Microsoft Office SharePoint Server vs Office 365 comparison

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Office 365 are both solutions in the Content Collaboration Platforms category. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is ranked #7, while Office 365 is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.5. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server holds a 6.3% mindshare in CCP, compared to Office 365’s 6.9% mindshare. Additionally, 76% of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Office 365 users who would recommend it.

Microsoft Office SharePoint...

Read 23 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server reviews

1,240 Views
1,063 Comparison Views

76% willing to recommend

Office 365

Read 143 Office 365 reviews

1,440 Views
340 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Microsoft Office SharePoint...

Office 365

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 29, 2025

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Office 365 compete in enterprise productivity solutions. Office 365 has an edge due to its cloud-based versatility and collaboration capabilities.

Features: SharePoint Server provides document management, version control, and customization, allowing businesses to tailor workflows and templates without extensive coding. Office 365 includes advanced collaboration tools, integration with SharePoint and Teams, and security features like data loss prevention.

Room for Improvement: SharePoint Server could enhance its ease of deployment, reduce IT resource requirements, and simplify updates. Office 365 may improve offline capabilities, further optimize its security features, and expand multi-language support.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Office 365 offers an efficient cloud deployment, reducing maintenance and providing responsive customer service integrated into its model. SharePoint Server's on-premises deployment can be complex, requiring significant IT resources but offers strong data control.

Pricing and ROI: SharePoint Server requires significant upfront investment in infrastructure, suitable for specific customization needs. Office 365 uses a subscription model, offering predictable costs and high ROI through frequent updates and innovative features. Pricing starts at $5 per user per month for basic plans, including access to Office applications and OneDrive storage.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Office SharePoint Server vs. Office 365 Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server vs. Office 365

June 2025

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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

7th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Office 365

Ranking in Content Collaboration Platforms

2nd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

143

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 Office SharePoint Server is 6.3%, down from 10.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Office 365 is 6.9%, up from 5.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Content Collaboration Platforms

Featured Reviews

Mehdi Hasankhan

Head of Development and Implementation at Arak Petrochemical Company

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.

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Gary Cook

Executive at Empowered Analytics

Access to advanced features boosts productivity despite pricing concerns in developing regions

I need to do maintenance for Office 365 very seldom, once a year. In the maintenance process for Office 365, we have about 12 people involved. For the maintenance side of Office 365, only one person is involved. Looking at Office 365's pricing, I would give it a 4 on a scale from 1 to 10. My overall rating for Office 365 is an 8 out of 10, but for the product itself, I would give it a 10. I would definitely recommend Office 365 to other businesses, probably a 9 out of 10 for recommendation. This is only because of its price and the fact that they do not take into account developing countries such as South Africa, where they should give us more favorable prices or local prices. We do not have a partnership with Microsoft, which is a sore point for us. We have reached out to Microsoft South Africa, and they are very hard to contact and largely uncooperative. We are a B-Level 2 and a B-Level 1, which are local affirmative action ratings that companies get. Level 1 is the highest, and Level 8 is the lowest. We hold amongst the highest BEE ratings, but we have not found Microsoft South Africa to be forthcoming or very open. We should have a partnership with them, and we run Power BI as we are a Power BI shop now. I strongly would want to see a box within Office 365 for our team to have ChatGPT through OpenAI as well. We use Excel as a data source for many tasks and find that it integrates really well with Python. We write a lot of Python code and use Excel as a data sheet many times, and we operate through SQL and other zero elements as well. From an Office 365 viewpoint, we find that with Copilot and Python and Excel's provision for Python, it is very useful.

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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."

"The most valuable aspect of the solution is the fact that it doesn't require coding. You just need to configure it. You don't need to code before getting something running. It makes it very fast."

"It is a decent tool for collaboration, especially if you are already using other Office products."

"Document management and records management features are the most valuable."

"The software is friendly to use for mixing data and analyzing it."

"The most valuable feature is the "Alert Me", which provides the ability to set an alert when content is either added or changed and that the alerts can be either real-time or aggregated for the day or the week."

"The solution is scalable. You can do both horizontal and vertical scaling."

More Microsoft Office SharePoint Server pros

"Using Office 365 has allowed us to go digital and onboard people seamlessly for working at home during the COVID pandemic."

"I like that it is cloud-based, wherefrom any computer I can access my documents and continue working."

