ShareGate alternative: what to look for and what it costs
The verified facts on ShareGate Migrate and the alternatives buyers compare it with, from free Microsoft tools to per-user and per-worker pricing.
ShareGate Migrate is the default answer when someone asks which tool to use for a SharePoint or Microsoft 365 migration, and it earns that position on breadth. The reasons people go looking for a ShareGate alternative are narrower and more specific: the price of the entry tier, the one machine and one job at a time rule, the fact that a migration cannot be paused or resumed, the way Teams conversations arrive as an HTML tab rather than real posts, and the one client per subscription rule that makes it expensive for consultants and managed service providers.
This article sets out those facts as ShareGate publishes them, then walks through the realistic alternatives. Every price and limit comes from the vendor's own pricing page or help centre, checked in September 2026.
Why buyers look for a ShareGate alternative
ShareGate publishes three Migrate tiers. Migrate Essentials is US$5,995 a year, positioned for tenants up to 250 employees, with one machine activation and the wording “Run 1 migration at a time”. Migrate Pro is US$9,995 a year with five machine activations and up to five concurrent migrations, and it is the tier that adds Exchange Online mailboxes, Google Workspace, Entra ID and Purview sensitivity labels. Migrate Enterprise is US$17,995 a year with 25 activations. All three include unlimited data.
The recurring complaints, taken from G2 reviews, a Vantage365 review and ShareGate's own FAQ, cluster into five themes:
- Licensing cost is high for small teams that need more than one administrator, and the single-machine model is restrictive.
- Migrations slow down and get throttled on large jobs.
- A migration that crashes or errors part way through cannot be picked up from where it stopped. ShareGate's FAQ confirms migrations cannot be paused, resumed or reverted, only cancelled.
- Error messages are sometimes vague enough to make troubleshooting harder than it should be.
- Capabilities are gated behind higher tiers, and the configuration UI is fiddly and hard to reuse.
Two further limits matter for specific workloads. Teams channel conversations are written to an HTML “Message history” tab, with only the 50 most recent conversations posted to the channel (500 through PowerShell), and reactions, link previews and mention resolution are lost. Copying Teams private chats has been disabled “until further notice” since 5 May 2026 because of history visibility defects. If Teams history matters, read the Teams migration tool guide before choosing anything.
For consultants and MSPs the deciding fact is contractual rather than technical: ShareGate's subscription works on a one client per subscription model, so a consultancy must buy a new subscription for each client. The MSP licensing article works through what that costs at 5, 10 and 20 clients.
The free alternative: Microsoft's own tools
Before paying anyone, check whether Microsoft's free tooling covers your scenario, because for two common cases it does.
| Tool | Covers | Does not cover |
|---|---|---|
| SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT) | SharePoint Server 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Foundation 2010 and 2013, and file shares into SharePoint Online, OneDrive and Teams. Versions, permissions, managed metadata and term store, navigation, site features, web parts, incremental re-runs, out-of-the-box 2010 and SharePoint Designer workflows. | SharePoint Online as a source. Cross-tenant moves. |
| Migration Manager | File shares, Google Drive, Box, Dropbox and Egnyte into Microsoft 365, with agents that scale linearly, delta sync for file shares, custom Azure storage, PowerShell and 250 GB files. | SharePoint Server as a source. SharePoint Online as a source. |
| Cross-tenant SharePoint and OneDrive migration (PowerShell) | One-and-done moves of OneDrive accounts and SharePoint sites between tenants with redirects. | Incremental or delta passes. Teams channels and structure. Sites that already exist at the destination. The SharePoint site variant is currently only available to Enterprise Agreement customers and is licensed per 100 GB moved. |
| Migration Orchestrator (public preview since 22 December 2025) | Exchange mailboxes, OneDrive, Teams 1:1 and group chats, and Teams meetings between tenants, with the per-user Cross-tenant User Data Migration licence. | Shared data: Microsoft states it does not migrate Teams and channels or SharePoint sites. |
The gaps the free tools leave are where the paid market lives: SharePoint Online to SharePoint Online restructuring, tenant to tenant SharePoint sites without an Enterprise Agreement, delta passes on cross-tenant moves, Teams channels with conversations, Planner, and assessment of file shares and SharePoint Online. A fuller roundup is in best SharePoint migration tools in 2026.
