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Modern Team Sites vs. Communication Sites--is there really a difference?
I may be late to this conversation if it's been had already, but now that my organization has gained access to more Modern page design features (editable banner, Hero web part, Events web part, layou...
- There are a few under the covers things that I have found are different (but those are minor so far).
The main things I've found are:
1) Comm Site default pages have a full width web part zone (modern team sites dont)
2) Comm Site uses left navigation on top and has no "top navigation"
3) Team sites have left navigation, if you want to hide them you have to do it with some CSS
Other than that, I've technically been able to make Team sites look and act like comm sites, in most respects with a little CSS hackery. Like Andrew mentioned though, we are completely rethinking how we have done everything because of the new modern world, and we are having to do ALOT of mini-migrations from one site to another to make things make the most sense.
If by "modern team site" you mean a site powered by Office 365 Groups then of course those "team sites" get all the related Office 365 Group services (Planner, OneNote, Outlook distribution list). Communications sites don't get those.
- Let's choose to use the phrase 'Modern team site' to be a site collection w/out O365 Groups where the page and list experience is the Modern experience and 'Group team site' to describe a SharePoint site associated with an O365 Group where the page and list experience is the Modern page and list experience. A Classic team site is a team site using the classic page and list experience. Modern team sites and Classic team sites provide 80+ different settings links on the Site Settings page (for site collection administrators) and Group team sites provide 40+ different settings on the site settings page. We really just need a way to differentiate between a Site associated with a Group and a Standalone site, since standalone site collections can use either Modern or Classic experience or they could use a combination of Modern and Classic. Group team sites are much different since there are fewer settings and many properties of the site are managed via O365 Groups (e.g. you can change the Title of the site, but it will automatically be changed back to the Group name.).
- Should've been more clear--I meant sites created under a site collection, not Office 365 Groups.
