Business Choice 2024: The Best Desktop PC and Monitor Brands for Work

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As part of our ongoing mission to help you make better buying decisions, we recently polled thousands of PCMag readers and used their input to pinpoint the best desktop PC brands of 2024. Now, we're taking that data a step further and digging into a different subset of the PC market: desktops that are used and deployed at the office.

What brands should you turn to if you need a computer for working from home? Which companies should you trust if you're an IT manager looking to deploy a fleet of desktop PCs to your team? No matter your situation, you'll find the answers you need in this article. Keep reading to see which brands earn PCMag's coveted Business Choice Awards for 2024.

What to know which desktop systems, monitors, and even graphics cards and peripherals are the best for everyday at-home use? Check out our Readers' Choice Awards.

The Top Work-From-Home Desktop and Monitor Brands for 2024

Apple is no stranger to the winner's circle for Business Choice, going back to 2013. The only time it didn't place on top in the last 11 years was 2020. This year it's the top pick once again across all types of desktop PCs that are used for working at home. The only category where Apple doesn't earn strong satisfaction ratings is cost.

Not everyone wants a macOS desktop, so we always pick a Windows-based winner as well. This year, Lenovo stands out from the competition with impressive satisfaction scores—particularly for cost, but also on the important measures of overall satisfaction and likelihood to recommend (it ties Apple on the latter).

(Note: Click the down, left, and right arrows in our interactive charts to view different elements of our survey results.)

This isn't the first time Lenovo has taken a top spot in our Business Choice awards, either. The company also made the podium in 2021.

The other two PC brands that place this year are Dell and HP. Neither company comes particularly close to beating Lenovo, but it's worth noting that HP scores slightly better than Dell on tech support and repairs.

It should also be noted that, much like in our Readers' Choice awards, it seems that no brand listed above can outscore the true favorite of a PCMag reader: the self-built, hand-crafted, DIY desktop PC. Self-made machines score even better than Apple when it comes to overall satisfaction, but users are not foolish enough to think anyone can handle a self-built computer, as they give the option a low recommendation score.

PCs themselves are just one part of the equation, though. In order to use a desktop PC, you also need a display. Which monitor brands are best for work? The answer, according to thousands of tech-savvy readers, is Asus. It's our first Business Choice Award winner for work-from-home monitors.

Asus monitors earn top marks in almost all the major categories we polled for this year. The company only falls behind Samsung in one: the likelihood to recommend.

Prospective buyers shouldn't overlook Samsung, either The company's work monitors make it a worthy silver medalist, as it scores particularly close to Asus for overall satisfaction, reliability, and display quality.

Our previous winner for home monitors, LG, places fourth when it comes to displays for work. Acer and HP remain at the bottom, despite Acer actually tying or beating winner Asus in categories like setup and ease of use. Acer just doesn't compete on the all-important measure of overall satisfaction.

For our in-depth reviews, read The Best Desktop Computers for Business and The Best Computer Monitors for Work.

IT Managers' Choice: Admin's Favorite Desktop and Monitor Brands

Last year, this category went to another dual win for Apple and Dell. This year, however, Apple doesn't get enough responses to make the list, and Dell (despite having the most responses) falls to second place behind Lenovo. It's the preferred brand this year among the IT people taking our survey.

Dell's overall satisfaction score for IT desktops is up by a tenth of a point compared to last year, but that's not enough to beat Lenovo's half-point leap. Lenovo has the lead in every sub-category except for repairs (behind Dell) and likelihood to recommend (same).

Our first IT-managed monitors survey pegs ViewSonic as the best brand for just about everything. It only falls slightly behind for setup (behind HP and Acer) and cost (behind Acer).

Perhaps most importantly, ViewSonic earns the top score for display quality. Once IT has it set up, that's what really matters.

For our in-depth reviews, read The Best Desktop Workstations.

Full Results

The PCMag Business Choice survey for Desktops and Monitors was in the field from May 12 to June 2, 2024. For more information on how we conduct surveys, read the survey methodology.

About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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