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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 #3 with an average rating of 8.7, while Office 365 is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.5. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server holds a 5.2% mindshare in CCP, compared to Office 365’s 8.8% mindshare. Additionally, 83% 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 35 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server reviews
  • 1,365 Views
  • 1,188 Comparison Views
83% willing to recommend
Office 365
Read 145 Office 365 reviews
  • 2,200 Views
  • 1,474 Comparison Views
95% willing to recommend
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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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.

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To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Office SharePoint Server vs. Office 365 Report (Updated: July 2025).
Buyer's Guide
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server vs. Office 365
July 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
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.3
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Office 365
Ranking in Content Collaboration Platforms
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
145
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Content Collaboration Platforms category, the mindshare of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is 5.2%, down from 10.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Office 365 is 8.8%, up from 6.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Content Collaboration Platforms Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Office 3658.8%
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server5.2%
Other86.0%
Content Collaboration Platforms
 

Featured Reviews

Vinicius Borges - PeerSpot reviewer
Collaboration tools improve efficiency but overlap creates confusion
I had minimal contact regarding Salesforce at my work, only reading a few papers about it. I deal with Microsoft's collaboration tools. All the collaboration tools from Microsoft, including Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint, are what I use nowadays. The document management features of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server are not very good compared to OneDrive. For sharing documents, we are using OneDrive regularly, while Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is used to plug in Power BI and other applications from Office 365. I am somewhat familiar with their advanced search functionality, and it does a good job. Regarding Microsoft Office SharePoint Server versus OneDrive, I have a critique of Microsoft. Many applications for Office 365 have overlap, which causes confusion with end users regarding what tools they need for their business needs. The Copilot features have been causing much confusion, as there are plenty of Microsoft products starting to call themselves Copilot this and Copilot that. Overall rating: 7 out of 10.
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Gary Cook - PeerSpot reviewer
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

"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."
"The support from Microsoft is very quick and they are very proactive."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the Communication Site."
"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 feature that I value the most about Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is the ability to have multiple persons in a file at the same time, which was not possible when we started using computers."
"The collaboration, the ability for multiple users to work on a single document."
"The solution is scalable. You can do both horizontal and vertical scaling."
More Microsoft Office SharePoint Server pros
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the integration."
"It's inexpensive to license."
"Reliable without any glitches."
"It has more features than somebody would expect, and it is worth taking a deeper look into the features available."
"Office 365 has positively impacted my organization by making the salespeople more accurate because they've been able to use the features in Excel instead of relying on the calculator or adding machine, and some of the AI with writing and things with Word has helped improve things with that, too."
"As an email provider, I believe Office 365 is the best email provider."
"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."
"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."
More Office 365 pros
 

Cons

"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."
"The ability to preview files in different formats should be expanded to include formats such as embedded postscript (EPS), AutoCAD, and Adobe Acrobat PDF."
"The solution needs to have more flexibility. The classic version had more flexibility, however, the modern version has many more limitations."
"Making it more intuitive could help teams adopt it faster and use it more effectively by being more user-friendly."
"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."
"The areas around security, such as protection, need to be included."
"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."
"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."
More Microsoft Office SharePoint Server cons
"There are some complexities to the initial setup if you use some of the more advanced features."
"As a private user, I do not appreciate the cloud features, but I doubt that this is something Microsoft would consider a feature request."
"It would be a fantastic opportunity if their solution could be used in combination with VoIP software, allowing you to combine VoIP software and Office 365 on a single platform."
"There are several additional features we would like to see, such as advanced features of SAN protection in Office 365. The main thing is the SAN protection; we would like to see a lot of advanced features added because we had a lot of spam attacks."
"A need that a company like ours has is that we want to be able to have data flow into one tool, for example, for all the management of tasks through the company and workflow of who is doing what and so on. There are no real solutions for this at the moment in Office 365. It would be nice if they could implement this in the next release, so we can have one solution from one company giving us the whole data and flow of data into the company."
"I would like to see the macro functionality in Excel made simpler."
"The feature to convert PDF file to a Word document needs improvement as well as the feature to save the file automatically when typing, without using the save command."
"Data protection and email security are almost the same for all the organizations, irrespective of their segment (SMB or enterprises), with standard subscription at least basic Data loss prevention and Advance threat protection can be enabled for SMB segments, it is available in enterprise version / Premium versions."
More Office 365 cons
 

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."
"The pricing is not really high, but one can get the software with the license key for free."
"I would rate the solution 3 out of 5 for the price. I think Microsoft presents a good solution concerning the price."
"Licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis, or we prepay them."
"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."
"We have a license to use this solution. We have an E3 license which covers many different solutions."
"The pricing is high and has actually caused us to limit the number of licenses we purchase due to budgeting."
"Good reporting and good value subscriptions for international calls."
"I think that we pay $9.99 USD per user, monthly."
More Office 365 pricing and cost advice
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
Government
8%
Performing Arts
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise14
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business61
Midsize Enterprise29
Large Enterprise68
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server?
The pricing for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is very reasonable, and the cost is not a significant concern.
See all answers
What needs improvement with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server?
Accountability is one benefit of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. We can all see the document live and see it being changed. We can review it as soon as they're done and make the changes, make t...
See all answers
What is your primary use case for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server?
We used Microsoft Office SharePoint Server fairly early on at Clemson for our project management and documentation. We used it for tracking documents and managing project-related materials.
See all answers
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Office 365?
For pricing, I think it's fairly priced, I would rate it 8.
See all answers
What needs improvement with Office 365?
The areas of Office 365 that have room for improvement are what should be better in this solution.
See all answers
What is your primary use case for Office 365?
A typical use case for Office 365 is how I primarily use this solution.
See all answers
 

Comparisons

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Compared 7% of the time
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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
August 2025
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server reportDownload Microsoft Office SharePoint Server product report
Buyer's Guide
Office 365
August 2025
Office 365 reportDownload Office 365 product report
 

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
July 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: July 2025.
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