# SharePoint Migration Tool vs ShareGate: which one handles your migration? > Microsoft's tools are free and better than their reputation. ShareGate starts at $5,995 USD a year. Here is what each one actually does, the four jobs the free tools cannot do at all, and the size of migration where paying starts to make sense. [Home](https://tenantcraft.ca/) [Insights](https://tenantcraft.ca/insights) Migration Plan Sep 4, 2026 9 min read Geri Crroj Microsoft 365 consultant, Niagara, Ontario Somebody has told you that you need ShareGate. Maybe a partner, maybe a forum post, maybe the vendor’s own blog, which is very good and also selling something. The question underneath is simple. Microsoft gives you migration tools for nothing. ShareGate starts at **$5,995 USD a year**. What does that money buy, and do you need it? Short answer: most small and mid-sized migrations finish fine on the free tools. But there are four jobs they cannot do at all. If yours is one of those, no amount of patience closes the gap. The five minute version - **SPMT** is free, runs on your machine, and handles SharePoint Server 2010 through 2019 plus file shares. It moves permissions, versions, metadata, web parts and out-of-the-box sites. - **Migration Manager** is free, lives in the SharePoint admin center, and uses agents you install. It handles file shares, Box, Dropbox, Google Workspace and Egnyte. **Not SharePoint Server.** - **ShareGate Migrate** is $5,995 / $9,995 / $17,995 USD a year, priced by how many machines you activate, not by users. - **Pay when** you are moving tenant to tenant, running lots of machines at once, or you need reporting somebody else has to sign off. - **Do not pay** because you read that the free tools are bad. They stopped being bad several years ago. ## What the free tools actually do Start here, because most of the advice you will read online is out of date. **SPMT** takes content from SharePoint Server 2010, 2013, 2016 and 2019, plus local and network file shares, into SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams. Per Microsoft’s supported-features page, it carries across: - Files, folders and list items - Permissions, with separate settings for file share and SharePoint on-prem permissions - Versions, and you choose how much history comes with them - Managed metadata and taxonomy, including content types and term stores - Site navigation and icons, site features, and SharePoint web parts - Pages in the site asset library - Incremental runs, so you can rerun a task and move only what changed Everything SPMT does in its window it also does in PowerShell, which matters more than it sounds. A migration you can script is a migration you can repeat at 2am without being awake for it. **Migration Manager** is the other free one, and it is a different shape. It lives in the SharePoint admin center, and you install a light agent on each machine you want doing work. Those agents pick up tasks from a shared queue, so you scale by adding machines rather than by babysitting one. You get agent groups, prescans, file exclusion rules and aggregated reports. Migration Manager does not do SharePoint Server This one trips people up, and I had it wrong on another page of this site until I checked. Microsoft’s own “where are you migrating from” table routes **SharePoint Server to SPMT**. Migration Manager covers file shares, Box, Dropbox, Google Workspace and Egnyte. Mover, which used to do the cloud-to-cloud ones, is retired and folded into Migration Manager. Migration Manager does not do Amazon S3 or Azure blob storage either. So if you are coming off SharePoint Server, SPMT is your Microsoft tool. If you are coming off a file share, you can use either, and Migration Manager scales better. There is also a **Migration Administrator** role now, in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Before it, anyone running Migration Manager needed the full SharePoint admin role, which is far more access than the job needs. If you are handing migration work to a contractor or a junior, this is the role to give them. A contradiction in Microsoft's own docs, worth knowing if you are on 2019 Two SPMT pages say it supports SharePoint Server 2010, 2013, 2016 **and 2019**. The routing table on the migration overview page says “SharePoint Server 2010, 2013, and 2016 environments only.” Both are current Microsoft pages. The two that include 2019 carry later dates: ms.date 2026-08-14 and 2026-08-17, against 2026-04-28 for the one that leaves it out. SPMT has supported 2019 for years. So the routing table is almost certainly