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Microsoft Office SharePoint Server vs Office 365 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

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
Office 365
Ranking in Content Collaboration Platforms
9th
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
54
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Content Collaboration Platforms category, the mindshare of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is 9.1%, down from 9.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Office 365 is 4.9%, down from 6.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Content Collaboration Platforms
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Minos Pitsillides - PeerSpot reviewer
Excellent technical support, easy to install, but the price, while affordable, could be improved
Office 365 is scalable, but it is dependent on the situation. We don't have a problem with it from an organizational standpoint. They started with 100 employees and then added another 500 after six months, for a total of 600 employees. The setup of new users, new emails, and new applications to be assigned to the new users is straightforward. They also provide the PowerShell command, which they provided more, development type, like, for example, you can create users, not manually, but through a script that can create users, for example, 100 users in two, three minutes, and you don't do it manually. They're fantastic. My portfolio contains approximately 50 companies. Office 365 is our primary platform for the 50 companies. I only have one on G Suite, and the majority of them will be migrating from G Suite to 365 in the coming month.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is that it is very usable. I can navigate it, I can have a media call, I can have a call with my project team, so we can chat with every team kind of like WhatsApp. Any time there are projects or other things, we can chat in a secure way. It's automation-specific secure."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the Communication Site."
"It is a decent tool for collaboration, especially if you are already using other Office products."
"The forms aspect of the solution, for example, the creation of surveys, is its most valuable aspect."
"The implementation and configuring of the resolution are very easy in the online version."
"It's a very robust product."
"The solution is scalable. You can do both horizontal and vertical scaling."
"Document management and records management features are the most valuable."
"The technical support is outstanding."
"The solution is quite intuitive and easy to use."
"It's nice that it's an all-in-one solution and everything is all in one place."
"The cloud service and Skype are the most valuable features."
"Adaptable solution with a good interface. It's easy to set up and easy to use."
"The most valuable features of Office 365 are Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Teams. Teams helped us to collaborate more through its call and document sharing features."
"The most valuable feature is the integration between net and mobile devices."
"Using Office 365 has allowed us to go digital and onboard people seamlessly for working at home during the COVID pandemic."
 

Cons

"The areas around security, such as protection, need to be included."
"I think these tools do a pretty good job. There is only one area of improvement. Maybe Microsoft can invest a little bit more into the ease at which integration can be done with other third party applications."
"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."
"The permission management features need improvement."
"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."
"The solution needs to have more flexibility. The classic version had more flexibility, however, the modern version has many more limitations."
"The ability to preview files in different formats should be expanded to include formats such as embedded postscript (EPS), AutoCAD, and Adobe Acrobat PDF."
"I would like to see the macro functionality in Excel made simpler."
"I rate the support of Office 365 a four out of five."
"It could be more user-friendly for inexperienced people."
"Constantly evolving with new features, which can be challenging for users."
"I started working a lot on Microsoft Teams and I find it a bit vast. It should be divided out a bit so that someone can use it for basic functionality, like audio, video, and calls. Then, if someone wants more advanced functionality for file sharing and team creation, and so on, they could use a separate app."
"There are some complexities to the initial setup if you use some of the more advanced features."
"The online applications have limited functionality compared to the local applications."
"Integration with other platforms can be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing plans may be flexible depending on volume usage and your corporate relationship with Microsoft."
"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."
"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."
"Licensing, billing, and accounting are available from the management interface."
"Licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis, or we prepay them."
"We have a license to use this solution. We have an E3 license which covers many different solutions."
"I would rate the solution 3 out of 5 for the price. I think Microsoft presents a good solution concerning the price."
"The pricing is not really high, but one can get the software with the license key for free."
"The pricing is good for all the features that we receive, e.g., Skype for Business."
"The price of Office 365 is very expensive."
"Most of the time, we purchase Microsoft Exchange licenses, which are less expensive and provide only an email platform and 50 gigabytes of email storage for free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
Educational Organization
84%
Computer Software Company
2%
Financial Services Firm
2%
Government
2%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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Also Known As

Office SharePoint Server, MS Office SharePoint Server
Microsoft Office 365, Office 365 Enterprise, Office 365 Enterprise E1, Office 365 Enterprise E3, Office 365 Enterprise E5, Office 365 ProPlus, Office 365 Business, Office 365 Business Essentials, Office 365 Business Premium, Office 365 F1
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
Me & the Bees Lemonade
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Office SharePoint Server vs. Office 365 and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
837,501 professionals have used our research since 2012.