Choosing team wiki software is one of those decisions that looks small and compounds daily. Employees spend nearly 20% of the workweek looking for internal information.
The four most common candidates are not four versions of the same product. Google Sites is a no-code site builder that arranges content living in Drive. Notion is a block-based database that holds the content itself. Confluence is a structured page hierarchy organized into spaces. SharePoint is a document management system with an intranet layer on top.
That architectural difference, far more than any feature list, decides which one will still be working for you in two years. And because two of the four are already included in suites most companies pay for, the comparison that matters is rarely list price against list price. It is the incremental cost against what your licenses already cover, which is the math this guide runs.
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Google Sites vs Notion vs Confluence vs SharePoint: detailed overview
Google Sites vs Notion vs Confluence vs SharePoint: Choose the best team wiki software
How to choose team wiki software: 7 factors that actually decide it
Which team wiki should you choose?
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Frequently asked questions about team wiki software
The architectural point first, because everything else follows from it: Sites is the front door, and Drive plus Docs is the wiki.
Content stays in Docs, where it is already searched, permissioned, versioned, and covered by Vault and DLP. Sites arranges that content into navigable hub pages with embedded Docs, Sheets, Forms, and Calendars that update live at the source, edited through a drag-and-drop interface a non-technical owner can run without training.
Image source: Google
What it wins on is exactly what the architecture predicts.
The restrictions deserve equal clarity.
Notion assumes no suite and is built to become one. Its unit is the block, and any page can hold text, embeds, and relational databases viewed as tables, boards, calendars, or timelines.
The same content renders differently for different audiences, which no other tool here does.
Image source: Notion
It wins on three things.
The restrictions are the mirror image.
Confluence assumes Atlassian. Its unit is the page inside a space, with hierarchy, templates, and page properties designed for documentation that must stay consistent: specs, runbooks, decision logs, postmortems.
Image source: Atlassian
It wins where structure and development workflow meet.
The restrictions:
SharePoint is the Google Sites of the Microsoft column: already paid for, already governed, already integrated. It is a document management system first, with an intranet layer of sites, pages, and lists built above it, surfaced through Teams and Outlook.
Image source: Microsoft
It wins on inclusion and control.
The restrictions:
|
Dimension |
Google Sites |
Notion |
Confluence |
SharePoint |
|
Architecture |
Site builder over Drive content |
Block-based database workspace |
Structured page hierarchy in spaces |
Document management system and intranet platform built on hub-spoke site architecture |
|
Best for |
Workspace shops: doc hubs, team sites, policy libraries |
Sub-100 teams wanting wiki + ops in one tool |
Engineering documentation tied to Jira |
M365 shops: intranet, records, compliance |
|
Included in an existing suite |
Yes, every Workspace edition |
No |
No (free tier to 10 users) |
Yes, every M365 business plan |
|
Incremental cost, 50-person Workspace shop |
$0 |
$10,800/yr (Business, $18/user/mo annual, 2026) |
~$3,250/yr (Standard) |
n/a without M365 licenses |
|
Standalone pricing |
Included in Workspace (from ~$7/user/mo Starter) |
Plus $10/user/mo, Business $18/user/mo |
Standard $5.42/user/mo (annual); Premium $10.44/user/mo |
Included in M365 Business Standard ($12.50/user/mo annual); standalone Plan 1 ($5) being retired from May 2026 |
|
Free tier |
Included in all paid Workspace editions + Essentials Starter free tier available with limited features |
Yes, unlimited pages/blocks, 10 guests, 7-day history, no time limit |
Yes, up to 10 users |
No standalone free tier |
|
AI availability and cost |
Gemini included in Business/Enterprise plans since Jan 2025 |
Full AI gated to Business and Enterprise only |
Rovo included from Standard (25 credits/user/mo); higher allowances at Premium |
$30/user/mo (enterprise) or $21/user/mo (business plans, from July 2026); not included in any base plan |
|
Editor and authoring |
Drag-and-drop pages; writing happens in Docs |
Best-in-category block editor |
Structured pages, templates, page properties |
Web-part page assembly |
|
Structured databases |
No (Sheets embeds as workaround) |
Yes, relational, multiple views |
Limited (page properties, database fields) |
Lists (powerful, admin-heavy) |
|
Search |
Drive search; depends on file hygiene |
Fast but flat at scale |
Persistent search complaints across user reviews and Atlassian community forums |
Powerful, metadata-dependent |
|
Permissions model |
Inherits Google Groups and Drive sharing |
Workspace/teamspace/page levels |
Space and page permissions |
Most granular; misconfiguration risk |
|
External and guest sharing |
Via Drive sharing rules |
10–100+ guests by tier |
Guest access on paid tiers |
Mature external sharing controls |
|
Version history |
Full Docs version history |
30-day on Plus, longer up |
Full page versioning |
Full versioning + records |
