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Microsoft 365 Business vs Microsoft Office SharePoint Server comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 29, 2025

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 365 Business
Ranking in Content Collaboration Platforms
9th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
245
Ranking in other categories
Mobile Device Management (MDM) (2nd)
Microsoft Office SharePoint...
Ranking in Content Collaboration Platforms
7th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Content Collaboration Platforms category, the mindshare of Microsoft 365 Business is 1.7%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is 6.3%, down from 10.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Content Collaboration Platforms
 

Featured Reviews

CharlesBrewer - PeerSpot reviewer
Price and reliability need improvement while general tasks are streamlined
The pricing for Microsoft 365 is too high, and quality-wise, it does not meet high standards. The operating system is outdated and inadequate. Microsoft has very poor security, and Defender is ineffective. In terms of collaboration and file sharing, OneDrive is very clunky and has frequent sync issues. It also crashes a lot and is unreliable.
Jaufre Rouanet - PeerSpot reviewer
Integration enhances workflow while user support requires improvement
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server should add some 'tip of the days' and small videos to help users grow within their experience with SharePoint. More integration with Copilot and with the AI platform would be great. Additionally, having the ability in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server to summarize when bringing in SharePoint folders would be beneficial, providing extracts, analysis, proposals, and summaries of those documents.

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 features are that it is quite robust and is a collaborative model."
"The product is very fast and convenient to use."
"The features that we find good and what we use the most are Outlook and Teams."
"What was most valuable for me was how simple this solution is to start using."
"The feature I find most valuable is Business 365's real-time edit and updates. You can share files, and it will automatically create the link for you."
"Teams is a valuable feature in addition to the other features 365 provides."
"The solution is easy to use."
"This is a unified business package that helps people be productive in working environments."
"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."
"Ability to collaborate with others in one location."
"The solution's most valuable features is its document management. It allows sharing with external users and integrates well with Office apps and Microsoft Flow."
"The solution is pretty easy to use for the most part."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the Communication Site."
"The implementation and configuring of the resolution are very easy in the online version."
"It's a very robust product."
"The support from Microsoft is very quick and they are very proactive."
 

Cons

"Its pricing plan should be better."
"The management could be a bit better."
"It would be nice if we had the option to open a document even if it was created with another application."
"In Teams, it is a little tricky to set up a guest or to become a guest on someone's domain, but if people do that, then you have an improvement in the shared access. The real pain, which is not a big thing, in Teams is if you're a small business user, it is really hard to get somebody on a different domain into your list of contacts. You can't just chat with them or start an instant meeting. That is easier to do with Zoom, which I also use. The real issue in Teams is that if you're not on the same domain, a lot of the good functionality falls apart. You have to actually be a guest in the other person's domain. I have a large customer, and they created a guest account for me in their domain so that I can chat with people inside their organization as though I was inside their organization, but not everybody is willing to do that. Some of my customers are Aerospace and Defense, and nobody gets on their domain."
"There are sometimes problems with incompatibility issues with other types of software."
"The platform’s GUI could be more simple to understand."
"It's a bit complex in itself when you get into items such as security or compliance."
"The pricing of the solution could be better."
"The permission management features need improvement."
"I would like to see more Agile techniques and seamless integration with other applications."
"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."
"I would like to see the integration with Teams reinforced."
"The solution needs to be more collaborative. I believe they are just coming up with the themes for this right now."
"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."
"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."
"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

"The price in general could be cheaper."
"We purchase annual licenses for this solution."
"You need to purchase the license."
"We pay a monthly subscription fee for the license."
"The monthly license of the solution is quite expensive."
"There would be licensing costs because Microsoft 365 Business requires a product key and a license to be present in order to use its products."
"The solution requires a license which is expensive."
"The price is fine."
"Pricing plans may be flexible depending on volume usage and your corporate relationship with Microsoft."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Performing Arts
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Microsoft 365 Business?
The product's initial setup phase was straightforward.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft 365 Business?
The solution might be considered pricey for some, however, the comprehensiveness of the suite justifies its cost. It is generally still worth the money and is cost-effective when considering the pr...
What needs improvement with Microsoft 365 Business?
Every year, they are increasing their price significantly. The price has more than doubled now. Once you start using this product, it becomes difficult to switch to alternatives. Microsoft should b...
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Also Known As

Microsoft 365 E3, Microsoft 365 E5, Microsoft 365 F1, MS 365 Business
Office SharePoint Server, MS Office SharePoint Server
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Urban Agriculture Co., The Detroit Wallpaper Co., TransBlue Facility Management, Garner Food Company
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 Microsoft 365 Business vs. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,745 professionals have used our research since 2012.