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Box vs Microsoft Office SharePoint Server comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Box
Ranking in Content Collaboration Platforms
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Content Management (6th), Cloud Storage (12th), Digital Asset Management (3rd), Document Management Software (3rd)
Microsoft Office SharePoint...
Ranking in Content Collaboration Platforms
10th
Average Rating
7.6
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Content Collaboration Platforms category, the mindshare of Box is 8.5%, up from 8.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is 8.3%, down from 9.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Content Collaboration Platforms
 

Featured Reviews

Shrikant Pillay - PeerSpot reviewer
Allows you to upload and download files quickly but lacks integration with Office 365
For enterprise users, the data is in a local repository. We use it for files for the end user process. This is a cloud solution. In my current organization, we have over 10,000 people using this solution. I use it very extensively. Users these days are working remotely You can upload your bin,…
Mehdi Hasankhan - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to use but offers poor integrations with Oracle and has inflexible security configuration
I can't configure the current security I want. There are a lot of bots in it. Sharepoint doesn't integrate well with Oracle, and we use a lot of Oracle products at our company. Therefore, it makes more sense for us to go to Oracle instead of continuing to use Sharepoint.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"We can provide controlled access to documents using the product."
"Box is very user-friendly; more so than SharePoint."
"It is really easy to load files to and from this solution."
"Sharing and collaborating across files and folders has been a massive game changer."
"The solution is scalable."
"Governance and ease of use are why I think a lot of people like Box, including ourselves. Basically, we're concerned about what information is being sent to Box, so we use a lot of the Box governance features to make sure that what is being sent to Box is appropriate. If it is not appropriate, it is not allowed to be sent. It is also pretty easy to use. It is the easiest to use for customers and for technologists."
"We've never had a penetration. We've never had a security issue that their support didn't solve. We love their audit trail. We can know exactly when a collaborator opens. We love how you can define a collaborator."
"Box is very realistic when it comes to sharing capabilities."
"This solution has provided us with a collaborative workspace to allow everyone to work together and be on the same page."
"It's a very robust product."
"Ability to collaborate with others in one location."
"The level of stability is good."
"The support from Microsoft is very quick and they are very proactive."
"It is a decent tool for collaboration, especially if you are already using other Office products."
"The solution is pretty easy to use for the most part."
"The implementation and configuring of the resolution are very easy in the online version."
 

Cons

"Tasks and comments could be easier to see, report, search, and manage."
"If there was a plugin that added some sort of toolbar in Office, that would be great."
"I recommend doing the trial first, because it's not cheap ware. It's not overly expensive, but it's not cheap ware, and enterprise has a minimum number of users."
"I don't like the low level of role-based security it provides – it's very cumbersome, and the support is ordinary at times."
"I would love to see the ability to invite collaborators extended to a file level, not just the folder level."
"The integration with other products should be improved."
"They could integrate better with other platforms."
"In future releases, there could be encryption, to have better security."
"This solution is not very stable. It is useful to arrange data but it's not the best for big data. Sometimes we have issues with our reports as a result."
"The user interface needs improvement because there is a lot of stuff in there. I use five to eight navigation buttons. It should be more user-friendly. Frequently used menu items should be arranged in a proper way. That would be helpful."
"The GUI is outdated."
"The product is behind in development and lacks some features."
"The solution is like a CRM, so the initial setup is complex. It takes a few days to deploy the solution and the length of time depends on how large the company's topology is and what the client's demands are."
"It is a bit restrictive to develop in the cloud version. A lot of features are in the cloud now, and you have to develop on the outside. As far as the platform and the programming side of things are concerned, it is moving more towards configuration management rather than programming. When we are doing solutions, we are basically just configuring it to make solutions happen rather than actually using the Visual Studio code and developing from scratch in the cloud. It is almost like creating an app. You have created an app for your phone, but the app doesn't really sit on your phone. It sits somewhere on a server, and the database sits on another server. The app is just pulling and pushing information. The whole development has changed. We used to install things directly on the server and then run the application from the server. Now, it is more of a modular architecture."
"I would like to see more Agile techniques and seamless integration with other applications."
"Many of our customers would like to see an OCR feature, so it would be very good to have this in a future release."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"My organization pays for the license."
"Box's pricing is excellent."
"Our pricing and licensing is excellent. I'd tell all Higher Ed customers to talk with Internet2 for excellent pricing and support."
"I believe Box is cheaper than SharePoint."
"I have to pay for Box. It could be a little cheaper. On a scale from one to ten, I would give the pricing a five."
"We are using the free version of the solution. There is a free version and monthly and yearly subscriptions available."
"The more you dig, the deeper the level of tools, and the more expensive it becomes."
"Better sign a full year's contract to get a discount."
"It can be expensive for on-premises deployments, especially when you have to support SQL Server as your backend database. That's where the cost comes into play. SQL Server has its own licensing, which Microsoft keeps on changing. Therefore, it can become costly. In the earlier versions of SharePoint, version 2007 or 2010, they had an express version where the SQL Server licensing was free. It wasn't like a full-blown SharePoint. It was only a slimmed-down version. It used to be whatever your hardware costs. You would install the free software and work with it, but you were very limited in what you could do in SharePoint. If you wanted the SharePoint Enterprise Server with all the bells and whistles, then you had to pay more to get the SQL Server license based on the number of users or servers. The subscription model is different for cloud deployments. Licensing is per user and per month. The cost also depends on the storage required. If you have a lot of sites or documents, then you need to expand it based on your needs."
"One of the reasons why we don't recommend the cloud version of SharePoint is the cost. With the on premise version, you pay for the license once. For the cloud version, there is a recurring fee. It is very expensive. They expect everyone to pay $20 or $30 per user per month."
"There are some aggressive discounts offered by Microsoft for organizations that are not for profit, which we are, and it makes it quite attractive to consider."
"Pricing plans may be flexible depending on volume usage and your corporate relationship with Microsoft."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
58%
Financial Services Firm
5%
Computer Software Company
5%
Government
3%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Box?
The solution is used for data storage and any kind of visualization.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Box?
The solution is expensive when it comes to API calls.
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Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Office SharePoint Server, MS Office SharePoint Server
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

GE, Toyota, P&G, Caterpillar, Flex, Schneider Electric, Sally Beauty, Eurostar, AstraZeneca, AirBnB, Whirlpool, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Nationwide, Aeropostale etc
Del Monte Foods, Unicredit Leasing, Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council, Nokia Czech Republic, Perkins Eastman, JLL, ICA, óxito Software, Dorset Software, PKP Cargo, Arcapita Bank B.S.C., AVE CZ, Chesapeake Energy
Find out what your peers are saying about Box vs. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
846,617 professionals have used our research since 2012.