Intranet or SharePoint? An honest comparison

"We already pay for Microsoft 365, let's just use SharePoint as the intranet" is a sentence spoken at least once in most intranet projects. In some companies it is the right call. In others it turns into a two-year project that never quite finishes. What makes the difference is not the quality of the product but the shape of the need.

What SharePoint does well

SharePoint is a document management and site-building platform. Its strengths are clear:

• Document libraries: version history, co-authoring, Office integration
• Permission model: granular, down to file and folder level
• Team sites: every team gets its own space
• Microsoft ecosystem: native ties to Teams, Outlook and OneDrive

If a company's primary need is document sharing and team spaces, SharePoint is usually the right answer and adds no extra cost.

Where it struggles

SharePoint is a document platform, not an employee experience platform. The difference shows up in the following needs.

No ready-made processes. Leave requests, asset tracking, recognition, onboarding checklists, an ethics hotline — none of these come out of the box. They can be built with Power Apps and Power Automate, but that is "development", not "configuration": it takes time, budget and a team to maintain it.

Frontline access is hard. Getting a store or factory worker onto SharePoint is awkward in terms of licensing, identity and mobile experience. Employees without a corporate mailbox need an extra solution.

High governance load. SharePoint intranets sprawl quickly: everyone creates sites, the same document lives in three places, search results turn into a junkyard. Preventing this needs information architecture design and ongoing governance.

Limited visual experience. Modern page templates have improved, but reaching the standard of consumer apps takes serious design effort.

Total cost comparison

The "we already have the licence" argument looks at only one line of the cost. The real cost has three components:

1. Licence: usually already covered on the SharePoint side
2. Setup and development: consultancy or in-house development for custom processes
3. Maintenance: governance, updates, support

In most companies the second and third lines exceed the licence fee of a ready-made employee experience platform. The comparison has to be made across all three; we went into detail in intranet cost and procurement.

Decision table

SharePoint is enough if:

• The main need is document sharing and team spaces
• The workforce is mostly desk-based and licensed for M365
• There is a team or budget for Power Platform development
• Internal communication needs are basic

A separate platform may fit better if:

• Frontline and shift workers make up a significant share of staff
• You want leave, requests and recognition to work on day one
• Fast rollout matters (weeks, not months)
• No dedicated team can be assigned to governance
• The organisation is multilingual and multi-site

Both together is an option

This is the most overlooked choice. SharePoint stays as the document library, the employee experience platform takes over communication and processes, and the two are linked.

This model protects the existing investment and uses each tool for what it does best. The critical rule is that the same document must not live in two places: where each type of content lives has to be written down at the start.

Three questions before you decide

Answer these before making the call:

• What percentage of staff have corporate email and a computer?
• Who will maintain this after launch, and how many hours a week can they give?
• Which three concrete problems do you want solved in the first six months?

If the answer to the third question is "finding documents", SharePoint is a strong candidate. If it is "leave requests get lost and the frontline never sees announcements", you need a different direction.

We collected the full set of selection criteria in the intranet selection guide, and what to expect after launch in the first 90 days.

If you have to migrate

If a SharePoint intranet already exists and you are moving to another platform, the biggest job is moving content. The common mistake here is trying to move everything.

In practice a large share of the content is already dead: pages nobody has opened in years, old campaign announcements, procedures that are copies of each other. Usage statistics make this distinction easy — content with zero views in the last twelve months probably should not be migrated.

Content that does move needs an owner, and each document should be checked for currency before it goes. Migration is a rare chance to clear accumulated content debt.

Old addresses also need to redirect for a while; bookmarks and links in old emails should not break overnight.

Governance is needed either way

Whether you pick SharePoint or not, the need for governance does not disappear. What changes is how much work it takes.

What has to be written is the same in every case: who can create a site or page, where content lives, who approves, when things are archived, which naming convention applies.

An intranet launched without these rules becomes cluttered within two years no matter which product it runs on. The product choice makes this job easier or harder; it does not remove it.

Run a pilot

A small two-week pilot before the decision tells you more than months of evaluation meetings.

Pick a single real scenario for the pilot — a leave request flow, or one department's announcement setup — and try building it in both products. Setup time, the technical knowledge required and the resulting experience give you enough data to decide.