the stale page. This matters. SharePoint Server 2019 went out of support on July 14, 2026, so it is the version most likely sitting in front of you. Run a small test migration before you plan around either page. ## What ShareGate costs Flat annual subscription, priced by **machine activations**, not per user. Straight from their pricing page: | Tier | Per year (USD) | Machines | Aimed at | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Essentials | $5,995 | 1 | Tenants up to 250 employees | | Pro | $9,995 | 5 | Tenants up to 1,000 employees | | Enterprise | from $17,995 | up to 25 | 1,000+ employees, 24/7 support | Essentials covers SharePoint, Teams, Planner, OneDrive and file shares. Pro adds Google Workspace, Gmail, Google Calendar, Exchange Online mailbox migration, Entra ID (in preview) and Purview sensitivity labels. There is a 15-day free trial on all of them. Two things to hold on to. It is **per tenant and per machine**, so a 40-person shop and a 240-person shop pay the same $5,995. And ShareGate Protect is a separate product, priced per user, for governance rather than migration. If a quote in front of you is per user, it is not the migration tool. ## The four jobs the free tools cannot do This is the part worth being precise about, because it is the only honest reason to spend the money. 1. **Tenant to tenant.** Merger, acquisition, or splitting a business apart. Microsoft’s cross-tenant OneDrive migration exists and runs through PowerShell outside Migration Manager. Cross-tenant **SharePoint** is still in private preview. If you are moving one tenant into another this year, this is the clearest case for a paid tool. 2. **Many machines at once, managed properly.** Migration Manager does scale with agents, and it is genuinely good at it. The Enterprise tier sells something narrower: twenty-five machines running at once, with priority support behind them. 3. **Reporting somebody else has to sign off.** The free tools report. What they do not produce is the tidy per-item comparison a client, an auditor or a nervous board wants to see. On a regulated migration you are either buying that or building it yourself in Excel. 4. **Mailboxes and Google Workspace in one place.** Pro tier territory. If the project is SharePoint _plus_ Exchange Online mailboxes _plus_ Google Drive, running one tool beats stitching three together. > Almost nobody needs a paid migration tool because the free one cannot move their files. They need it because the project has a shape the free tools were not built for. The pattern across small migrations ## So which one, for your size? Work it out from the shape of the job, not the headcount. | Your situation | Use | | --- | --- | | SharePoint Server 2010 to 2019, out-of-the-box sites, under ~50 sites | SPMT, free | | File shares of any size | Migration Manager, free, add agents to go faster | | Box, Dropbox, Google Drive or Egnyte | Migration Manager, free | | Hundreds of sites, several machines, tight window | ShareGate Pro, or SPMT in PowerShell if you can script | | Tenant to tenant | ShareGate, or wait for the Microsoft preview | | SharePoint plus mailboxes plus Google in one project | ShareGate Pro | | A regulated client who needs a signed-off report | ShareGate | The line for most Ontario organizations I see sits at roughly **50 sites of ordinary content**. Below that, SPMT finishes the job and the money is better spent elsewhere. Above it, or if any of the four jobs above apply, the tool pays for itself in a couple of weeks of saved evenings. ## The money, put honestly $5,995 USD is real money for a 40-person organization. It is also less than it looks next to what a migration costs in hours. Set it against help instead. At a typical Ontario consulting rate, the Essentials tier is roughly the equivalent of 40 to 45 hours of hands-on assistance. So the real question is not “tool or no tool.” It is: _would I rather have the software, or the equivalent in someone who has done this before sitting next to me?_ For a straightforward SharePoint Server move, the hours win. The tool does not know which of your sites are abandoned, and that decision is where migrations actually stall. For a tenant-to-tenant move under a deal deadline, the tool wins, because there is no free path at all. One tactic worth knowing either way: **it is a rental.** Subscribe for the months the project runs, then cancel. Nobody needs a migration tool forever. And the 15-day trial is long enough to move a pilot site and find out whether the free tools were fine all along. ## What neither of them fixes Whichever you pick, these stay on your plate. **Customizations do not migrate.