In short
Use a communication site when a few people write for many readers, and a team site when everyone writes. The writer-to-reader ratio decides, and this guide gives you the decision test plus hub site, home site and readership guidance.
Key takeaways
- A communication site serves a small author group and many readers; a team site connects a Microsoft 365 group where everyone edits.
- A SharePoint site is created automatically for every new team in Microsoft Teams, with membership stored in a Microsoft 365 group.
- A SharePoint home site is always a communication site, marked as an official source of organizational news.
- In Tryane's Digital Workplace Benchmark 2026, SharePoint scored 45% on Analytics, the lowest of the 12 platforms benchmarked.
- Associate either site type with a hub for shared navigation; hubs link sites rather than nesting them.
What is a communication site built for?
A communication site exists to inform and engage a broad audience. Microsoft's own planning guidance draws the line clearly: unlike a team site, where the primary goal is to collaborate on creating content with a small group, the primary goal of a communication site is to inform readers, primarily for them to read, not create[1]. For you as an internal communications manager, that makes the communication site the natural home for company news, leadership announcements, HR campaigns and anything else where a few people publish and many people consume.
The three templates you choose from
- Standard: the general-purpose communication layout for sharing news and information with dozens, hundreds of people or your entire organization.
- Showcase: a visually driven layout for telling a story, launching a product or showcasing the services your group offers.
- Blank: an empty canvas when you want full control over the page structure and web parts.
Microsoft documents these three templates as the Standard communication, Showcase and Blank communication site templates[2], so the names above are current at the time of writing. Whichever you pick, the division of roles stays the same: authors with edit rights design pages and publish news, while the much larger group of readers consumes it. Microsoft recommends communication sites for sharing information with dozens or hundreds of people or the whole organization, showcasing services, and sharing news in a visually compelling format[1].
This is also why communication sites are the primary building block of a SharePoint intranet: Microsoft expects them to attract broad readership, and advises one topic-specific site per group responsible for a topic or function[1]. If you are still mapping how the different SharePoint surfaces fit together, our guide to what SharePoint means for internal communication walks through each one.
When is a team site the better choice?
Flip the ratio and the answer changes. A team site is built for a smaller group with very specific goals and tasks to accomplish, where the primary activity is creating content together rather than consuming it[1]. Project workspaces, departmental file collaboration and working groups all belong here. The site is the team's shared desk, not its broadcast tower.
The Microsoft 365 group connection
- A team site is connected by default to a Microsoft 365 group, which also connects services such as Microsoft Teams and Planner[3].
- A SharePoint site is created automatically whenever you create a new team in Microsoft Teams, so team sites multiply across your tenant without anyone in communications deciding to create them[4].
- The default permission model lets every member of the group edit, which is exactly what collaboration needs and exactly wrong for broadcast content.
That last point deserves your attention. When everyone in the group can edit, a team site gives you no editorial control: any member can change pages, publish news or restructure the navigation. For a project team that is a feature. For the page where you announce a reorganization, it is a governance risk. Publish company news on a communication site where you control who writes, and keep team sites for the work itself.
Who writes and who reads: a quick test
You can settle the choice in five minutes with one question: what is your writer-to-reader ratio? Use a communication site when a few people write for many readers. Use a team site when everyone writes. Microsoft's guidance points the same way: communication sites usually have a small number of authors and many more readers, while a team site generally has a much smaller audience with specific goals and tasks[1].
| Decision factor | Communication site | Team site |
|---|---|---|
| Number of authors | A small, named group of editors | Everyone in the group can edit |
| Audience size | Dozens to the entire organization[1] | A small team with specific tasks[1] |
| Permission model | Site-level permissions you control | Microsoft 365 group membership in Microsoft Entra ID[4] |
| Governance owner | Internal communications or the site owner | The team itself, within IT guardrails |
Watch for the two classic mistakes. Publishing company news on a team site limits your reach to the group's members, because outsiders have no path to that content, and your readership numbers will reflect the group's size rather than your intended audience. The reverse mistake is granting broad edit rights on a communication site: suddenly anyone can alter the announcement page, and your governance story to leadership weakens. Apply the ratio test before you create the site, and both problems disappear.
Where do hub sites and the home site fit?
Whichever site type you choose, it rarely stands alone. Hub sites are the connective tissue you use to organize families of team sites and communication sites together[3]. Associating a site with a hub gives it three things: shared navigation and brand, a roll-up of content and search across the associated sites, and a home destination for the hub[3].
- Shared navigation and brand across every associated site.
- A roll-up of content and search, so news from many sites surfaces in one place.
- A home destination for the hub itself, most commonly built on a communication site.
Two architectural details matter for your intranet plans. First, hubs model relationships as links rather than hierarchy or ownership, so when your organization reorganizes, you re-associate sites instead of breaking URLs, which is precisely the flexibility the old subsite model lacked[3]. Second, the home site is not a choice between the two types: a SharePoint home site is always a communication site, designated as the top landing page for the intranet, and it is automatically marked as an official source of organizational news, with its news posts taking priority on the SharePoint start page[5]. Your home site can never be a team site, because the landing experience your whole organization sees is, by definition, a broadcast.