|
Page analytics |
Minimal |
Page analytics on paid tiers |
View analytics on paid tiers |
Full usage analytics |
|
Compliance and retention |
Vault and eDiscovery from Business Plus; DLP at Enterprise only; GDPR compliant across all plans |
SOC 2 Type II, GDPR; SaaS-only |
SOC 2 Type II, SOC 3, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, GDPR; Data Center for self-hosted deployment |
Most mature; HIPAA BAA, records management |
|
Self-hosting |
No |
No |
Yes (Data Center) |
SharePoint Server (separate on-prem product); SharePoint Online is cloud-only |
|
Migration in |
Content already in Drive |
CSV/Markdown/HTML import |
Importers incl. legacy wikis, Notion |
Microsoft migration tooling, IT-led |
|
Export and lock-in |
Content is portable Docs/Drive files |
Labor-intensive at scale |
Standard exports; permission mapping work |
Metadata/permissions don't export cleanly |
|
Admin and maintenance overhead |
Near zero; no review workflows |
Low to start, grows with sprawl |
Moderate to high; strong governance tooling |
Highest of the four |
|
Learning curve |
Lowest |
Low to write, high to structure well |
Moderate |
Steepest |
|
Performance at scale |
Tied to Drive; comms ceiling at hundreds of users |
Sluggish on databases past ~5,000 rows |
Slowdowns reported on large instances |
Built for enterprise scale |
|
Top pros |
$0 incremental, no migration, inherited governance |
Editor, databases, free tier |
Price + included AI, Jira depth, self-host option |
Included in M365, compliance depth, comms at scale |
|
Top cons |
No databases, weak analytics, comms ceiling |
AI cost gating, SaaS-only, sprawl pattern |
Weak outside Atlassian, search complaints |
Authoring experience, admin complexity, Copilot cost |
Start from what you already pay for. Google Sites is included in every Google Workspace edition, and SharePoint is included in every Microsoft 365 business plan, which means most readers of this comparison already own two of the four candidates. The honest baseline for any new wiki license is therefore not Is it worth $8 per user? but Is it worth $8 per user more than the option I have at zero?
The full cost stack has five layers. Per-seat licensing is the visible one:
AI access is the second and increasingly decisive layer:
Then come the three layers nobody budgets: migration labor, ongoing admin time, and the cost of operating a second permission model alongside your suite's.
The compounding shows up fast at team scale. A 50-person team pays roughly $3,250 per year on Confluence Standard and roughly $9,000 per year on Notion Business at annual billing rates. The same team pays zero incremental cost on Sites or SharePoint if the suite is already licensed.
Stack fit is the strongest predictor of whether the best team wiki software gets used. A wiki that lives where work already happens gets read in the flow of that work; a wiki that is one login away decays quietly until someone proposes replacing it.
In a Workspace shop, Sites pages embed Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, and Calendars that update live at the source, and access rides on the Google Groups you already maintain. In an M365 shop, SharePoint surfaces inside Teams, shares storage with OneDrive, and pushes news through Outlook. In a Jira shop, Confluence renders tickets, sprints, and incident timelines inside documentation pages. Notion assumes no suite at all and is built to become one, which is either its best feature or its biggest cost depending on what you already run.
Where content physically lives determines who can audit it, what retention applies to it, and what happens to it when its author leaves. A wiki whose content sits in Drive inherits the sharing rules, Vault retention, and data loss prevention policies your admin already operates. A wiki in a new vendor's cloud adds a new permission model, a new data processing agreement to review, and a new line on every offboarding checklist.
Sprawl is the documented failure mode of the flexible options. Notion wiki quality at 100 or more employees degrades predictably without a dedicated admin. SharePoint has the opposite problem: its permission model is granular enough that misconfiguration is its own failure category, which is why SharePoint estates accumulate consultants.
Three different jobs hide inside the word "wiki." Communications-style intranet pages are layout-driven: announcements, policy hubs, directories. Structured reference documentation is hierarchy-driven: specs, runbooks, decision logs that need consistent templates and version discipline. Relational databases are data-driven: OKRs linked to projects linked to meeting notes.
Each tool was built for one of these jobs. Sites was built for the first, Confluence for the second, Notion for the third, and SharePoint for managing the documents underneath all three. The expensive mistakes come from mismatches: forcing Sites to be a database, forcing SharePoint to be an authoring wiki, or forcing Notion to be a controlled document system.
More wikis die of staleness than of missing features.
The tools distribute this burden differently. Sites is near-zero administration but offers no review workflows, so freshness depends entirely on culture. Confluence and SharePoint carry the strongest governance tooling, page ownership, review dates, retention labels, and the highest admin cost to run it. Notion has the widest gap of the four between how easy it is to create and how hard it is to maintain.
