SharePoint Team site vs Communication site

 SharePoint Team site vs Communication site

Reference

Here's a way to think about the difference between a team site and a communication site. A team site is where the sausage is made – it's behind the counter and typically private. A communication site is where the sausage is sold – where it's visible to all our "customers" and where they come to buy our sausage. Typically, our customers don't want to know how we make the sausage (or how many times we had to edit that document to get it "ready to share"). They just want to get the finished product.

Communication sites have two distinct user personas.

Most often, a communication site has a small number of people with permission to author content and many people who only have permission to read content. Team sites use Microsoft 365 Groups for permissions. Communication sites use SharePoint groups.

Think about your team sites as where you collaborate and your communication sites as where you communicate**.**

As an example, consider your Human Resources (HR) department. Typically, HR will have at least one team site where the members of the HR team can work on defining a new benefits program or crafting the announcement about an organizational restructuring. During the process of creation, the HR team works privately on a team site open just to the members of HR (or individual "friends of HR" who contribute to one or more specific documents). Once all the back and forth about the message or document or program is complete, the HR team is ready to share the information with the rest of the company.

When they are ready to share, the HR team moves the document to or writes the story in a communication site that is open to the entire organization. They use a communication site to share "team to organization" or "organization to employees" information. While in some cases they may solicit feedback on the information shared in their communication site (for example, with comments on the page), the content itself is typically editable only by a small number of authorized users.

Examples of communication site scenarios.

• "Official" corporate news.
• HR team communicating benefits and compensation information.
• Travel team publishing guidelines about corporate travel.
• Policies and procedures.

Feature Comparison

Feature	Team Site	Communication Site
Who creates the site?	Site Owner (or Admins)	Site Owner (or Admins)
Who creates content?	All members are content authors who jointly create and edit content.	Small number of content authors and a much larger number of content readers or consumers.
Security	Microsoft 365 Groups	SharePoint Groups
Default Setting for External Sharing	External Sharing Enabled (but can be disabled by the SharePoint Admin)	External Sharing Disabled (but can be enabled by the SharePoint Admin)
Navigation	Left	Top
Multilingual features?	Yes	Yes
When you create, you ALSO get …	Planner board, OneNote notebook, Email address for the group, Shared Calendar, shared mailbox, opportunity to connect with a Microsoft Team (if the site wasn't created as part of provisioning a Microsoft Teams)	NOTHING but a SharePoint communication site!