/ Reference guide · Advisory paper · November 2026
Every business on Microsoft 365 already owns SharePoint. Egnyte is a second home for files, bought on top of Microsoft 365 rather than instead of it. This paper sets Egnyte's four MSP plans, Starter, IFS, Elite and Ultimate, against the SharePoint that comes with Microsoft 365 Business Premium, and explains when each extra licence pays its way. It doubles as a sales training guide, with every feature explained in plain English.
/ The short answer
For most office businesses on Microsoft 365 Business Premium, SharePoint is the right place for files. It is already paid for, it sits underneath Teams and Copilot, and Business Premium wraps it in data loss prevention, sensitivity labels, Conditional Access and Intune device management.
Egnyte IFS earns its place when the files themselves carry the work: large drawing and model sets, several terabytes of project archive held by a modest headcount, offices that still want a drive letter and a fast local copy, or teams that work across Microsoft and Google. IFS gives 200 GB of pooled storage per power user, a folder and permissions model staff already understand, and an on site cache that SharePoint has no equivalent for.
Elite and Ultimate are governance products. Elite adds retention and deletion policies, view only and watermarked sharing, and access reviews. Ultimate adds sensitive data discovery, labelling, behavioural ransomware detection and customer managed keys. Business Premium already covers some of this ground for files, email and Teams, so they suit clients who want that control built into the file platform itself, and should be priced against Purview add-ons on top of Business Premium.
Egnyte Starter is harder to recommend. It has no file or login auditing, no ransomware detection and no data residency choice, so on governance it sits below the SharePoint the client already owns. Lead with IFS whenever Egnyte is the answer.
No Egnyte plan replaces Microsoft 365. Email, Office apps, Teams, identity and device security stay with Business Premium at £17.75, so Egnyte is always an added cost: from £11.89 per power user per month for Starter to £54.19 for Ultimate.
/ How they work
Files live in document libraries inside sites, and every Team gets a site. Staff reach them through Teams, the browser, or OneDrive sync into File Explorer. Access is inherited from the site's members; folder level permissions are possible, but Microsoft advises against breaking inheritance widely.
Files live in one folder tree that behaves like a traditional file server, with permissions set on folders. The Egnyte desktop app shows the cloud as a drive in File Explorer or Finder and fetches files on demand. Word, Excel and PowerPoint co-editing runs from inside Egnyte, and the same files can open in Google Workspace.
SharePoint asks a business to reorganise its files around teams and sites. Egnyte lets it keep the folder structure it already has.
/ The four plans
Each plan includes everything in the one before it. Storage stays at 200 GB per power user from IFS upwards, so the higher plans are bought for control, not capacity.
Advanced Snapshot & Recovery is a separately purchased option on IFS and Elite. Project Hub (with the advanced Procore integration), the Specialized File Handler for BIM and 360 images, and Document Portal with upload request workflows are add-ons on IFS, Elite and Ultimate; Starter has none of them.
/ AI in plain English
Egnyte's AI list reads like a feature minefield, but almost all of it does one of five jobs. Each feature below has an example of what a member of staff would actually type or do, and the lowest plan that has it.
Instead of reading or searching, you ask in plain English and get an answer, with a link back to the file it came from.
Turning piles of documents, scans and emails into something searchable and organised without anyone retyping or filing by hand.
AI aimed at whoever looks after the file share rather than everyday staff.
The risk with any AI over company files is that it answers someone's question using a file they should never have seen.
Many clients will use AI from somewhere else. These features let it work with files in Egnyte without copying them out.
/ The sales point
Business Premium includes Copilot Chat, which can summarise and answer questions about a document you give it. Asking questions across the company's files, research across many documents and meeting transcripts on the Microsoft side need a separate Microsoft 365 Copilot licence for each user, at £16.91 per user per month on top of Business Premium.
IFS bundles the cross document AI into its £24.53. For a client who wants AI over their files but is not ready to spend £16.91 a head on Copilot for everyone, that is a real part of the IFS case. It does not replace Copilot in Outlook, Teams or Excel, so heavy users may still want both.
Be straight about the overlap. If the client only wants AI over their files and has no other reason to move to Egnyte, Copilot at £16.91 is cheaper than IFS at £24.53 and covers more of their day. For a client already committed to Copilot, SharePoint is the natural home, because Copilot works there with no setup.
Either way, tidy permissions first. AI on either platform will surface anything a user technically has access to, so an access review belongs at the start of any AI conversation.
/ Building on it
Copilot Studio is Microsoft's tool for building custom AI assistants, called agents, that sit in Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot. An agent can work with files held in Egnyte, so a client can have AI built around their own projects without moving anything into SharePoint. There are three ways to connect it, and one agent can use all three.
Microsoft's Egnyte connector copies Egnyte content into Microsoft's search index, and Copilot Studio can use it as a knowledge source. The agent can then answer questions such as "summarise the files in the product launch folder".
Best for: question and answer agents over stable reference content, such as policies, specifications or past projects.
