SharePoint vs DMS: is SharePoint enough for document management?

SharePoint is enough for a company that mainly shares and co-authors Office files: Microsoft 365 Business Basic, at €6.07 per user per month paid yearly, excluding VAT, includes document libraries, co-authoring and built-in approvals. Reading documents into fields is billed per page, and Purview retention policies need Business Premium or an enterprise plan.

What SharePoint does not do out of the box, or charges extra for

• Reading documents: extracting data from invoices, contracts or receipts uses Microsoft document processing, billed per use in US dollars through an Azure subscription: USD 0.01 per page for prebuilt models and USD 0.05 per page for structured and freeform models.
• Retention and deletion rules: Purview retention policies for SharePoint are licensed with Business Premium and enterprise plans such as Microsoft 365 E3 and E5. Starting a retention period from an event, a disposition review at the end of the period and marking items as records need licences such as Microsoft 365 E5 or Microsoft Purview Suite.
• Longer audit history: keeping SharePoint audit records for one year needs Audit (Premium); Audit (Standard) stops at 180 days.
• Approvals on files that change: saving changes to a file cancels its approval request in progress, so the file has to stay unchanged until it is approved.
• AI assistant: Microsoft 365 Copilot is not included in Business Basic; the Copilot Business add-on is listed from €18.20 per user per month paid yearly, excluding VAT, or €15.60 for the first year under an offer valid until 31 December 2026.

What small teams use instead

Companies that want a dedicated document system next to Microsoft 365 usually compare several kinds of product. One published fact for each:

• M-Files: the Essentials edition is listed at €65 per seat per month.
• Folderit: priced per plan rather than per user; the Mini plan is €45 per month or €486 per year plus VAT, with 5 users and 150 GB of storage.
• Arhivix: priced per company, with a free plan and paid plans for 5, 10 or 20 user accounts.
• DocuWare: no list price; its pricing FAQ gives a typical USD 30 to USD 125 or more per user per month.
• Paperless-ngx: open source, and its documentation says your data is stored on your own server.

Arhivix works next to Microsoft 365 rather than in place of it: people sign in with Microsoft Entra ID, users and groups can be provisioned with SCIM and Entra groups mapped to roles, and Outlook inboxes become an intake: attachments are filed by your rules, and Arhivix proposes the document type, supplier, amount and dates for a person to confirm. Files are hosted on AWS in the EU (Frankfurt and Dublin), and the legal retention period, with the deletion at its end, stays with the company: Arhivix keeps each document until the company deletes it. See Arhivix and SharePoint compared side by side.

How to decide

• If most of your documents are Office files that people write together, stay on SharePoint and use what your licence already includes.
• If most documents arrive from outside as PDFs, scans and email attachments and someone retypes their details, compare the per-page cost of SharePoint document processing with a tool that reads documents as part of its plan.
• If you must keep documents for a legal period and delete them at the end, check whether your licence includes Purview retention policies, or which provider in your country applies that period for you.