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Google Sites vs SharePoint
March 06, 2025 | Author: Adam Levine
10★
Google Sites is a structured wiki- and web page- creation tool offered by Google as part of the Google's Productivity suite. Unlike most alternatives Google Sites is free.
58★
SharePoint's multi-purpose platform allows for managing and provisioning of intranet portals, extranets and websites, document management and file management, collaboration spaces, social networking tools, enterprise search, business intelligence tooling, process/information integration, and third-party developed solutions. SharePoint can also be used as a web application development platform.
Google Sites and SharePoint are, at their core, quite similar in the same way that a bicycle and a spaceship both technically help you travel. They let you build intranet sites, collaborate with colleagues and share important files, all while giving you just enough control over permissions to make you feel like an omnipotent cyber overlord. They are both cloud-based, which means you don’t have to worry about where they actually live and they both come with the unshakable promise that they integrate seamlessly into their respective ecosystems—though in practice, this is a bit like saying a giraffe integrates seamlessly into a crowded elevator.
Google Sites, as one might expect from the company that brought us search engines, self-driving cars and the quiet existential terror of targeted ads, is designed to be absurdly simple. It appeared in 2008 as a way to make websites without having to actually know anything about making websites. It’s great for small teams, educators and anyone who prefers a drag-and-drop interface over the dark arts of coding. However, if you ever feel the desire to customize it beyond what Google has deemed reasonable, you will quickly find yourself in a Kafkaesque loop of limitations, at which point you will either give up or embrace minimalism as a lifestyle.
SharePoint, on the other hand, is Microsoft's idea of what a collaboration platform should be, which is to say, it has everything and then a few more things in case everything wasn’t quite enough. Born in 2001, at a time when websites were still mostly collections of weird fonts and questionable GIFs, it has evolved into an enterprise-level powerhouse. It allows for elaborate document management, automation and enough access controls to make a paranoid dictator nod in approval. Unlike Google Sites, SharePoint can exist both in the cloud and on actual physical servers, though setting it up on-premises may require the assistance of a wizard, an engineer and possibly a sacrificial goat.
See also: Top 10 Wiki software
Google Sites, as one might expect from the company that brought us search engines, self-driving cars and the quiet existential terror of targeted ads, is designed to be absurdly simple. It appeared in 2008 as a way to make websites without having to actually know anything about making websites. It’s great for small teams, educators and anyone who prefers a drag-and-drop interface over the dark arts of coding. However, if you ever feel the desire to customize it beyond what Google has deemed reasonable, you will quickly find yourself in a Kafkaesque loop of limitations, at which point you will either give up or embrace minimalism as a lifestyle.
SharePoint, on the other hand, is Microsoft's idea of what a collaboration platform should be, which is to say, it has everything and then a few more things in case everything wasn’t quite enough. Born in 2001, at a time when websites were still mostly collections of weird fonts and questionable GIFs, it has evolved into an enterprise-level powerhouse. It allows for elaborate document management, automation and enough access controls to make a paranoid dictator nod in approval. Unlike Google Sites, SharePoint can exist both in the cloud and on actual physical servers, though setting it up on-premises may require the assistance of a wizard, an engineer and possibly a sacrificial goat.
See also: Top 10 Wiki software
