What is the difference between creating a page and and a subsite? What are the benefits of each and downfalls?

I a still a little confused. Why would I need to create separate online SharePoint sites and then link them to the parent site when I can create Subsites from the parent site? Can you tell me the difference? Also, what is the purpose of Pages then?

Dear Admin,

Thanks for writing back and updating us. Apologies for the confusion and delay in the response as I was out of the office due to the weekend.

As per the further updates, we would like to let you know you can go further with creation of subsites instead of creating a separate sites and associating them to the a Hub site, we recommended with separate site creation and associating it because whenever you create a subsite, the subsite will inherit the permissions from the site where the subsite is created, where you need to select the Unique permissions if you want to restrict access to the subsites for all users who are having access to the parent site, please check the picture1 below:

For example: User 1, User 2, User 3 and so on, have access to the parents site but you don’t want all users who are having access parent site to access the subsite, then you need to select the Unique permission before creating a subsite.

Moreover, by default subsites creation is disabled at the tenant level, where we need to follow the below steps to activate it:

Open the SharePoint Online admin center> Settings> Classic Settings page> Scroll to down to Subsite creation> Enable subsite creation for all sites> Click OK. Please check the picture 2 below:

Please also check this reference: Hub Sites vs. Subsites | SharePoint Maven

Coming to the pages, you can consider it as a news page in the SharePoint Online page where it will only be helpful to display the content using the webpart. Reference: Create and use modern pages on a SharePoint site - Microsoft Support

If you still have confusion, please don’t hesitate and post back to us, where we will try our best to assist you further on this.

Appreciate your patience with us and have a great day!!

Best Regards,
Sophia

Dear Admin,

Good day!!

I understand your concern and would like to you know that the pages in the SharePoint Online site functionality is completely different with the subsites in the SharePoint Online site, where page act as single file where we can add the webparts to the page, but it doesn’t have any feature like storing, uploading, creating of files, sharing the contents etc.

However, Subsite acts like a SharePoint Online where it’s also called as Child site where we can do all same things that we can do on the normal SharePoint Online site like creating document library, lists, adding the pages, etc.

Since you mentioned you are having 14 departments and setting up hubsites, to my knowledge, you can do the following:

Step 1: Set up a Parent site as Hub site.

Step 2: Create a different SharePoint Online sites for each department and give access to the users based on your requirement.

Step 3: Associate each department site to a hubsite so that all news in the associated sites will be displayed in the parent site which setup as hub site.

Reference:

Planning your SharePoint hub sites - SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Learn

Set up your SharePoint hub site - Microsoft Support

Associate a SharePoint site with a hub site - Microsoft Support

If there is any misunderstanding or confusion, we are sorry and please feel free to post back to us with more detailed information which will help us to guide you further.

Appreciate your patience and understanding, Have a good day!!

Best Regards,

Sophia