** Microsoft is plain about it: “out-of-the-box SharePoint sites that don’t use any coding or third-party tools can be migrated.” Full-trust solutions, SharePoint Designer workflows and InfoPath forms are rebuilds, not moves, and no tool changes that. [The on-prem versus online post](https://tenantcraft.ca/insights/sharepoint-on-premises-vs-sharepoint-online) has the table of what travels and what does not. **Bad permissions travel perfectly.** Both tools carry permissions across faithfully. So every wrong grant arrives intact in the new tenant, where Copilot can now reach it. Do [the permissions audit](https://tenantcraft.ca/insights/permissions-cleanup-before-migration) before you move, not after. **Deciding what not to move.** The biggest saving in any migration is the content you leave behind, and no tool makes that call. That is [the triage in the migration plan post](https://tenantcraft.ca/insights/sharepoint-migration-plan), and it is the work that actually shortens the project. **Throttling.** SharePoint Online slows you down when you push hard, and it does that to paid tools as well as free ones. A tool can handle throttling gracefully. None of them can opt out of it. 01 Is the SharePoint Migration Tool actually free? Yes. Microsoft describes SPMT as "a free and easy to use migration solution." There is no licence to buy and no seat count. Migration Manager is also free and is built into the SharePoint admin center. You need to be a Global admin or SharePoint admin at the destination, or now the narrower Migration Administrator role, and have read access at the source. 02 Can Migration Manager migrate from SharePoint Server? No. Microsoft's migration overview routes SharePoint Server sources to SPMT. Migration Manager handles file shares, Box, Dropbox, Google Workspace and Egnyte. It does not support Amazon S3 or Azure blob storage either. If you are coming off SharePoint Server, SPMT is the Microsoft tool. 03 Does SPMT migrate permissions and version history? Yes to both. Microsoft's supported-features list includes permissions, with separate settings for file share and SharePoint on-premises permissions, and versions where you choose how much history is preserved. It also covers managed metadata and taxonomy, content types, term stores, site navigation, site features and web parts. Global term store migration needs global tenant admin permissions. 04 How much does ShareGate cost? ShareGate Migrate is a flat annual subscription priced by machine activations: Essentials $5,995 USD a year for one machine, Pro $9,995 for five, Enterprise from $17,995 for up to twenty-five. It is not per user. All tiers include a 15-day free trial. ShareGate Protect, their governance product, is priced per licensed user and is a different thing. 05 When is it genuinely worth paying? Four cases: a tenant-to-tenant move, where cross-tenant SharePoint migration is still only in private preview from Microsoft; a large migration needing many machines running concurrently; a project that has to produce sign-off-grade reporting for a client or auditor; or a combined job covering SharePoint, Exchange mailboxes and Google Workspace at once. Outside those, the free tools generally finish the work. ## Bottom line Run the free tools first. Point SPMT at one real site, or Migration Manager at one real file share, and see what comes out the other side. That costs you an afternoon and it answers the question properly, which no comparison article can, including this one. If it works, you have saved $5,995 and you already know the tool. If it falls over, you now know exactly why, which makes the trial of a paid tool a test rather than a hope. And take the 15-day trial before you buy anything. A migration tool is a rental for the length of the project, not a thing you own. Pricing the whole migration, not just the tool SharePoint Migration Cost & Scoping Guide PDF · 7 pages [Email me the PDF](https://tenantcraft.ca/resources/guides/migration-cost-scoping-guide) TWENTY MINUTES, NO PITCH ## Tell me what is stuck. I will tell you what it takes. Same consultant from the first email to the last cutover. If I am not the right fit, I will refer you to someone who is. [Book a 20-min call](https://tenantcraft.ca/contact) [See published rates](https://tenantcraft.ca/pricing) --- _Canonical HTML: https://tenantcraft.ca/insights/sharepoint-migration-tool-vs-sharegate · Agent guide: https://tenantcraft.ca/llms.txt · Site map: https://tenantcraft.ca/sitemap-index.xml_