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip in the EliteBook Ultra.

If you are unconvinced by AI right now, that’s fine; the HP EliteBook Ultra is a fantastic business laptop, even if you never use a single AI feature. It offers stellar battery life at over 16 hours in our Laptop Mag battery test, wildly outlasting the 10 hours we consider a solid result in this category. 

That kind of battery life often means underpowered performance, but that isn’t the case here, with the Ultra scoring 12,717 in the Geekbench 6 overall performance test. That’s enough to outpace even a high-performance laptop like Apple’s MacBook Pro 14 M3 (11,968). Our only performance complaint with the EliteBook Ultra is its SSD transfer speeds at 712MBps; we want to see almost double those speeds, so if you are frequently moving large files around on your laptop, that could be a dealbreaker.

The EliteBook Ultra’s 2.2K matte anti-glare display helps make it an ideal travel companion. While we would have liked to see brightness higher than the 321 nits it achieved in our testing, that anti-glare coating helped make it easily visible even in bright lighting conditions. 

HP’s Wolf Pro Security platform, including AI-powered antivirus software and threat detection, is built into the EliteBook Ultra, and the 5MP webcam gives you secure Windows Hello sign-in. 

If you work with proprietary software that may not support the ARM-based Qualcomm chip inside the EliteBook Ultra, that’s another potential reason to look to the HP Spectre x360 14 instead, but if you stick to mainstream apps and like having the latest technology, the EliteBook Ultra is tough to beat in 2024.

Read our full HP EliteBook Ultra G1q review.

Best Work-from-home Laptop

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The MacBook Air M3 is a nearly perfect laptop; it’s our current choice for the best laptop overall. However, when considering it for work, it takes a backseat to some of the more purpose-built business laptops. That’s why it makes an excellent choice for a work-from-home laptop; as long as your business supports macOS, it’s the ideal laptop for business and personal use.

In my review, I said, “While I’ve certainly used more powerful laptops, the fact that I can get this kind of performance from a laptop in a chassis this small is mind-bending.” I stand by that statement months later. We’ve seen strong competition this year, but the Air remains tough to beat for overall productivity performance. 

The MacBook Air 13 M3 is more than a match for the latest Intel Core Ultra Series 2 processors, with only the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chips outperforming it in some tasks. While Qualcomm and Intel are finally putting up a fight in the battery life department, the Air M3 delivers over 15 hours in our testing, so it’s not something that you’ll have to worry about. 

Taking a closer look at performance, the Air 13 M3 narrowly defeated the latest Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 12, outscoring it on Geekbench 6.2 (12,087 vs. 11,638) for multi-core performance, but the battery life was the decisive factor there with the ThinkPad only reaching 9 hours and 27 minutes. If you want more battery life than the Air M3, you’ll need to look at the HP EliteBook Ultra above, which delivered over 16 hours in our testing. Not a huge difference, but a win is a win.

One of the only knocks against the MacBook Air is that it only offers a pair of Thunderbolt 4/USB 4 ports along with the MagSafe charging port. If an HDMI or USB Type-A port are critical to your setup you are going to need to pick up a USB-C hub or a docking station. If it’s just the HMDI port or an SD card slot, you could also opt for the MacBook Pro 14 (M3, 2023), which adds both, along with a third Thunderbolt 4 port (sadly, still no USB-A). 

See our full Apple MacBook 13-inch M3 review.

Best for Travel

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The Acer TravelMate P6 isn’t the flashiest business laptop, but if you are a frequent business traveler or have a long commute with your laptop daily, its 2.6-pound weight and 13-hour battery life may make it sparkle like a diamond in your eyes.

Our reviewer said, “The super-slim Acer TravelMate P6 14 sports a classic yet elegant design you’ll barely feel in your bag.” That’s the highest praise possible for a thin-and-light business laptop. Thankfully, it also boasts MIL-STD certification for durability, meaning that if it encounters bumps, drops, cold, heat, and dust as it travels with you, it will continue to power up every time you need it.

The 14-inch display has a 16:10 aspect ratio, giving you 120 extra vertical pixels to work with compared to a typical 16:9 display, so you’ll get a few extra rows of that spreadsheet or another paragraph of that report you’re working on. The display is bright at 395.4 nits, which is always handy for travelers or commuters that need to work in varied lighting conditions. 

While performance is sufficient for productivity apps and web browsing, this laptop isn’t a powerhouse, scoring 9,121 on the Geekbench 6 overall performance test. That defeats our budget pick the Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen 5 (8,000), but is behind every other laptop on this list. Just know that you are optimizing for portability and battery life over performance when choosing the TravelMate P6.

Travelers will appreciate the port offerings on the TravelMate P6 as a thin-and-light laptop often means scant connectivity options. The TravelMate gives you a full HDMI port, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, a USB Type-A port, a microSD card reader, and a 3.5mm headphone/mic jack.

Finally, the TravelMate P6 features a comfortably bouncy and responsive Chiclet-style keyboard and a large 5×3-inch trackpad. This should at least keep you from considering packing a portable keyboard, but depending on your needs, finding the best wireless mouse to go in your bag may be worth the space in your bag.

It won’t be the perfect match for everyone, but if you are looking for the best business laptop for travel, the Acer TravelMate P6 14 is the right choice in 2024.

See our full Acer TravelMate P6 review.

Benchmark comparisons

Recently Reviewed Laptops

Not every laptop can make the best business laptop page, we wouldn’t be doing you that much good if that were the case. We review new laptops every week and over 100 laptops yearly, so here’s a look at our most recently reviewed laptops that didn’t make this page either due to a fault or simply because it isn’t a business laptop.