Copilot Studio can add an MCP server to an agent as a tool, using the server's address and an OAuth sign in. Nothing is copied: the agent searches and reads Egnyte at the moment someone asks, so answers are always current.
Best for: live project work, where yesterday's crawl is not good enough.
Egnyte has a certified connector for Power Automate and Power Apps, which Copilot Studio agents can call through agent flows. This is how an agent does things in Egnyte rather than only reading it.
Best for: taking repetitive admin off staff.
/ A worked example
A project assistant for a design or construction client. It lives in Teams. Staff ask it "what is the latest revision of the ground floor plan for job 2026-031?" or "what did the client approve at the last meeting?", and it answers from that job's Egnyte folder, live through MCP or from the connector index. When a new job is won, someone types "set up job 2026-044 for Harbour Road", and a flow creates the standard folders in Egnyte with the right permissions. Nobody needs to know where the data lives, and the files never leave Egnyte.
Why it matters commercially. It puts AI over a client's real working files without a SharePoint migration, and it is a build that can be reused from one client to the next with small changes.
/ Storage
SharePoint's pool grows by 10 GB for each licence. Egnyte's grows by 100 GB per power user on Starter and 200 GB on every higher plan. For a document heavy firm with modest headcount, that gap turns into a monthly bill for extra Microsoft storage. Set the figures to match the client; the example starts at a 25 person practice holding 3 TB.
Pools are shared across the organisation on both platforms. SharePoint storage is counted in binary units (1 TB = 1,024 GB) and a tenant that stays over its limit can be set to read only. Egnyte extra storage is sold in packs; confirm pricing with Egnyte. Monthly Egnyte figures are on top of Microsoft 365.
/ Cost
End user prices per power user per month, ex VAT, with the whole Business Premium licence shown for scale. SharePoint itself adds nothing on top of Business Premium.
Egnyte is a significant line on the invoice. IFS costs more per user than the whole Business Premium licence, taking a user from £17.75 to £42.28 a month. For a 25 user client it adds £613.25 a month, or £7,359 a year. Starter adds £297.25, Elite £854.75 and Ultimate £1,354.75 a month. A proposal has to justify that with what Egnyte does that SharePoint cannot.
Storage alone rarely justifies it. At 18p per GB per month, buying extra Microsoft storage is cheaper than IFS until a 25 user client holds about 4.6 TB of shared files. The equivalent points are about 2.9 TB for Starter, 5.9 TB for Elite and 8.6 TB for Ultimate. Above those volumes Egnyte wins on storage cost too, and everything else it does comes with it. The calculator above works these out for any headcount and data size.
Compared with Copilot. Microsoft 365 Copilot adds £16.91 per user per month to Business Premium, so IFS costs £7.62 a user more. They do different jobs. Copilot works across Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel and SharePoint; Egnyte's AI only covers files held in Egnyte, but IFS also brings the storage, drive letter and on site cache. For 25 users, Copilot for everyone is £422.75 a month against £613.25 for IFS. Taking everything, Business Premium with IFS and Copilot comes to £59.19 per user per month.
The middle way is often the right one. IFS for everyone, with Copilot only for the few people who will use it every day, gives the whole team AI over their files and the heavy users AI across email, meetings and documents. For a 25 user client with five Copilot users, that adds £84.55 a month on top of IFS, rather than £422.75 for Copilot across the board.
Starter to IFS is the easy step. The extra £12.64 per user buys auditing, edge caching, data residency, exposure and ransomware reporting, the AI add-on and PDF tools, plus double the storage. Few clients who choose Egnyte should stop at Starter.
IFS to Elite costs £9.66 more and buys lifecycle policies, view only and watermarked sharing, and access governance. Elite to Ultimate costs £20.00 more and buys sensitive data discovery and protection. Because every client already has Business Premium's DLP and sensitivity labels, the fair comparison is the cost of the Purview add-ons that would close the remaining gap, so price both before recommending either.
/ When to choose
Ultimate competes with Purview or E5 Compliance add-ons on top of the client's Business Premium. If the client lives in Microsoft 365, that route usually covers the same ground across email and Teams as well as files.
Egnyte Starter suits a small team that wants straightforward external sharing beside Microsoft 365, holds little sensitive data and has no need for audit trails. That is an uncommon profile among managed clients.
/ Feature guide
Egnyte columns come straight from the October 2026 MSP plan matrix. The Microsoft column describes SharePoint and OneDrive as licensed in Business Premium, with notes where a capability needs another product or licence. Select any feature to see what it does and when it matters to a client, or search for the word a client used. Scroll sideways on smaller screens.
| Capability | Starter£11.89 | IFS£24.53 | Elite£34.19 | Ultimate£54.19 | SharePointBusiness Premium £17.75 |
|---|
No features match. Try a shorter word, or clear the filters.
/ Sales training
The terms that come up, the questions clients ask, and a few scenarios to test yourself against. Every feature in the guide above also opens to a plain English explanation.
