SharePoint Online vs OneDrive

SharePoint and OneDrive are both part of Microsoft 365, but they don't serve the same purpose. OneDrive is an employee's personal storage space : work-in-progress files, before they're shared. SharePoint is the collective platform : structured document libraries, team sites, company intranets. The practical rule : a file stays in OneDrive as long as it belongs to you; it moves to SharePoint the moment a team needs to view it, edit it, or access it long-term.

This distinction sounds simple, but ignoring it gets expensive. According to McKinsey ("The social economy," 2012 : an old data point, but still widely cited), an employee spends on average 1.8 hours a day, nearly a full workday every week, searching for and gathering information. A good chunk of that lost time comes precisely from a poor split between personal storage and shared libraries. Our ROI calculator can help you put a number on that impact for your organization.

In this guide, we compare SharePoint Online and OneDrive feature by feature, with the numbers and use cases that make the difference in 2026.

SharePoint Online

Description

SharePoint is a collaborative platform integrated with the Office 365 suite. More specifically, it is a solution for creating team or communication sites, whether they take the form of an Intranet, an Extranet, or project spaces. SharePoint also offers many advanced features, particularly in terms of document management.

Companies particularly appreciate SharePoint for the possibility it offers to set up a fully customized intranet. The company's information is thus communicated and shared in a fluid and efficient manner, with a view to strengthening collaborative work. Moreover, users can add documents from any computer.

Functionality

SharePoint offers a unique infrastructure to create 100% customized Intranets that reflect the company's values. Here are some of its main features:

• Document Management: SharePoint makes document management easier by gathering them all in one single place. Users have access to all necessary information within a few clicks. Bonus: you get to define the document centralization structure.
• Search: users can search for content (information, business data, collaborators, etc.) within an integrated platform.
• Creation of Intranets and integration of dashboards.
• Business application creation.
• Project spaces: SharePoint allows you to create collaborative spaces by user group and duplicate them in a few clicks.
• Workflow: All work processes are automated for maximum efficiency.

The Advantages of SharePoint

With SharePoint, teams can easily collaborate, share, disseminate, and manage important documents and information.

Streamlining communication and collaboration

One of the main advantages of SharePoint is its ability to streamline communication within a company. Teams can share documents and information, collaborate on projects, and stay informed of important deadlines, all quickly and intuitively. For example, a team working on a project can create a shared document library in SharePoint, where all members can edit the same documents in real-time. There is no longer a need to create multiple versions of the same document.

Integration with other tools

SharePoint also has the major advantage of integrating with other tools and software used by the company. For example, SharePoint can be integrated with Microsoft Office, HR systems, or CRM and project management software.

Ensured security

SharePoint provides complete security and compliance, making it an ideal tool for companies operating in regulated sectors. For example, SharePoint can be configured to limit access to sensitive data, with specific permissions.

Customization of SharePoint sites

Finally, SharePoint offers numerous customization options, allowing user companies to adapt the tool to all their needs.

🚀 Find out how to create a Modern SharePoint Intranet

OneDrive

Description

OneDrive is an online document storage tool. It allows access to all your files and work documents, no matter where you are. This makes it the ideal tool for hybrid workers, who work part-time remotely and part-time in their company's premises. As such, access to OneDrive works from all devices: smartphone, computer, tablet, etc.

The storage of various types of documents is fully secure on OneDrive. Each user has an account, with which they have the ability to:

• Store documents;
• Share documents or folders with access permission to another collaborator;
• Create a shared work library, accessible from SharePoint and Teams.

OneDrive thus facilitates collaborative work and document management, but it is not an intranet. Its features are, therefore, more limited than those of SharePoint.

Functioning

To use OneDrive, all you need is a Microsoft account. Once your account is created, you can synchronize the OneDrive folder on your computer to access the files stored in the cloud. It is also possible to use the OneDrive app on smartphones and tablets.

More specifically, here are some of OneDrive's features:

• Synchronization: Users can work on documents from their computer, while changes are synchronized in real time to the cloud.
• Document sharing: This feature allows you to see the documents you have shared with others, whether they are internal or external to the company. Moreover, in shared documents, it is possible to access documents that have been shared by a third party.
• Shared libraries: OneDrive is based on document sharing, through which it is possible to access documents from all the SharePoint libraries the user has access to.
• Data protection: OneDrive ensures the protection and security of all documents without the need for third-party applications.

The Advantages of OneDrive

OneDrive offers numerous benefits, including:

• Real-time collaboration on documents,
• The ability to access your documents at any time and from anywhere;
• Access to previous versions of documents;
• The creation and editing of documents online;
• The possibility to share files quickly and easily;
• Data security;
• The automatic backup system.

