SharePoint vs Building Your Own: Which to Choose in 2026

You can no longer buy SharePoint by itself: Microsoft retired the standalone SharePoint Plan 1 and Plan 2 from sale on May 31, 2026 (existing subscribers keep service until December 2029). SharePoint now comes only inside Microsoft 365 bundles. Microsoft's live prices as of July 2026, paid yearly: Business Basic $7.00 per user per month, Business Standard with Copilot $23.50, Business Premium with Copilot $32.00 (Business plans cap at 300 seats), Microsoft 365 E3 $39.00, and E5 $60.00. The Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on is a further $30.00 per user per month where not bundled.

The license is already included, so the incremental licensing cost of using SharePoint as your intranet is zero. That is the bundling gravity that makes SharePoint so hard to beat internally, and any honest comparison starts there. But free licensing is not a free intranet: a governed rollout costs real money in configuration, information architecture, and ongoing content ownership, and workflow automation typically adds Power Platform licensing. The license is free; the intranet is not.

At BearPlex's published bands: a custom internal tool or portal starts from $15,000 and typically runs $25,000-$70,000 depending on workflow depth, integrations, and roles. A client-facing platform build typically runs $25,000-$80,000. Ongoing maintenance via a care plan starts from $150/month and typically runs $350-$2,000/month. Those are honest ranges, not quotes: a real number requires a scoping conversation, which is what our discovery call is for.

SharePoint side, licenses only, Microsoft's live July 2026 prices paid yearly: 50 users on Business Basic is 50 x $7.00 x 36 months = $12,600. 100 users on Business Standard with Copilot is 100 x $23.50 x 36 = $84,600. 500 users on Microsoft 365 E3 is 500 x $39.00 x 36 = $702,000. Two caveats cut in opposite directions: those licenses buy the entire Microsoft 365 suite, not just SharePoint, and most companies in this comparison already pay for them, making the incremental cost zero; but licenses are rarely the biggest intranet line item, since configuration work and intranet-in-a-box products are quoted per project on top. Custom side: a typical internal portal build at $25,000-$70,000 plus 36 months of care plan at $350-$2,000/month lands at roughly $37,600-$142,000 all-in over three years. Conclusion: for a purely internal intranet at an M365 shop, SharePoint nearly always wins on cost. The custom math wins when external users would force additional licensing and support burden, or when the portal replaces manual operational work that costs more per year than the build.

Four show up consistently in practice. Governance sprawl: sites, permissions, and stale content multiply by default, and search quality decays with them, so an unowned SharePoint intranet rots quietly. Branding and UX limits: past the templates you are into SPFx development, a niche specialty. Workflow depth: anything beyond lists and simple approvals pulls in Power Automate and Power Apps, licensed and skilled separately. External access friction: guest sharing spans multiple admin centers and auth systems, and breakage is routine. None of these are fatal for an internal, content-centric intranet with an owner. All of them compound for client-facing or workflow-first use cases.

Technically yes, via guest access, and for occasional file sharing with a handful of partners it is fine. As a real client portal it is fragile: access depends on tenant-level sharing policies, guests hit account mismatch errors when their invite email and Microsoft account differ, links that worked last week stop working, and Microsoft keeps tightening external sharing mechanics. Every one of those failures lands as a support ticket and shapes how clients perceive your firm. If external users logging in is core to your service, that experience deserves a first-class application, not a guest pass into your tenant.

Almost never. Since standalone SharePoint plans retired from sale in May 2026, buying SharePoint now means buying a Microsoft 365 bundle, which puts a second productivity suite, a second identity system, and a second admin surface into a Google shop just to get an intranet. Better options: a dedicated SaaS intranet product that integrates with Google identity, or a custom portal built on your existing stack (from $15,000 at our bands). The right answer depends on whether your need is comms-and-content or workflow-and-data.

A legitimate middle path for comms-heavy intranets at M365 shops: vendors like Powell, Omnia, and similar layer better branding, navigation, targeting, and publishing tools onto SharePoint so you avoid both raw SharePoint's limits and a custom build. They price per user per month with quotes from the vendor, so model that recurring cost against your seat count before committing. Know what they do not solve: they inherit SharePoint's external-access mechanics and content-platform architecture, so client-facing portals and workflow-first operations tools remain outside their lane.

A discovery call first, and we will tell you plainly if SharePoint (or an intranet-in-a-box product) is the better answer, because for most purely internal intranets it is. If a build is justified, we scope it to a fixed band before kickoff: internal tools and portals typically $25,000-$70,000, client-facing platforms typically $25,000-$80,000, with a care plan from $150/month after launch. BearPlex is a 65-person engineering firm (founded 2017, about 45 engineers, verified 5.0 Clutch profile, SOC 2 Type II audit underway) and our engineers work AI-augmented, so scoping is about what ships each month, not hours. You get the source code either way.