How To Choose a Business Laptop

Here are some things to keep in mind when choosing the right model of business laptop for you or your company.

• Do you need Intel vPro or AMD Pro? Many business laptops are available with CPUs that have Intel vPro technology, which lets a support person log in remotely, even if the computer can’t boot. However, unless you have a large IT department and a huge fleet of laptops that you need the ability to service remotely, you probably won’t use this feature.
• How fast do you need it to be? While the kind of blistering performance you need in a gaming laptop isn’t necessary, business users don’t want to be bogged down while multitasking. RAM is one concern here, opting for at least 16GB and 32GB isn’t ridiculous if you are a power user who likes to keep numerous apps and browser tabs open. For your CPU most will be fine with a Core i5 or higher Intel P-series or U-series options from Intel 13th Gen or Intel 14th Gen, or an Intel Core Ultra 5 or higher.
• Long battery life: Nobody wants to run out of juice in the middle of a long workday or a cross-country flight. Unless you’re getting a giant workstation or a budget laptop, look for a laptop that gets at least 10 hours on a charge. 
• The right ports: Nobody likes to carry a bag full of dongles. Consider which kinds of connections you or your employees will need the most. If you connect to a wired network a lot, make sure the laptop has an Ethernet port. If photography is a key part of the job, choose a laptop with a memory card reader. No matter what your needs, a Thunderbolt 4 port is a huge advantage because it will allow you to connect to high-speed peripherals, universal chargers, and powerful laptop docking stations.
• A great keyboard: It almost goes without saying that every laptop should have a good keyboard. But with business systems, a comfortable typing experience is even more important. Look for snappy feedback, deep travel and absolutely no flex.

FAQs

• Q: What makes a good business laptop vs. home laptop?
  A: While there is substantial overlap in the qualities that we look for in the best business laptops as opposed to simply the best laptops, security is one of the biggest features that separates them. We want a fast, reliable, and secure login method, whether it’s a fingerprint reader or an IR camera, for Windows Hello support.

  Durability is another critical feature for a business laptop; your job may depend on your ability to bring this laptop everywhere with you, and not having it break down at an inopportune moment is mission-critical.

• Q: Why are business laptops so expensive?
  A: Some of this comes down to the two features referenced in the answer right above this one: security and durability. Business laptops often feature additional security features at a chip level that aren’t included in consumer laptops, which drives up the costs and, in turn, the price. A more durable laptop means more robust components, and the added cost of those pricier parts is passed on to the business laptop buyer.

  Another factor to keep in mind is that while retail price listings for business laptops can often sound outlandish, this isn’t typically the price you should expect to pay for them. Whether a business gets a discount for purchasing these laptops in bulk or you just have to wait for a discount, you should almost never be paying the original stated MSRP for a business laptop.

How We Test Business Laptops

Every business laptop that comes into our labs is put through extensive benchmark testing — both synthetic and real-world — before they are handed off to our reviewers. We evaluate each aspect of the laptop, including its performance, battery life, display, speakers and heat management.

Those first two garner particularly high scrutiny for business laptops. Depending on your work, you may need a more vibrant or bright display, but everyone needs solid performance from their laptop to perform at their peak for work. Battery life isn’t crucial to every worker, but it’s vital for frequent travelers or if you have a long commute and depend on getting work done while making your way to and from the office.

For performance testing, we run the laptop through a gauntlet of benchmarks, including GeekBench 5 and 6 and 3DMark professional graphics tests.  To determine real-world performance, we task the laptop to convert a 4K video to 1080p resolution and to duplicate a 25GB multimedia file. 

Our battery test consists of continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi at 150 nits of brightness. For MacBooks and premium Windows 11 laptops, a runtime of over 10 hours is considered a good result, but the latest generation of chips is driving that up, with the longest-lasting laptops now pushing to 16 hours and beyond.

For our display testing, we use a Klein K10 colorimeter to detect the brightness and DCI-P3 color gamut of the laptop’s display. Unless you work with graphic design, photos, or video or just use your work laptop to watch content in your downtime, the color gamut likely isn’t a big concern for you. Brightness, however, can be crucial if you work in less-than-optimal lighting conditions to ensure you can see your screen.

If you are a regular commuter or traveler, you should also pay careful attention to our heat tests. We play a 15-minute full-screen video and measure temperatures in different areas of the laptop. If you ever truly use your laptop in your lap, you don’t want to see it get above our 95-degree comfort threshold in this test.

These tests are complemented by extensive hands-on testing from our reviewers, who critique everything from the laptop’s materials to the feel of its touchpad. 

Why Trust Laptop Mag

Laptop Mag reviews over a hundred different laptops every year, from paperweight ultralights to everyday workhorses to lumbering gaming notebooks that scorch the frame rates of even the hottest AAA games. We’re not just experts in the laptop field, as we go one step further by meticulously testing smartphones, tablets, headphones, PC accessories, software, and even the latest in gaming. 

We are 100% independent and have decades of experience to help you buy with confidence. In fact, Laptop Mag has been testing and reviewing products for three decades, and we continue to deliver trustworthy reviews you can rely on. 

Our experienced team of writers and editors scour the available information about the laptop and put it through its paces to determine which is best for you. But before they start, the testing team subjects each system to a rigorous regimen of synthetic and real-world tests to see how a system handles the type of work and games you’re most likely to throw at it. 

Our editorial trustworthiness is enforced by one of the world’s largest technology publishers, Future Publishing. As a company, we have unrivaled experience across every tech sector — and we’re the group’s specialist for all things mobile tech.