The one-paragraph difference
A VPN is a secure tunnel from a device into your office network. The work still happens on the device — files open on it, get saved to it, and live on it. A hosted desktop moves the entire desktop into a datacentre; the device just displays it. Work happens centrally, and the data never actually lands on the laptop at the kitchen table.
What a VPN is good at
VPNs are cheap, well understood, and fine for occasional access to office resources — checking a file, reaching an internal system now and then. If you have a well-managed office network, competently maintained company laptops, and remote work is the exception rather than the pattern, a VPN can be entirely reasonable.
Where VPNs quietly go wrong
The problems arrive when the VPN becomes the main way people work. Every connected device effectively joins your network — including the family PC with who-knows-what on it, if you allow personal devices. Files get copied locally "just to work on the train" and never come back. Desktop applications that expect a fast office network — accounts packages, practice management, anything database-backed — often crawl over a VPN, because the application traffic was never designed for a home broadband round-trip. And your office server is still your office server: still ageing, still your backup problem, still a single point of failure.
What a hosted desktop changes
With a hosted desktop, the application and its data sit next to each other in the datacentre, so database-backed software runs at full speed no matter where the user is. The laptop is just a screen — lose it, and you've lost a screen, not the client files. Access is per-user with multi-factor authentication, and permissions are role-based. And because the desktop is the same everywhere, "working from home" stops being a degraded version of working from the office.
Cost, honestly
A VPN is much cheaper as a line item — often near-free on hardware you already own. But the fair comparison includes what the VPN setup still requires: the office server and its replacement cycle, backup, patching, endpoint security on every device, and someone's time to keep it all working. A hosted desktop wraps all of that into a per-user monthly price — typically £30–£100 per user in the UK market, and covered in detail in our pricing guide.
The short decision rule
Occasional remote access to a healthy, managed network: a VPN is fine. Remote or multi-site work as a way of life, desktop software your business depends on, sensitive data, or a server that's due for replacement: a hosted desktop solves the actual problem instead of tunnelling into it. Plenty of businesses run both for a while — the hosted desktop for daily work, the VPN for edge cases — and retire the VPN when nothing uses it any more.