Is your communication site reaching its readers?
Choosing the right site type is step one. Step two is knowing whether the content you publish there actually reaches the people it is meant for. SharePoint's native site usage report shows you views and unique viewers at site and page level[6], which tells you how much traffic a page attracted. What it does not tell you is who those viewers were.
- What native reporting shows: total views, unique viewers and per-page usage for the site.
- What it misses for you: readership broken down by department, country and role.
- The consequence: you cannot tell whether the right audience was reached, only that someone clicked.
That gap is not unique to your tenant. In Tryane's Digital Workplace Benchmark 2026, an assessment based on in-depth demonstrations, expert interviews and analysis of publicly available data, SharePoint scored 45% on Analytics, the lowest score any of the 12 platforms benchmarked received in any category, with an overall Tryane Score of 68/100. Download the full Digital Workplace Benchmark 2026 to compare all twelve platforms across user experience, publishing, targeting, administration and analytics. We see the same pattern in practice: the measurement problem is usually an architecture and tooling problem, not a content problem, as we argue in our piece on SharePoint analytics for internal communication. And it matters beyond SharePoint alone: every channel has its own structural limits, which we examine in what SharePoint does well and where it cannot help.
Measure your communication sites with Analytics for SharePoint
So you have applied the writer-to-reader test, built your communication sites, joined them to the right hubs and designated your home site. The remaining question is the one your leadership actually asks: did the right people read it? Answering it means moving from traffic counts to readership by segment, and that is the difference between reporting activity and demonstrating impact.
- Track employee engagement, views and activity across your SharePoint intranet and Viva Connections.
- See readership by audience segment, so you know whether the intended department, country or role was reached.
- Turn site-level numbers into data-driven decisions about what to publish, where and to whom.
This is exactly the situation Analytics for SharePoint was built for. It is a specialized analytics solution that tracks and measures employee engagement, views and activity on your SharePoint intranet and Viva Connections, so you can see who actually read your communication sites rather than only how many times they were viewed. You can explore what it covers on the page.
If you want to see this on your own sites, book a 30-minute call with Jérémy via Calendly to see how Analytics for SharePoint measures readership of your communication sites.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a SharePoint communication site and a team site?
A communication site is built to inform a broad audience: a small number of authors publish news and pages that dozens, hundreds or your entire organization reads. A team site is built for collaboration: it is connected to a Microsoft 365 group where members co-create content and work together. The writer-to-reader ratio is the fastest test: few writers and many readers means communication site; everyone writing means team site.
Can a team site be connected to Microsoft Teams?
Yes, and it happens automatically. When you create a new team in Microsoft Teams, a SharePoint site is created and connected to the team, and the team's membership is stored in a Microsoft 365 group in Microsoft Entra ID. All standard channels in the team share the same parent site, while each private or shared channel gets its own site.
Can a communication site be a SharePoint home site?
Yes, in fact it must be. A SharePoint home site is a communication site that you designate as the top landing page of your intranet. Setting it as the home site gives it special capabilities, including status as an official source of organizational news, intranet-wide search and global navigation in the SharePoint app bar.
Can I convert a team site into a communication site?
SharePoint does not offer a one-click conversion between the two types, because they differ in their permission model and group connection. The usual path is to create a new communication site, move or re-link the content you want to broadcast, and associate both sites with the same hub so navigation stays consistent. Plan the move around your writers and readers rather than around the technology.
How many authors should a communication site have?
Microsoft's guidance is that communication sites usually have a small number of authors and many more readers. Keep authorship to the few people accountable for the topic, function or service the site covers, and give the wider audience read access. If a different group becomes responsible for a topic, consider creating a separate communication site rather than expanding authorship.
Can I see who reads my SharePoint communication site?
Native SharePoint reporting shows site and page level usage such as views and viewers, but it does not break readership down by department, country or role, which is what you need to prove the right audience was reached. In Tryane's Digital Workplace Benchmark 2026, SharePoint scored 45% on Analytics, the lowest of the 12 platforms benchmarked.
What is a SharePoint hub site?
A hub site organizes families of team sites and communication sites. It provides shared navigation and brand, a roll-up of content and search across associated sites, and a home destination for the hub. Hubs model relationships as links rather than hierarchy, so you can reorganize your intranet as your organization changes without breaking the URLs in your content.
Sources
Further reading
• Viva Connections Analytics: How to Measure Intranet Adoption in Microsoft 365
• Intranet adoption rate: healthy SharePoint benchmarks
• Measuring the Impact of a SharePoint Intranet Redesign
• SharePoint in 2026: How to Analyse Intranet Performance
If you want to see what cross-channel reporting looks like against your real data, Tryane runs a 15-minute walkthrough with no slides. Book a slot with Jérémy.