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Choosing a SharePoint intranet

Most people evaluating SPHub are really deciding between three things: building on plain SharePoint, using what Microsoft already gives them, or buying a packaged product. This page covers the first two directly, and gives you the questions to put to any vendor in the third group, including us.

The two comparisons worth making

The two comparisons worth making are both with Microsoft products you already have, which is why they can be written honestly.

  • SPHub and SharePoint out of the box

    Plain SharePoint can become an intranet, and for some organisations it should. The question is who assembles it and who maintains it in two years. That page includes the case where SPHub is the wrong answer.

  • SPHub and the SharePoint app in Teams

    Formerly Viva Connections. It is a surface rather than a set of modules, so it is not an alternative to SPHub — the two compose. That page explains which does what, and quotes Microsoft's licensing rule rather than paraphrasing it.

Eight questions to ask any vendor, with our answers

These eight questions are worth putting to every intranet vendor you evaluate, us included, and the answers below are the ones we would give on a call.

The question

SPHub's answer
  • Where does our content physically live?In ordinary SharePoint lists in your own tenant, with no separate database. See security.
  • What leaves our tenant, and when?One licence check, the only call SPHub makes to a host outside Microsoft. See security.
  • What exactly gets installed?A single SPHub.sppkg uploaded to your tenant App Catalog. Modern pages, no custom script required.
  • Which permissions do you need, and why each one?Three Microsoft Graph permissions, each explained on the security page.
  • What happens to our data if we stop using you?It stays where it is. The lists are SharePoint lists; removing the web parts does not remove them.
  • Can we run setup again without breaking things?Yes. Setup skips anything that already exists, so re-runs and upgrades do not duplicate a list.
  • Does it work in Microsoft Teams?Most web parts can be added as a Teams tab; see the web parts page.
  • What does it cost?$1.22 to $6.11 per user per month depending on headcount, every plan including every web part. See pricing.

If a vendor cannot answer the first two in a sentence each, that is worth noticing.

Why there is no vendor-by-vendor table here

A vendor-by-vendor table is missing here because we would be marking our own homework, and you would be right not to believe it.

  • Vendor comparisons are written by vendors

    A comparison published by a vendor is written to be won by that vendor, ours included. It is worth checking who wrote the list before trusting the order of it.

  • Feature tables go stale quietly

    A competitor ships something in March and our table still says they cannot do it in November. We would not notice, and you would have no way to tell. A wrong claim about someone else's product is worse than no claim.

  • Where to get an independent view

    Independent analysts publish researched reviews of intranet products built on SharePoint, rather than reviews solicited from the vendors in them. An independent review is worth more than ours.

  • What to do instead

    Take the eight questions above to every vendor on your shortlist and compare the answers you get directly. That is a comparison nobody wrote for you.

Put the questions to us

Book a demo and ask all eight. If an answer is not what you need, it is better for both of us that you find out now.

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