SharePoint team sites vs communication sites

SharePoint Online has many site types, but two account for the vast majority of usage: team sites and communication sites. They're fundamentally the same product — the same web parts, the same APIs — but they're shaped for different jobs.

Site type is the first decision in SharePoint information architecture; communication sites are detailed in communication sites deep dive, team sites are usually created through Teams per Groups vs Teams vs SharePoint, and both are grouped by hub sites.

Team sites

A team site is a workspace for a group of people working together — a department, a project, a product. Every Microsoft 365 Group and every Microsoft Teams team is backed by a team site. Team sites assume:

• A relatively small, defined membership.
• High write-to-read ratio — lots of people contributing files and edits.
• Quick links and shared dashboards rather than polished marketing pages.
• Members and Owners groups inherited from the underlying Microsoft 365 Group.

The default home page is utilitarian: news, document library, activity feed, links.

Communication sites

A communication site is for broadcasting information to a wider audience — an intranet landing page, an HR portal, a brand hub, a company news site. Communication sites assume:

• A small set of authors writing for a broad audience of readers.
• Low write-to-read ratio.
• Polished page design with hero images and modern layouts.
• Permissions tilted toward read-only for most of the org.

Communication sites are not connected to a Microsoft 365 Group, which means no shared mailbox, no team, no Planner. That's fine — they're publishing tools.

How to choose

| Use case | Site type | | --- | --- | | Project workspace, 5–50 people contributing | Team site | | Department intranet, broadcast to whole company | Communication site | | Teams channel (auto-created) | Team site | | Company news hub | Communication site | | Manager toolkit, edited by HR, read by managers | Communication site | | Customer-facing site | Neither — use Power Pages or another platform |

Hub sites

Both can be associated with a hub site, which provides shared navigation, theme, and search across many sites. Most modern intranets use one or more hub sites with a communication site at the centre and dozens of team and communication sites associated to it.

A practical rule: if you find yourself adding a "site visitors" group to a team site so half the company can read it, you probably want a communication site instead. Trying to make a team site behave like a publishing site means fighting the product the whole way.

Why the Microsoft 365 Group attachment is the real dividing line

The single most consequential technical difference isn't the page design templates — it's that a team site is backed by a Microsoft 365 Group and a communication site (by default) is not. That attachment is what brings a shared mailbox, a Planner plan, group-based membership management, and (if applicable) a Teams team along for free — and it's also what ties the site's lifecycle to the group's own lifecycle policies (expiration, naming conventions, access reviews). A communication site, lacking that attachment, needs its own separate site-collection administration and permissions management from day one, which is more manual work but also avoids inheriting group sprawl for content that was never meant to be a "team" in the collaborative sense at all.

Frequently asked questions

Can a communication site be converted into a team site later, or vice versa? No — the underlying architecture (Microsoft 365 Group-backed or not) is set at creation and isn't a supported in-place conversion; migrating content from one site type to the other means creating a new site of the target type and moving the content across, which is worth planning for up front rather than guessing wrong and needing to redo it.

Do communication sites support the same web parts and page design as team sites? Yes — both site types share the identical modern page and web-part engine described elsewhere; the difference is entirely about audience, permissions model, and Microsoft 365 Group attachment, not about what content or layout capabilities are available on the page itself.