Are There Any SharePoint Alternatives for Your Enterprise?

The digital storage, tracking and management of documents is a must for today’s enterprises, regardless of their scale. Paper-based and manual processes are too much of a handicap to productivity, security, and compliance.

That’s why document management (DM) is one of the most common applications for which organizations implement SharePoint. That said, SharePoint is not the only possible solution. There are so many more options available, but do any of them compete effectively with the original and, as many would contend, still the best DM platform?

Another SharePoint alternative with multiple capabilities, Documentum doesn’t have quite the scope of Alfresco but is more than capable of meeting general content management needs of large enterprises. It offers a wide array of integration options and plays nicely with leading document scanning solutions. If yours is a smaller business though, you might find Documentum’s cost to be an obstacle, along with the number of installations required.

As its name imply, Documentum is an enterprise-grade document management system by its nature. It means that it contains a great number of out-of-the-box document-centric features that come to SharePoint via customization only. For instance, default document search and indexing capabilities in Documentum can defeat those of SharePoint easily.

The power of Documentum that may attract large enterprises can scary smaller firms, though. SMEs can feel more comfortable with SharePoint, particularly its cloud version that is more lightweight and flexible in terms of use scenarios.

SharePoint is immensely popular as a collaboration platform, and only likely to become more so as enterprises increase the use of distributed teams and remote workers.

A recent study by Upwork highlighted that 73% of teams will be partially made up of remote workers by 2028. However, SharePoint is not the only option for collaborative teamwork in enterprises. You could consider working with any of the applications described in this section.

Like Slack, Mattermost is a business communication platform. Unfortunately, Mattermost is not as easy to integrate with other solutions as Slack. The main advantage of Mattermost is in its architecture. If your company does not want to rely on hosted servers, you can download the application, use it on-premises, and customize it freely since it is open-source.

Can Mattermost serve as a useful alternative to SharePoint Server though? Not likely, but it still can perform well enough as a communication component.

Mattermost is billed as a collaboration and communication platform, but is mostly limited to file sharing and messaging. As it doesn't offer audio or video conferencing, many organizations may find it too limited to be a viable aid to collaboration.

Indeed, the only SharePoint gap that Mattermost can fill is built-in messaging. Other than that, SharePoint provides a better range of collaborative capabilities, and if messaging is necessary, you can always couple it with Slack, Skype, or Microsoft Teams.

Jira is a project and workflow management tool that is extremely popular among information technology companies as it supports the entire software development lifecycle. Nevertheless, Jira can be hardly compared to SharePoint in collaboration terms, as it does not provide features equivalent to the ones of SharePoint. There is a fair reason for this since Atlassian offers collaboration and knowledge management capabilities within its Confluence platform.

On the other hand, if your organization is considering SharePoint and needs superior project and workflow management capabilities, you could do a lot worse than to integrate the two solutions. Again, this tandem is frequently used in the software development industry.

Jira and SharePoint are both suitable for larger enterprises as opposed to SMEs, and they are both highly customizable. Against these similarities,  there are some fundamental differences, such as the fact that Jira is designed for software development teams specifically. Therefore, if that’s the industry you operate in, deploying Jira makes a good sense, as you can probably make it work for you without a great deal of customization. It might be harder to optimize for a different industry though, in which case SharePoint could be the more suitable alternative.

It seems that in every category of SharePoint alternatives, there is one product that is closer to SharePoint than others. In the project management and collaboration niche, that product might be Wrike. Used by such notable companies as TGI Fridays, Jaguar Land Rover, and AirBnB, Wrike is a feature-packed project management solution.

It’s also a product with ambition, as evidenced by a growing family of add-ons tailored to specific industries. For example, a version of the software enhanced explicitly for marketers and creatives includes modules for digital asset management and real-time document collaboration.

Wrike is not the easiest of project management tools to implement and adopt, and it’s not just for project management. The company’s CEO, Andrew Filev, gave perhaps the best summary of this product.

Filev said, “We are not building a project management system, we are building a digital workplace, and that means connecting different teams, and it also means connecting different tools.” Regarding ease of use, he adds, “We are not necessarily the simplest tool on the market, but among the most powerful tools we are the simplest.”

The key thing to keep in mind when considering Wrike as an alternative to SharePoint, is that, as Filev says, it’s a digital workplace in the making. SharePoint, though, is long-established as a complete and mature version of the same—and it shows.

As mentioned, Wrike offers more similarities to SharePoint than any of the other project management applications covered in this article. Like SharePoint, it is a centralized collaboration platform and workspace and thus may appeal to a similar subset of software buyers.

Again, the size of the organization and its ability to field skilled developers might be a deciding factor. SharePoint could work best for corporations, while smaller businesses may prefer the slightly less complicated process required to set up Wrike. At the same time, Wrike might not yet have become sophisticated or comprehensive enough for large enterprises.

With its Jira, Bitbucket, Trello, Opsgenie, and Confluence products, Atlassian provides the tools your business needs for a collaborative digital workspace—if your business is in software development.

However, while Confluence might be targeting the technology space, which perhaps limits its audience, it’s nevertheless a popular and capable platform for knowledge and content management. Suggested as an alternative to SharePoint, Confluence centralizes knowledge management for distributed teams in a way that encourages the sharing of ideas and information.

Sophisticated knowledge base features and an abundance of add-ons make it a viable solution for organizations wishing to build an intranet-like portal. Users have access to advanced search features and collaborative tools, allowing them to share and work together on as many documents as they wish.

Like SharePoint, Confluence is available both in cloud and on-premises versions. It should be noted though, that while the cloud version is easy to set up and use, the on-premises package will require technical expertise, adding to the cost of ownership.

It’s also an expensive product, so perhaps not suitable for smaller enterprises. However, the price reflects the quality of customer support offered by Atlassian and the possibilities for extensive customization. That tends to persuade some non-tech organizations to select it and adapt it to suit their domains.

Atlassian Confluence is one of the few applications discussed here that has more commonalities with SharePoint than differences. Nevertheless, some key variances separate the two products. Certainly, Confluence has fewer features than SharePoint, although some add-ons are available to bridge the gap.

Its relative simplicity could also be a pro since fewer features mean less learning for users. Potential buyers might also consider the fact that its architecture and functionality have been designed for the software and tech industries, whereas SharePoint feels like an industry-agnostic platform.

Obviously, it is impossible to cover all SharePoint alternatives in one article. There are many more solutions that can fit your business context. But the question is, does it make sense to look for a SharePoint substitute, or is it more logical to opt for Microsoft’s collaborative compendium?

While you can configure and customize SharePoint to support a raft of collaborative business needs, it doesn’t necessarily excel in any of them out of the box. Moreover, SharePoint customization can be costly and very time-consuming. That’s why, if you’re in the market for a reliable document or knowledge management tool, communication solution, or PM platform, it’s worth considering the alternatives covered in this article.

The decision can often boil down to answering a single question. Do you prefer a platform potentially spanning the entire collaborative spectrum, and are you prepared for the work involved in realizing that potential? If not, you should perhaps opt for a niche solution, ready to go straight off the shelf.

The only issue with choosing a SharePoint alternative is that sooner or later, you might need to expand your collaborative toolkit. That will mean buying another software product—and so it can go on until you have four, five, or even more different pieces of software.

If you predict that this might be the case in your IT environment, there is merit in preempting the issue by implementing SharePoint. It will give you the foundation of a comprehensive solution supporting every field of business collaboration, which can be developed and customized as a series of projects over time.

SharePoint or an alternative? To date, that’s not a valid question. SharePoint or how many alternatives? Now that’s the one begging to be asked.