The paid alternatives and how they charge
The paid vendors split into two pricing models, and the model matters more than the headline figure.
| Vendor | Model | Published figures (September 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| ShareGate Migrate | Flat per year, per machine activation, one client organisation per subscription | US$5,995, US$9,995, US$17,995 a year; multi-year discounts of 10 to 15 percent |
| BitTitan MigrationWiz | Per user or per object, consumption | Mailbox US$14; User Migration Bundle US$17.50; Shared Documents US$25 per library up to 50 GB; Teams Collaboration US$48 per team up to 100 GB; Tenant Migration Bundle US$57 per user |
| Quest On Demand Migration | Per migrated user account, one project | UK G-Cloud 14 list (April 2024): Suite T1 £16.91, T3 £22.55, T5 £35.76 per migrated user; “may only be used for one migration project” |
| Cloudiway | Per user licence, single use, 90-day delta window | About US$11 standard and US$17 premium per user (secondary sources, 2026) |
| AvePoint Fly | Per user; Fly Server is “one universal per-user price regardless of the source” with “zero data caps” | Not published, quote only |
| CloudFuze, Tzunami | Custom quotes | Not published |
| ShareShift | Flat per registered worker, unlimited data, no workload gating | Monthly £399 or US$499; Annual £2,395 or US$2,995; MSP £6,395 or US$7,995 with 10 client slots |
For a 250-user tenant to tenant project the per-user models add up: BitTitan's tenant bundle is about US$14,250, Quest T5 about £8,940, Cloudiway about US$4,250. ShareGate is US$5,995 on Essentials, or US$9,995 if you need mailboxes. A flat US$2,995 for unlimited data undercuts all of them for content, and stays cheaper than per-user pricing from roughly 100 users upwards. The head to head is in ShareGate vs AvePoint vs Quest.
What to check in any alternative
These questions separate a tool that finishes from one that generates a support ticket.
- Can it resume? Ask what happens when a worker restarts, the network drops, or Microsoft throttles for an hour. The honest answer for the Migration API is that a job already accepted by Microsoft keeps processing, so the tool needs to record the result rather than re-send it. ShareShift persists every step in SQLite and only acts at package boundaries; see how to pause and resume a SharePoint migration.
- Does it use the Migration API with app-only authentication? Microsoft states that migration solutions should only use app-based authentication and that user mode triggers increased throttling. Certificate credentials are also throttled less aggressively than secrets.
- Where does your content go? A desktop tool or a worker you run keeps content inside your network. A pure SaaS tool routes every byte through the vendor's cloud, which makes the vendor a data processor for your content. ShareShift is worker-only by design and its licence server receives only aggregate counts.
- Does it honour Retry-After and decorate traffic? Microsoft measures throttling per tenant and app and asks for a
User-Agentof the formISV|Company|Product/Version. Tools that ignore this cannot be identified as migration traffic, and in Microsoft's words opening a support ticket about throttling does not help. The throttling article explains the budgets. - What does it say about Teams? Channel posts can be imported with original timestamps and authors through migration mode. Chats cannot be re-created by any supported API, so any tool claiming a chat migration should be asked exactly how, given ShareGate's withdrawal.
- How is it licensed for the people and machines you actually have? Per machine, per user, per client or per worker. Count your administrators, your client tenants and the number of parallel jobs you need, then price each model.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a free ShareGate alternative?
Yes, for two scenarios. Microsoft's SharePoint Migration Tool handles SharePoint Server and file share sources into SharePoint Online, and Migration Manager handles file shares, Google Drive, Box, Dropbox and Egnyte. Neither accepts SharePoint Online as a source, so restructuring within a tenant or moving sites between tenants without an Enterprise Agreement still needs a third-party tool.
Does ShareGate really limit you to one migration?
No. Essentials permits unlimited migrations and unlimited data for one organisation. The limit is concurrency and workstations: one machine activation and one migration running at a time, for one client organisation, for one year. The wording “run 1 migration at a time” is ShareGate's own.
Which alternative handles Teams conversations best?
Any tool using Microsoft's migration mode API can import channel posts with original timestamps and authors. ShareGate writes conversations to an HTML tab with the 50 most recent posted to the channel. ShareShift imports them as native posts. No tool can re-create 1:1 or group chats with original metadata through a supported API; the honest options are archives or Microsoft's own Migration Orchestrator with per-user licences.
How much does ShareShift cost compared with ShareGate?
Annual is US$2,995 or £2,395 a year with three workers, against ShareGate Essentials at US$5,995 with one machine. Five workers on ShareShift Annual is US$3,995 against Pro at US$9,995. The MSP plan is US$7,995 for ten client slots, where ShareGate needs a subscription per client.
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