SharePoint Alternative | Managed Zoho WorkDrive

What SharePoint costs, and what that figure does not buy

Seven dollars a user, and no way to buy SharePoint by itself

Both pricing routes off the SharePoint product page resolve to the Microsoft 365 business plans, where Business Basic is seven dollars per user a month paid yearly and includes a terabyte of cloud storage per person. That is a real published figure and it is genuinely cheap. It is also a licence rather than a working system, and the gap between those two things is what this page is about.

SharePoint has a price, just not one of its own

Every pricing route from the SharePoint page lands on the Microsoft 365 business plans. Business Basic is seven dollars per user a month paid yearly, Business Standard with Copilot is twenty three fifty, and Business Premium with Copilot is thirty two. Versions without Teams run at five forty, twenty thirty and twenty eight eighty. What there is not, anywhere, is a line item that reads SharePoint.

A terabyte each, handed out per person

Every Business plan includes a terabyte of cloud storage per user. That is a generous allocation, and it is the opposite model to a team pool: capacity follows the individual rather than sitting with the team. It also means storage arrives attached to a person who may one day leave, and their files then become somebody else's problem to find.

The capable parts are the parts that need an owner

Microsoft counts more than two hundred thousand organizations and a hundred and ninety million people using SharePoint for intranets, team sites and content management. That is a serious content platform rather than a folder, and a serious content platform has site structure, permission inheritance, document libraries and retention policies. Every one of those is a decision somebody has to make, and then keep making.

SharePoint

Where SharePoint fits

If your company already runs Microsoft 365, SharePoint is not a decision you are making, it is a thing you already own and already pay for. At seven dollars a user it is also the cheapest published entry on this hub, and buying storage elsewhere on top of it means paying twice. It gets harder when the site sprawl, the broken permission inheritance and the leavers are nobody's actual job, because SharePoint does not do that part and neither does anything else here.

Cascadia Web Services

Where owning the platform stops being the same as running it

We exist for the business that bought a capable content platform and then found that capability is not the same as configuration. Somebody still has to decide the structure, hold the permission model together, and be doing it a year from now. Once nobody has those hours, which vendor sells you the terabyte stops being the number that decides anything.

Where SharePoint is strong

The entry price is the lowest here, by a distance

Seven dollars per user a month on Business Basic paid yearly, with a terabyte of cloud storage each and SharePoint team sites included. Nothing else on this hub starts that low with that much storage attached. If your decision is genuinely about licence cost, this is the answer, and we are not going to pretend it is a close call.

You are almost certainly already paying for it

SharePoint arrives inside every Microsoft 365 Business plan, so for a company already running Outlook, Teams and the Office apps the adoption cost is nil and the training cost close to it. That is a starting position no competitor here can match by argument, and it settles the question for plenty of businesses before anybody asks it.

It is a content platform, not a folder

Microsoft counts more than two hundred thousand organizations and a hundred and ninety million people using SharePoint for intranets, team sites and content management. Document libraries, versioning, metadata, retention and workflow all go deep. Used properly it does considerably more than store files, which is exactly why it rewards being run properly.

The security tier is serious once you reach it

Business Premium adds Microsoft Defender for Business, with ransomware protection, automatic threat disruption, advanced antivirus and vulnerability management, at thirty two dollars per user a month with Copilot. That is a genuine step up in protection. It also means how well protected your files are was decided by the plan finance signed for.

All of that is real, and if you already pay for Microsoft 365 then SharePoint is very likely the right home for your files and we are not going to talk you out of it. What it is not is a platform that configures itself. Every capability on that list assumes somebody on your side to design it, decide who it applies to and keep it current. That is a different job, and it is the one our Managed Zoho work is built around.

What five hundred a month buys when the structure is finally somebody's job

One figure per organisation, whoever you hire next

Structure design, the permission and role model, external sharing controls, storage planning and reporting, the retention and recovery position, data loss prevention and audit trails, the TrueSync rollout and the migration off what you hold today. All of it inside one figure that does not move when headcount does, with no change request and no hourly rate behind it. Your WorkDrive licence is separate and stays in your name.

Five hundred a month is about seventy Microsoft licences

That arithmetic is worth doing out loud, because on this comparison we can actually do it. Five hundred dollars is roughly what Microsoft charges to licence seventy people on Business Basic. It is only a fair comparison if you think a licence and somebody running it are the same purchase, and they are not. Below about seventy people our fee is larger than your whole Microsoft bill, and we will say so on the call.

The person who designed it is the person who answers the phone

You are not explaining your site structure to somebody meeting it for the first time. Microsoft's documentation and admin centre are genuinely good and we used both to write this page. Neither of them decided which of your libraries should be restricted, or why a contractor who finished in 2024 can still open one.

One suite, so the file is already next to the record

WorkDrive sits in the same Zoho estate as CRM, Desk and Projects, and we wire it into Zoho Directory, Flow, Sign and Analytics as part of the fee, so a signed contract lands where the record already is. SharePoint does the same thing across the Microsoft estate and does it extremely well. The real question is which estate you have decided to standardise on, and whether anybody is maintaining the joins.

