Unique features in team- and communication sites

[Gabriel Smoljar]

I know that this has been asked before but it is relevant to bring up this question again now that modern Team Sites without connected group has been announced.

Just so we are clear, the marketing and promotion for these templates is different. Communication sites are for news publishing and team sites for collaboration.

I want to strictly discuss features from a technical perspective. From here they use the same page model, have the same web parts, same list templates etc.

The only tru difference that I found is that communication sites use horizontal top navigation and team sites use vertical left navigation. This also seems to be hard coded in the site templates so that they it cannot be changed on an existing site.

Is it really so that the only critical question you have to ask when choosing between a communication- and team site without group is where you want the navigation to be?

[#2]

Security is also different if the Team Site is created from SharePoint Home, Teams, Groups, Yammer, or Planner. Modern team sites (except for the ones not created this way) are backed by Office 365 Groups. Communication Sites use SharePoint Groups for permissions.

[#3]

The security part is only applicable to the team sites that we have today. It was announced earlier that there will be team sites without groups. What is the big difference between those and communication sites? https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-SharePoint-Blog/Updates-to-SharePoint-self-service-...

[#4 · Accepted solution]

Funny you should ask. I did a blog post about this very topic!

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3293405/collaboration/how-updates-to-sharepoint-self-service-s...

[#5]

That was a informative read. So aside from navigation differences team sites can be groupified while communication sites cannot. With this in mind I cannot come up with a scenario where I would prefer a communication site over a team site.

[#6]

If your audience is broadly focused - an intranet scenario - I recommend a Communication Site over a team site every time. Most intranet owners don't want left side navigation and the starter templates for Comm Sites are more aligned for communication. You can only get the "full width" experience in a Comm Site so when a client says to me "make it not look like SharePoint," I know they will love Communication Sites!