💡 Go further, check out our guide: "SharePoint Online vs SharePoint On-Premise"

SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams: the Microsoft 365 trio

A lot of people are actually looking for a three-way answer, not a two-way one: where does Teams fit into all this? The answer is simple. Teams doesn't have its own storage space: every team channel is backed by a SharePoint site created automatically, and the "Files" tab of a private conversation points to OneDrive. In practice:

• A file shared in a Teams channel lands in the channel's SharePoint library, not in OneDrive.
• A file sent in a private Teams message is stored in the sender's OneDrive, with a sharing link generated for the recipient.
• Real-time co-editing works identically in both cases, directly from Teams.

With Jint Teams & Web, this mechanic stays invisible to the user: employees open their intranet directly in the Teams sidebar, without ever needing to know where the file actually lives.

SharePoint VS OneDrive: Feature Comparison

Document Management

SharePoint allows you to gather all your documents in one single place and access them with just a few clicks. The same goes for OneDrive, which enables quick access to files and work documents from any tool. It is also possible to create a shared work library that can be accessed from SharePoint. On this point, the two tools are equivalent.

Collaboration

With SharePoint, teams can easily collaborate on various projects and share files, information, and documents in real-time. They can also edit them without the need to create multiple versions of the same file, leading to significant efficiency gains.

OneDrive also offers file-sharing functionality, whether internally or with external partners. Real-time file co-creation is also available.

Finally, similar to SharePoint Alert, OneDrive allows you to receive notifications when certain documents are updated. Overall, however, SharePoint has the advantage, as its features as an interface for creating customized Intranets are more numerous and advanced.

Security and Compliance

SharePoint ensures complete security for businesses. It can be configured to limit access to confidential data, with specific permissions.

On the other hand, OneDrive also offers features for restricted access control. Additionally, it provides a system for recovering lost data.

Finally, as a SharePoint administrator or administrator in Microsoft 365, it is possible to block the downloading of Teams meeting files from SharePoint or OneDrive sites.

Pricing

SharePoint and OneDrive aren't sold separately: both are included in most Microsoft 365 plans, at a cost that varies by tier (Business Basic, Business Standard, or the E3/E5 Enterprise plans). OneDrive provides 1 TB of storage per user starting with entry-level plans; SharePoint adds a pooled storage allowance for the organization, calculated by license count. For exact pricing based on your headcount, check our pricing page or Microsoft's, since the tiers change regularly.

Technical limits: the numbers to know in 2026

Beyond use cases, a few numbers settle the debate faster than a long argument. According to Microsoft's official documentation (Microsoft Learn, 2025), a SharePoint library can hold up to 30 million files and folders, with a limit of 250 GB per uploaded file. OneDrive follows the same file size limits, but Microsoft recommends staying under 300,000 synced items per library to preserve performance (Microsoft Support, 2025). In practice: once a team approaches that volume, or needs fine-grained metadata and permissions, that's the signal to migrate to SharePoint.

Moving a file from OneDrive to SharePoint: best practice

The move itself is simple: drag and drop the file from your OneDrive into the relevant team's SharePoint library, either in Windows Explorer or straight from the browser. Access permissions and version history follow automatically. Best practice: migrate a document as soon as it leaves the individual-draft stage, rather than waiting until it's "finished." A report shared too late in OneDrive means a team working off a stale version while the author already has a newer one on their own machine.

Conclusion: 2 tools, 2 uses, one question to ask yourself

SharePoint Online and OneDrive offer complementary but distinct solutions for file management and sharing within companies.

While OneDrive is an ideal tool for file storage and collaboration on personal documents, SharePoint allows for the creation of 100% customized team sites, ensures complex document management, and facilitates collaborative work on larger projects.

OneDrive can thus be used to store individual or collaborative documents (for example: monthly reports to share with one's team). These reports can be shared with other colleagues by moving them to a SharePoint location specifically dedicated to the project.

Once the report is in SharePoint, team members can access it, read it, and make necessary modifications in real time. This means that multiple people can work on the same document simultaneously. In addition, SharePoint offers advanced document management features, such as the ability to create workflows for document approval or to track version history.

In this example, we see that OneDrive is used for the creation and storage of documents, while SharePoint is utilized for teamwork and document management. These two tools thus work in a complementary manner to provide a secure collaborative work environment.

The choice between each tool then depends on the specific needs of your company. However, it is possible (and even recommended) to combine the features of SharePoint and OneDrive with a view to improving operational efficiency.

A well-designed SharePoint intranet, like the one Jint builds on top of SharePoint, makes this switch invisible for your teams: they find their documents, news, and tools in the same place, without ever wondering where the file actually lives.