ShareGate pricing explained: the three tiers and the fine print

The three Migrate tiers

All three tiers include unlimited data and, in ShareGate's words, “unlimited data and workloads, one sweet price”. A subscription can be used on an unlimited number of farms and tenants within the same company or its subsidiaries. What differs between tiers is the number of machines, the number of parallel migrations, the workloads and the support level.

The employee bands are positioning rather than a documented technical limit. The page reads as guidance about which tier suits which organisation size; whether a 300-person tenant is technically prevented from using Essentials is not stated and could not be verified. Treat the bands as ShareGate's sales guidance and check with them if you are near a boundary.

What “1 migration at a time” actually means

This is the most misunderstood line on the page. It does not mean a subscription is consumed by a single migration. An Essentials subscription permits unlimited migrations and unlimited data for one organisation for a year. The restriction is concurrency: one migration job running at any moment, on one activated workstation.

For a small project that is fine. For a project with several site collections, a file server and a set of OneDrive accounts, it means the work is serialised through one machine and one queue. Microsoft's own guidance for throughput is to run parallel tasks against different site collections, and a single-job licence cannot do that. Pro raises the ceiling to five concurrent migrations on five machines, Enterprise to 25 on 25.

Accurate framing, then, is this: US$5,995 a year buys one machine, one job at a time, one client organisation, unlimited data, for one year, with the workloads you need possibly sitting in the US$9,995 tier. That is neither as bad as “one migration” nor as generous as “unlimited” suggests.

Machine activations and the one client rule

ShareGate defines a machine activation as “one use of the license key by one user to access the downloadable migration tool on a specific workstation”. An activation therefore binds a person and a machine. A team of three administrators who each want the tool on their own workstation needs three activations, which on the published tiers means Pro. Moving the tool to a new machine is a licence management task rather than a technical one, and it is one of the complaints that shows up in reviews about the single-machine model being restrictive.

The second rule matters more for anyone who works across organisations. ShareGate's channel FAQ states that a subscription works on a one client per subscription model and that consultants must purchase a new subscription for each of their clients. A consultancy with ten clients is therefore looking at ten subscriptions. The MSP migration licensing article sets out what that costs against per-user and slot-based alternatives.

ShareGate does have a partner programme with SMB Migration License terms, but the price of that licence is not public, so it cannot be compared here.

Workload gating: what pushes you into Pro

Essentials covers the content workloads most SharePoint projects need: SharePoint (on-premises 2010 through Subscription Edition and Online), Teams, Planner, OneDrive and file shares. Four things move you to Pro at US$9,995:

• Exchange Online mailboxes, including the mailbox destination folders and application authentication for Exchange cmdlets added in the June to September 2026 releases.
• Google Workspace as a source: Drive, Gmail and Calendar, with Gmail label conversion.
• Entra ID, including the Copy Identities feature added for Pro and Enterprise in 2026.
• Purview sensitivity labels, including the label mapping cmdlets.

Note what is not on any tier. ShareGate lists Dropbox, Alfresco, Confluence, Documentum, Lotus Notes and Azure Files as explicitly unsupported sources, and Box is supported through PowerShell only on Pro and Enterprise. Shared channels in Teams are unsupported, and GCC, GCC High, DoD and 21Vianet clouds are unsupported for Teams copies. Pause and resume is not available on any tier: the FAQ states migrations cannot be paused, resumed or reverted, only cancelled.

The 2026 release notes show where ShareGate is investing: identities, mail, labels and Gmail conversion. That is a push up-market, and it leaves the Essentials tier relatively static, which is worth knowing if you are buying it for a content-only project.

Worked examples against a per-worker model

The cleanest way to compare is to price the number of machines and parallel jobs a project actually needs. The table uses ShareGate's published US list prices and ShareShift's Annual plan in USD, which includes three workers and adds extra workers at US$500 each per year. GBP figures are on the pricing page.

Two caveats keep the comparison honest. First, if you need Exchange, Google Workspace, Entra ID copy or sensitivity label mapping today, ShareGate Pro includes them and ShareShift does not; Exchange is deliberately not in the ShareShift launch set. Second, the workloads on Essentials and on ShareShift are the same list, so for content projects the comparison is like for like. The feature detail is on the ShareGate comparison page, and the ShareGate alternative article covers the wider market.

How to buy the right tier

• Count parallel jobs, not migrations. If your plan calls for running several site collections at once, Essentials will serialise them.
• Count administrators and workstations. Each person on each machine is an activation.
• Count client organisations. Each one is a subscription unless you are on partner terms whose price is not public.
• List your sources. Google Drive, mailboxes, identity and labels are Pro; Dropbox and Azure Files are not supported at all.
• Decide how you will handle failures. With no pause or resume, plan for cancel and re-run using the incremental copy, which copies new or modified items and never deletes at the destination.
• Ask about multi-year discounts (10 to 15 percent) if the tool will be in use beyond one project.

If the answer to the first three points is “one, one and one” and the sources are SharePoint, file shares, OneDrive or Teams, then the real comparison is Essentials at US$5,995 against a flat plan at half that with more concurrency and resume built in. ShareShift's 30-day trial exists so you can run the same content through both before deciding.

Frequently asked questions