SharePoint may cost you nothing extra at all, and if you are already on Microsoft 365 that is the likeliest outcome. What is not in doubt is that the subscription is not where SharePoint costs money. The structure, the permission model, the leavers and the person who owns all three are, and none of that appears on any plans page, ours included.

Onboarding process

What the first sixty days look like when the structure gets designed rather than inherited

Most of the work is ours. Every product on this hub will hold a file and give it back. What differs is who decides which sites exist, who outside the company can reach them, and who revisits both when the business changes shape.

Nothing moves until we have seen where your files actually live

We sit with the team that files everything correctly and the team that keeps it all on the desktop, and we look at both. The picture that comes out is where work genuinely gets stored, which on a mature SharePoint estate is almost never where the site map claims.

We count the sites, the broken inheritance and the departed owners before anything moves

The sites somebody opens weekly, the ones created for a project that ended two years ago, every place permission inheritance was broken for a good reason nobody wrote down, the external links handed to clients, and the files sitting in a leaver's terabyte. That inventory decides the structure, and it is almost never the one people expect.

The structure, the permissions and the ownership position all get made on purpose

Which Team Folders exist, who may create one, who outside the company may be invited in, who owns a file when its author resigns, and how long a deleted item stays recoverable. Coming off SharePoint you will also have per user storage to consolidate and a permission history to unpick, and we would rather map that before the migration than meet it during one.

You run a full month on it, including one real project and one real departure

The first month of live filing runs with us beside it. Anything that lands in the wrong folder, reaches an outside company that should not have seen it, or leaves a resigned employee still holding files the team needs gets fixed while it is still fresh.

Two situations where the cheapest licence on the hub stopped being the cheapest answer

Scenarios rather than client stories. A business that outgrows what a Zoho estate can carry belongs on managed ERPNext, and we would rather say so early than sell you something you have to leave.

A technician at a terminal beside a rack of network equipment

How this plays out

A company where permission inheritance had been broken in forty places and nobody knew why

Each exception had been made for a sensible reason by somebody who has since moved on, and not one of them was written down. The only honest way forward was to rebuild the permission model from the role definitions up. The seven dollar licence had never been the problem. What forced it was an auditor asking who could see the payroll library.

Hands checking figures on a calculator against a stack of invoices

When this comes up

A company paying Microsoft per seat while a Zoho suite it already owned sat unopened

Operations had built everything in SharePoint years earlier because that is where the intranet already was, and that was the right call at the time. Finance was separately paying for a Zoho subscription that included a file platform nobody outside sales had opened. Neither side was wrong, and the two renewals never landed on the same desk. Consolidating turned out to be a governance exercise rather than a technical one.

500

Dollars a month per organisation, printed here, with your WorkDrive licence staying yours

Every part of it, from the first inventory of your sites through to the monthly access report, sits inside that one number. Zoho Assist is the single service where we carry the subscription ourselves; on WorkDrive it stays in your name.

Dollars per person, per guest or per gigabyte

The audit, the structure design, the permission model, the migration and the reporting all sit inside the five hundred. Nothing is metered and there is no plan tier to grow into.

4-8

Weeks, usually, before your people are filing in the new structure without us in it

Four to eight weeks typically, and longer where a decade of broken permission inheritance has to be unpicked rather than copied across.

SharePoint alternative and managed Zoho WorkDrive FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions

How does SharePoint compare to Google Drive, Dropbox and Box?

It is the cheapest of the four to licence and the only one you cannot buy on its own. Business Basic is seven dollars per user a month paid yearly with a terabyte each. Google Drive sits in a similar position for a different reason: it publishes no price at all, because it is sold inside Workspace and the plans page renders in the browser. Dropbox publishes fifteen and twenty four dollars per user, and Box publishes twenty and thirty three. Both of those hold their deeper administration for the upper tier.

Can I just buy SharePoint on its own?

No. Both pricing routes from the SharePoint product page resolve to the Microsoft 365 business plans page, where you are buying the suite. SharePoint arrives with Exchange, Teams and the Office apps whether or not you wanted them. That is not a criticism, it is how Microsoft sells it, and at seven dollars a user it is hard to argue with.

What does SharePoint actually cost?

Seven dollars per user a month on Business Basic paid yearly, including a terabyte of cloud storage per person. Business Standard with Copilot is twenty three fifty and Business Premium with Copilot is thirty two. There are variants without Teams at five forty, twenty thirty and twenty eight eighty. Microsoft 365 Apps for business is ten dollars but is desktop applications only. We fetched every one of those from Microsoft's own plans page rather than quoting a blog post.

Which SharePoint capabilities depend on the plan you hold?

The storage does not, since every Business plan carries a terabyte per user. The security does. Microsoft Defender for Business, with ransomware protection, automatic threat disruption, advanced antivirus and vulnerability management, arrives with Business Premium rather than Basic. So the plan finance signed for decides how well protected the files are, which is worth knowing before an incident rather than after one.

What is not on the published plan list?

