SharePoint vs OneDrive: When to Use Which

Published: 16 June 2026  |  By AOLC

If your business uses Microsoft 365, you almost certainly have access to both OneDrive and SharePoint — and there is a good chance your team is confused about which one to use. Files land in both places. Links get shared from both. Someone saves something to OneDrive that was meant for the team. Someone else uploads a department document to SharePoint that no one else can find.

This confusion is not your team's fault. Microsoft has not made the distinction obvious, and the overlap between the two products is genuine. But once you understand the key difference — OneDrive is for personal files, SharePoint is for team files — almost every other question answers itself.

What Is OneDrive?

OneDrive is Microsoft's personal cloud storage service, built directly into Microsoft 365. Every user on your M365 subscription gets their own private OneDrive — by default, 1 TB of storage in most business plans. Think of it as a cloud version of your personal "My Documents" folder.

Files stored in OneDrive are yours. By default, no one else in your organisation can see them. You can share individual files or folders with colleagues, but sharing is an opt-in action — the default state is private. This makes OneDrive ideal for:

• Work in progress — Drafts, notes, and files you are still working on before they are ready to share.
• Personal productivity files — Your own templates, personal reference documents, and work journals.
• Shared one-to-one — A file you need to send to one or two specific colleagues, temporarily.
• Syncing across your devices — Your laptop, desktop, and phone all stay in sync via the OneDrive app.

One important caveat for South African businesses: when an employee leaves your organisation and their Microsoft 365 licence is removed, their OneDrive files are accessible for a grace period (typically 30 days) before deletion. If critical team documents were stored only in that person's OneDrive, you risk losing them. This is one reason why shared team content should live in SharePoint, not OneDrive.

What Is SharePoint?

SharePoint is Microsoft's team collaboration platform. While OneDrive is built for individuals, SharePoint is built for groups — departments, project teams, and the whole organisation. Every Microsoft Team you create in Microsoft Teams automatically gets a SharePoint site behind it, which is where Teams channel files are stored.

SharePoint storage is shared. By default, everyone in a SharePoint site can see all the files in that site. Permissions are managed at the site or folder level rather than the file level, which makes it far better suited to team collaboration than OneDrive.

SharePoint is the right home for:

• Departmental document libraries — Finance policies, HR templates, operations manuals, company procedures.
• Project collaboration — Files that multiple team members need to access and edit simultaneously.
• Company-wide resources — Forms, templates, and reference documents that every employee might need.
• Intranet content — News, announcements, and internal pages for your organisation.
• Regulated documents — Under POPIA, documents containing personal information should have clear access controls — SharePoint's permission model makes this significantly easier to manage than OneDrive.

Side-by-Side Comparison.

Here is how the two tools differ across the dimensions that matter most for South African businesses:

Real Scenarios for South African Businesses.

Abstract rules are easy to forget in practice. Here are the most common real-world situations and which tool to reach for:

• Monthly financial report — The CFO drafts it in OneDrive, then moves the final version to the Finance SharePoint site where the board can access it. Draft in OneDrive, publish to SharePoint.
• HR leave forms — Should be in a SharePoint library with appropriate permissions. Every employee can access them, but only HR can edit the templates. Not in anyone's personal OneDrive.
• Sales pitch deck — Being built by one person? OneDrive. Being built by a team? SharePoint or the team's Microsoft Teams channel (which uses SharePoint behind the scenes).
• POPIA data processing register — Belongs in SharePoint with restricted access, so it survives staff changes and has an audit trail. Never in a personal OneDrive.
• My reference notes and bookmarks — Personal OneNote or OneDrive. No need to take up shared space or pollute search results for colleagues.
• Company IT policy — SharePoint. It needs to be findable, versioned, and accessible to all staff regardless of who originally created it.

The Load Shedding Factor.

South African businesses face a challenge that most Microsoft documentation does not account for: unreliable power and internet connectivity. Both OneDrive and SharePoint have an important feature for this context — offline sync.

The OneDrive sync client (installed on Windows and Mac) can sync specific SharePoint libraries to your local machine, not just your personal OneDrive. This means your team can:

• Work on files locally during load shedding or connectivity drops
• Sync changes automatically when connectivity is restored
• Mark frequently-used SharePoint folders as "Always keep on this device" for offline access

This makes the combination of SharePoint (for shared files) + OneDrive sync client (for offline access) particularly powerful in the South African context. Your team keeps working through a stage-6 outage, and everything syncs the moment the UPS or generator kicks in.

AOLC's managed IT service includes Microsoft 365 setup and configuration, which covers OneDrive sync policies, SharePoint site architecture, and offline access configuration — so your team gets the benefit without having to figure it out themselves.

A Practical Setup for Most SA Businesses.

For a typical South African SME with 10 to 100 users, we recommend the following structure:

• One SharePoint site per department — Finance, HR, Operations, Sales, IT. Each site has its own document library with appropriate permissions.
• One company-wide SharePoint site — For policies, forms, announcements, and resources that the whole organisation needs.
• OneDrive for individual work — Encourage staff to use OneDrive for personal drafts and work-in-progress, with a clear rule: if it belongs to the team when you are done, move it to SharePoint.
• Microsoft Teams channels linked to SharePoint — Each team channel automatically has a SharePoint folder. Files shared in channel conversations are already in the right place.

Getting POPIA-Ready.

Under South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act, your organisation is required to implement appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect personal information. SharePoint gives you the tools to do this at scale:

• Granular permissions — Restrict access to HR or customer data to only the people who need it.
• Audit logs — Microsoft 365 maintains a record of who accessed, edited, or shared each file — essential for POPIA compliance and breach investigations.
• Retention policies — Automatically delete or archive documents after a set period, in line with your retention schedule.
• Sensitivity labels — Available in Microsoft 365 Business Premium, these allow you to tag documents as Confidential or Highly Confidential, with automatic encryption and access restrictions.

None of these controls are practical to apply to files scattered across individual OneDrives. Centralising team and company documents in SharePoint is not just a collaboration best practice — it is foundational to your POPIA compliance posture. Our cloud security team can help you configure SharePoint to meet your compliance obligations.

If you need help sourcing or configuring the right Microsoft 365 licences for your team, our procurement and licensing service covers Microsoft CSP licences with local ZAR billing, meaning no foreign exchange risk on your software costs.

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What to Do Next.

If your business already has Microsoft 365, you already have both OneDrive and SharePoint. The question is not whether to use them — it is how to use them well. Here is a quick action plan:

• Audit your current file storage — Identify how much team content is currently sitting in personal OneDrives or on a local file server.
• Create a SharePoint site structure — One site per department, one company-wide site. Keep it simple to start.
• Set clear team norms — Communicate the rule: personal files in OneDrive, shared files in SharePoint. Write it into your IT policy.
• Enable offline sync — Set up the OneDrive sync client on all devices to sync the SharePoint libraries staff use most.
• Review permissions — Audit who has access to what in SharePoint, and tighten up sensitive libraries as part of your POPIA compliance.

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