This post is dedicated to helping you determining Sharepoint costs for your implementation. You might say, well, they offer a pricing page for the cloud version, so isn’t this article moot?
As you start looking under the Sharepoint hood, you will realize there is more to it.
Sharepoint Online costs
Source: Sharepoint pricing page
Plan 1
The US5 plan is somewhat limited: it lets you built intranets and store documents, and but it restricts access to other Office 365 applications like video conferencing and chat, workflow automation etc.
What about buying the Plan 1 plus Office 365 applications?
Plan 1 + Office365(?)
That might be a more complex answer; you can choose between Business Essentials (as seen above), Business, and Business Premium.
Business Premium offers
- Email hosting with 50 GB mailbox and custom email domain address
- Desktop versions of Office applications: Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote (plus Access and Publisher for PC only) File storage and sharing with 1 TB of OneDrive storage
- One license covers fully-installed, always-up-to-date Office apps on 5 phones, 5 tablets, and 5 PCs or Macs per user
- 24/7 phone and web support
- Annual plans are $12,5 user/month ($150/year) and monthly commitment plans are $15 ($180/year).
Business offers:
- It doesn’t include email hosting with a 50GB mailbox and custom email domain address.
- Desktop versions of Office applications: Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote (plus Access and Publisher for PC only)
- File storage and sharing with 1 TB of OneDrive storage.
- One license covers fully-installed, always-up-to-date Office apps on 5 phones, 5 tablets, and 5 PCs or Macs per user
- Automatically updated with new features and capabilities
- 24/7 phone and web support
- Annual plans are $8,25 user/month ($99/year) and monthly commitment plans are $10 ($120/year).
Business Essentials offers:
- Email hosting with 50 GB mailbox and custom email domain address
- Web versions of Office applications: Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote (plus Access and Publisher for PC only). It doesn’t offer desktop versions.
- File storage and sharing with 1 TB of OneDrive storage
- Online meetings and video conferencing for up to 250 people
- 24/7 phone and web support
- Annual plans are $5 user/month ($60/year) and monthly commitment plans are $6 ($72/year).
In the lowest tier, you would pay $6 for Business Essentials each month. How different is this from the Sharepoint Plan 2 that costs $10?
Plan 2
This offers everything Plan 1 does, but in addition:
- Customize your enterprise search and results with enhanced features to surface resources across O365
- Find content in electronic format for litigation or audit scenarios
- Use advanced DLP capabilities to identify, monitor, and protect sensitive information
- Use In-Place Holds to programmatically preserve content from deletion or edit
- No access to other Office 365 features…
In terms of security and document management, Plan 2 seems ideal, but ito does not allow access to the broader array of Office 365 capabilities.
Plan 3
This is the only plan with an annual commitment. Of course, it has all the features available by Sharepoint, but its pricing is twice that of Plan 2, with an annual $240/user/year commitment which is more expensive that most providers.
The additional features are:
- Business-class email and hosting; you can only get a business email when joining the most expensive tier
- Desktop versions of Office applications: Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, plus Access and Publisher for PC only
- OneNote: Access to additional OneNote features (features vary)
- Web versions of Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
- One license covers 5 PCs or Macs, 5 phones, and 5 tablets per user
- Online video-conferencing meetings for up to 250 people
- Online video-conferencing meetings for up to 10,000 people with Skype Meeting Broadcast
- Get a hub for teamwork with Microsoft Teams
- Automate business processes with Microsoft PowerApps (formerly Access Online)
- Maximum number of users: unlimited
- FastTrack deployment support with the purchase of 50+ seats at no extra cost
- 24/7 phone and web support
- Licensed for commercial use
Additional costs
As you can see, there are a wide array of somewhat confusing choices when picking Sharepoint Online. However, the Total Cost of Ownership of sophisticated software like Sharepoint is rarely just the license itself. You should also consider:
Training:
Just as its pricing plans, Sharepoint experience is also complex, full of modules and multiple administrative levels. It is no wonder there are various Sharepoint certification and courses on the market. According to Certstaff, the online courses aggregator, Sharepoint training could be easily more than $1000 per student. You also need to consider these additional costs of training your administrators and users.
Custom development: Some organizations prefer to hire help from outside consulting shops to help with their Sharepoint implementation. According to Aerie Consulting, a development firm, Sharepoint additional configurations could cost between 10k to even 100k.
Our Sharepoint costs calculator below helps you determine your costs based on your plan selections and number of users. If you think the options and choices available in Sharepoint have left your head swimming, you might want to consider a leaner, simpler and cheaper Sharepoint alternative.