Who decides which sites exist and who may create one. Who repairs permission inheritance after the twentieth reasonable exception. Who audits the external sharing links handed out two years ago. Who owns a terabyte when the person holding it resigns. Whether the retention labels the licence makes available were ever actually applied. None of that appears on any vendor's plans page, ours included, which is why this page exists.

We already pay for Microsoft 365. Why would I pay you five hundred a month?

Often you should not, and we give that answer regularly. If SharePoint is working, the site structure is deliberate and somebody reviews access, keep your five hundred dollars. You pay us when the platform has quietly become nobody's job, and somebody still has to design the structure, hold the permission model together, handle leavers and the files they held, wire storage into the rest of the estate, and still be doing all of it a year from now.

At what point does SharePoint stop being the cheaper answer?

This is the one comparison on the hub where we can actually do the arithmetic, because Microsoft publishes a number. Five hundred dollars a month is roughly what seventy Business Basic licences cost. Below that headcount our fee is larger than your entire Microsoft bill, and we will say so on the call. Above it the comparison stops being about licences at all, because a company that size with no owner for its file estate is not saving money, it is deferring a clean up.

Is SharePoint metered on people, files or storage?

On people. Each Business licence carries a terabyte of cloud storage for that user, so capacity grows as you hire and, importantly, stays attached to individuals rather than to teams. Zoho WorkDrive works the other way: a team pool starting at one terabyte on Starter and three on Team, topped up per additional user. Neither model is better in the abstract. They fail differently, and the per user model fails when somebody leaves.

Is SharePoint a better product than Zoho WorkDrive?

As a content management platform, yes, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Document libraries, metadata, versioning, workflow and intranet publishing all go deeper in SharePoint than in WorkDrive, and the Microsoft ecosystem around it is enormous. WorkDrive wins on two things: it sits in the same estate as CRM, Desk and Projects, and its Team Folder model treats shared ownership as the default rather than something you configure. If your problem is intranet and content management, buy Microsoft.

Does Zoho WorkDrive connect to the rest of Zoho?

That is the reason to choose it. WorkDrive sits alongside CRM, Desk, Projects and People, and we wire it into Zoho Directory, Flow, Sign and Analytics as part of the fee, so a signed contract lands where the record already is. SharePoint pulls the same trick inside the Microsoft estate and does it very well. The question is which estate you have decided to standardise on.

What exactly do you do for five hundred a month?

We design the workspace and Team Folder structure and its naming, build the permission and role model, write the external sharing controls, settle retention and recovery, configure data loss prevention and the audit trail, add and remove people as they join and leave, roll TrueSync out across desktop and mobile, connect WorkDrive to Zoho Directory, Flow, Sign and Analytics, migrate you off what you hold today, and issue storage planning and access reporting every month. Support for your team is unlimited and carries no extra charge.

Who holds the Zoho WorkDrive licence, you or us?

You do, and that is deliberate. WorkDrive is bought direct from Zoho in your name and we manage what you own. Every Zoho service we run works this way except Managed Zoho Assist, where the subscription genuinely sits with us. Here the licence, the data and the account are all yours, so ending the arrangement means we hand back keys rather than transfer a contract.

Can you move us off SharePoint?

Yes, and it carries a step a straight file copy does not. Alongside listing the sites people actually use, the ones nobody has opened in a year and the outside companies still holding links, we have to unpick the permission model, because inheritance exceptions do not travel and neither does ownership of a leaver's storage. Agreeing what happens to the Microsoft subscription afterwards is part of the job rather than an afterthought, particularly where the rest of the suite is still in daily use.

Is there a minimum term?

No. Five hundred a month, month to month, thirty days notice, and no setup fee. Your Microsoft agreement is between you and Microsoft, and it is worth reading before assuming you can stop paying for it this quarter, because those Business plan figures are the paid yearly rates.

What if we are only five people?

Then buy the Microsoft licences and keep your five hundred dollars, and we would tell you the same on the phone. Five people who all know where the file is do not have a governance problem. Come back when the second team starts, or when the first person leaves and nobody is sure what was in their terabyte.

What happens if we outgrow Zoho?

Some do. Once the work being filed is manufacturing, field service or project delivery at scale, the honest answer is ERPNext rather than another Zoho app, and we run that too.

A SharePoint Alternative for Companies Paying for a Platform Nobody Was Given Time to Run

SharePoint has a price, just not one of its own

A terabyte each, handed out per person

The capable parts are the parts that need an owner

Cascadia

Without Cascadia

Somebody decides which sites and Team Folders exist before every department quietly opens its own

Permissions that follow a role somebody designed, rather than inheritance broken one exception at a time

A monthly pass over members, guests, external sharing and connected apps, checked against who joined and who left

A price that does not move when you hire, because it is charged per organisation rather than per seat

The same named person on every call, who built your structure and can say why each permission exists

A leaver's files handled as a process, rather than a terabyte belonging to somebody who no longer works here

Retention and recovery decided deliberately, rather than a label that exists but was never applied

File, ticket, deal and project inside one suite rather than joined up with connectors you maintain

An honest no on the first call if the Microsoft licence you already pay for is the right home for this

Data loss prevention and audit trails actually configured, not merely available on the tier you happen to hold