Whichever way the comparison lands, the standing rule is the same: assign a named owner before buying anything, because no tool on this page survives without one.
For regulated teams, three questions outrank features.
First, certifications and tooling: SharePoint carries the most mature compliance and records management stack of the four, including HIPAA BAA support, while Confluence and Notion both offer SOC 2 Type II and GDPR compliance, and Workspace brings Vault, retention, and DLP to anything living in Drive.
Second, hosting: Confluence Data Center is the only true self-hosting path among the four; Notion is SaaS-only, which is a hard blocker in some regulated sectors. Third, exit: SharePoint exports do not carry metadata and permissions cleanly, and large Notion migrations are labor-intensive enough to need custom scripts. Lock-in is a cost. Price it on the way in, because you will pay it on the way out.
The honest answer is a factor equation, not a brand. Take the criteria from the first section, weigh them for your situation, and the recommendation falls out. These are the five combinations that cover most teams.
If you already run Workspace and the priority is a working wiki this quarter with no new spend, the system you own is the answer. A 60-person services company runs this build today:
What this build does not give you is databases and analytics; if those become real needs, you will know, and you will have paid nothing to find out.
If no suite has your loyalty, the team is small, and you want the wiki to double as the operating system, Notion is the strongest tool in this comparison.
A 30-person startup runs company home, an OKR database linked to project pages, meeting notes related to both, and a lightweight CRM in a single workspace, which no other option here can replicate.
The only demand: name an admin who owns the structure on day one, because the documented sprawl pattern past 100 employees is what happens when nobody does.
If the factor mix is structured docs, version discipline, and development workflow integration, Confluence wins regardless of which suite runs your email. A platform team keeps runbooks that link live Jira incidents, decision logs with enforced page properties, and spec templates standardized per space.
This recommendation coexists with either suite: Workspace shops running Jira commonly run Confluence for the engineering wiki alone, and the Standard tier's price with Rovo included keeps that defensible.
If you run M365 and the requirements include formal retention, records management, or comms at enterprise scale, SharePoint is the right default for the same reason Sites is on the other side: it is already licensed and already governed. An 800-person manufacturer runs audience-targeted news, ISO document control under retention labels, and the whole thing surfaced in Teams.
The caveat from the comparison stands: engineering teams in that same company will likely still want a real authoring wiki beside it.
If you are choosing a suite and a wiki at the same time, run the combined math.
A Workspace Business Standard plan covers the wiki front end (Sites), the content layer (Docs and Drive), the database substitute (Sheets), request workflows (Forms, with Apps Script when they outgrow it), and AI (Gemini), under one license, one admin console, and one permission model, at $14 per user per month on annual billing. For 50 people that is $8,400 per year all-in.
A team choosing a separate productivity suite plus Notion Business pays roughly $9,000 per year for Notion alone at $15/user/month annual billing, on top of whatever the suite costs. Add Confluence Standard instead, and that is roughly $3,250 per year on top of the suite. In both cases, you are also operating a second permission model, a second vendor DPA, and a second offboarding checklist. None of those appear on the invoice.
Whichever combination matches yours, the universal condition holds: every option on this page fails without an owner. Assign one before you choose anything.
If you are convinced Google Sites + Docs + Drive is the perfect choice for your team but are not sure where to get started, Revolgy can help!
Revolgy is a certified Google Cloud Premier Partner that deploys and manages Workspace environments across the globe, including knowledge architecture, security configuration, and Gemini adoption.
A typical engagement covers three things:
For organizations on Google Workspace, yes, with a scope: treat Sites as the navigation layer and Drive plus Docs as the content layer, and it handles documentation hubs, policy libraries, and team sites at zero incremental cost. The honest ceiling is formal internal communications at several hundred employees, where missing features like news targeting and engagement analytics justify evaluating dedicated intranet products.
If you already pay for Google Workspace, the cheapest team wiki for small businesses is Google Sites at zero additional cost.
Confluence is better for controlled, structured documentation: enforced templates, page hierarchies, versioning, and live Jira context, with AI included on paid plans. Notion is better when documentation should connect to operating data through relational databases, and the team is small enough to govern its own structure. The cost profiles differ sharply at scale: a 50-person team pays roughly three times more on Notion Business than Confluence Standard.
Export content (Notion supports Markdown, HTML, and CSV; Confluence offers space exports), convert pages into Docs organized in shared drives, and rebuild navigation as a Sites hub embedding those Docs. Plan the permission mapping first, since Google Groups become the access model, and budget manual cleanup for databases and macros that have no direct equivalent. For large workspaces, treat it as a project with an owner rather than a weekend task.