"The most valuable feature is the integration between net and mobile devices."

"The most valuable feature of Office 365 is that it has many solutions bundled together."

"I love all of the applications being interlinked. I do not have to separately work on an independent system when it comes to file storage, email, and other tools."

"If you have a global solution, you can go from one product to the other very easily. And then you can share data between all the different tools of Office which is good because participation and sharing is very good. That's the most important aspect of Office 365."

"OneNote is the feature I use the most. We also frequently use the Power Apps features."

"Most of the work that seems not to work offline works perfectly with Microsoft Office 2013, like converting a Word document to a PDF file."

More Office 365 pros

Cons

"The solution needs to enable better sharing capabilities between users and external users. Several users also have problems with linking their emails to their Microsoft account."

"The solution needs to be more collaborative. I believe they are just coming up with the themes for this right now."

"The solution needs to have more flexibility. The classic version had more flexibility, however, the modern version has many more limitations."

"Technical support could be improved. They are not fast enough, especially when we'll go deeper in the product itself. More complex issues make it very tough to find someone that can help you."

"The areas around security, such as protection, need to be included."

"The ability to preview files in different formats should be expanded to include formats such as embedded postscript (EPS), AutoCAD, and Adobe Acrobat PDF."

"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."

More Microsoft Office SharePoint Server cons

"The integration with mobile services is not so good. It's coming, but they could improve a lot."

"Improvements can be made to the products generic offering. It's not customized for health care. It doesn't understand the meaning of health care related concepts. Providing a greater degree of industry specificity would make the tool much more unique and valuable."

"The online applications have limited functionality compared to the local applications."

"Using Office 365 is not that flexible on some mobile devices, like Android."

"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 could use some customization, but this area for improvement is trivial."

"Normally, they have a way to work with specific developments, and I think they shouldn't allow the partners to make some changes they have made. When I have a client with a lot of changes, we have a problem with that because there aren't rules to develop inside the ERP, so you can do anything."

"Office 365 could allow for smoother collaboration with other companies, which is the main reason we use it. The B2B connection is something we need, like global adverse lists between two tenants or multiple users. That's what we're missing at the moment."

"I rate the support of Office 365 a four out of five."

More Office 365 cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"The price of Office 365 is very expensive."

"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 good for all the features that we receive, e.g., Skype for Business."

"Good reporting and good value subscriptions for international calls."

"The pricing is not really high, but one can get the software with the license key for free."

"The pricing is high and has actually caused us to limit the number of licenses we purchase due to budgeting."

"For the moment, we are paying on a monthly basis because we are still adapting the support and how we want to proceed. I think we will move to paying for the annual license."

"Licensing, billing, and accounting are available from the management interface."

More Office 365 pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Educational Organization

51%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Office 365?

For pricing, I think it's fairly priced, I would rate it 8.

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What needs improvement with Office 365?

The areas of Office 365 that have room for improvement are what should be better in this solution.

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What is your primary use case for Office 365?

A typical use case for Office 365 is how I primarily use this solution.

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Comparisons

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Compared 73% of the time

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Compared 17% of the time

Flock vs Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

Compared 5% of the time

Kiteworks vs Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

Compared 5% of the time

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Google Workspace vs Office 365

Compared 39% of the time

Amazon WorkDocs vs Office 365

Compared 9% of the time

Atlassian Confluence vs Office 365

Compared 7% of the time

Microsoft OneDrive vs Office 365

Compared 7% of the time

Dropbox vs Office 365

Compared 6% of the time

More Office 365 Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

June 2025

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server report

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Buyer's Guide

Office 365

June 2025

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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

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) is a Microsoft software portal based on the ASP.NET framework. MOSS facilitates file sharing and collaboration, social networking, Web databases and Web publishing. It is hosted by Microsoft Windows Server and is accessible through Microsoft Office or the Web.

Microsoft

Office 365 is more than just Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. It provides powerful services like business-class email, online storage, and teamwork solutions that you can access from anywhere. Bring teams and resources together with solutions like Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business that make working together more productive and enjoyable regardless of where participants are located. Easily implement security and privacy controls to help protect business data and devices against malicious threats and help you meet your compliance obligations. Automatic updates ensure your employees will always have the latest features and security updates.

Microsoft

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

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server vs. Office 365

June 2025

Free Report: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server vs. Office 365

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Office SharePoint Server vs. Office 365 and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.

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