OneDrive vs Teams vs SharePoint

Dear javablood,

Good day! Thank you for posting your query in our community.

Moving from Google Drive to a Microsoft 365 solution can offer tighter integration with Office apps and may align better with your existing Office 365 Business subscription. Let's briefly compare OneDrive, Teams, and SharePoint to help you decide which might be best for your small company's needs:

OneDrive for Business:

Best for personal storage or for files that you're working on individually.

Integrates with Microsoft Office so you can easily save and share documents from within Word, Excel, etc.

Files can be synced to your local machine, offering an experience similar to File Explorer.

It's good for files that don't require collaboration yet.

Microsoft Teams:

Ideal for collaboration and communication within your team or organization.

Files shared in Teams are actually stored in SharePoint, but Teams provides a more collaborative interface with chat and video conferencing built-in.

Offers a Files tab that shows you the documents shared within a particular team or chat.

Best for files that are being actively worked on by a team where ongoing discussion and collaboration are needed.

SharePoint:

Designed for document management and storage on an organizational level.

Allows for more sophisticated permission settings and document workflows than OneDrive.

Provides a wide range of features, including document libraries, lists, and sites that can be customized to your company's needs.

Can be set up to have a similar look to File Explorer through document libraries.

Given what you've described, wanting a "File Explorer" look, with a focus on a familiar folders and files structure, SharePoint seems like the most fitting choice. SharePoint document libraries can be synced to your local machine using the OneDrive sync client, providing a File Explorer-like experience while retaining the online collaboration features. This way, you can navigate your files in a traditional folder structure while benefiting from the cloud-based features of SharePoint.

OneDrive and SharePoint both offer the file organization structure you're looking for, with SharePoint offering more robust organizational features. However, keep in mind that SharePoint can have a steeper learning curve than the simplicity of OneDrive or the straightforward collaboration features of Teams.

Sincerely,

Jazlyn | Microsoft Community Moderator

If you want the intuitive experience of Google Drive, go for OneDrive rather than Sharepoint.

Like Google Drive, OneDrive surfaces documents you are currently working on in Home, but offers a basic drill down file interface in My Files rather than the last millennium File Explorer look.

But before you make the move, explore how sharing in Sharepoint (which also underpins OneDrive) works compared to Google. I much prefer the latter and think it is more intuitive than Sharepoint with less risk of error. If you accept the premise that cloud based collaboration is geographically neutral, I'd question the need to move from Google Drive at all. Google Drive and its Docs and Sheets apps are leaner, faster and more intuitive all round. You can't do a lot of stuff in 365 cloud apps that you can do in Google, and have to resort to the desktop apps. It's slower and less efficient. If you are already committed to Microsoft for some reason, fair enough, but otherwise it's one of those "to get the best results we wouldn't start from here" scenarios.

Privileges in Sharepoint are more rigidly hierarchical and sharing is based on instances of links - one link might have permissions such as "anyone with [this particular] link can edit" while another link will be "anyone with this link can view". I find sharing much easier to manage in Google Drive through one interface which eliminates the risk of someone forwarding a "can edit" link, for example.