For most businesses you shouldn't, and saying so builds trust. Egnyte is worth it when staff need the drive letter and folder structure they know, when files are large or numerous enough that SharePoint struggles, when the office needs fast local access, or when data volume means buying Microsoft storage every month anyway. Use the calculator to show the storage side honestly.
Usually less than with SharePoint. People coming from a file server keep a drive letter and the same folders, and still open Word and Excel as before. A move to SharePoint normally means reorganising files into sites and getting used to OneDrive sync.
Both hold the main certifications, encrypt data and support MFA. Set Egnyte to sign in through Microsoft so the client's Business Premium Conditional Access rules apply. From IFS upwards Egnyte adds a full audit trail, ransomware detection and exposure reports. Starter lacks auditing, so avoid it for anyone with security questions to answer.
Office co-editing works on every plan, there is a Teams app, and Egnyte integrates with Copilot. Be clear that files dropped into Teams chats still go to OneDrive and SharePoint, so some content will live in Microsoft regardless.
IFS and above let the client choose the storage region, so UK or EU hosting can be confirmed in writing. Check the hosting region before offering Starter. Microsoft holds UK tenants' core data in UK datacentres.
Files stay as ordinary files in ordinary folders, so moving them later is a migration project rather than a lock in. Budget time for permissions, shared links and any integrations, as with any platform move.
Less than it seems, and it is better to say so. Any of those tools can already summarise a document you give it. What they lack is safe access to the company's files. Egnyte connects to Claude and ChatGPT, and to Copilot through Microsoft's connector, so staff can search and question the file share from the AI they already use, with Egnyte's permissions and the ability to block outside AI tools. On top of that, Egnyte does jobs general assistants do not do across a whole archive: an AI answer in every search for every user, transcripts of recordings stored in the file share, and on Ultimate, OCR, classification and bulk extraction. Do not sell Egnyte to this client on AI. Sell it on files, and treat the AI as a bonus. If they are committed to Microsoft 365 Copilot, keep files in SharePoint, where Copilot works natively.
Partly. From IFS, the AI assistant can answer questions across the client's files, compare and summarise documents, build knowledge bases, research across folders and transcribe recordings. Egnyte runs it on models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, follows folder permissions and does not use client data for training. It will not draft emails in Outlook, summarise Teams meetings, analyse spreadsheets in Excel or answer general questions. A sensible starting point for a client with no AI is Copilot Chat, which is included in Business Premium, for general writing, plus Egnyte's assistant for company files. Add Copilot at £16.91 per user, or Claude, later for the people who will use it heavily. If the client does not need Egnyte for its files, do not buy it just for the AI.
Yes. A Copilot Studio agent in Teams can answer questions from the client's Egnyte folders, through Microsoft's Egnyte connector or live through Egnyte's MCP server, and can carry out tasks such as setting up folders for a new job through Power Automate. The files stay in Egnyte. Check Copilot licensing or pay as you go credits on the Microsoft side, and the AI add-on on the Egnyte side, before quoting.
Only if they need simple sharing and nothing else. Starter has no audit log, no ransomware detection and no choice of hosting region. The extra £12.64 per user for IFS is usually the better conversation.
A 35 person architecture practice holds 6 TB of drawings on an ageing server. Staff work from the S: drive and open large Revit files all day. What do you lead with?
IFS gives about 6.8 TB of pooled storage for 35 users, a drive letter, file locking and an on site cache for big files. SharePoint would need about 4.7 TB of paid storage at roughly £860 a month, almost exactly what IFS costs for 35 users, and Starter's 3.4 TB pool is too small.
An accountancy firm of 12, with 400 GB of Word, Excel and PDFs, lives in Teams and wants clients to upload documents without accounts.
The data fits comfortably in the tenant pool, Teams is central, and SharePoint's Request files covers uploads at no extra cost. Egnyte would need the Document Portal add-on on top of the plan.
A client on Egnyte Starter asks who deleted a project folder last Tuesday. What can you tell them?
File and login auditing starts at IFS. Starter can recover files through versioning, but cannot say who deleted them. This is exactly why Starter is hard to recommend.
An engineering client sends drawings to subcontractors and wants them viewable only, with the viewer's name stamped across each page. Lowest Egnyte plan?
Read only viewer and watermarking both start at Elite. If the client is happy for that sharing to happen from SharePoint, Business Premium can do view only links with download blocked.
A care provider wants to find every file in Egnyte that contains National Insurance numbers or health details. Which plan?
Sensitive data discovery and classification is Ultimate only. Price it against Microsoft Purview add-ons on their Business Premium before recommending.
Which is the lowest Egnyte plan that includes Storage Sync edge caching?
Edge caching starts at IFS, along with auditing, data residency and the AI add-on.
A client on IFS asks for whole system snapshots so they can roll back after ransomware. What do you say?
Advanced Snapshot & Recovery is a separately purchased option on IFS and Elite and is included in Ultimate.
Why should Egnyte be set to sign in through Microsoft for Business Premium clients?
Single sign-on through Entra ID means leavers are switched off in one place and the client's existing sign in rules protect Egnyte too.
/ Please confirm before quoting