When SharePoint fills up, every vendor has a pitch, and each one leaves out what its approach costs you. This guide compares the SharePoint archiving software on the market in 2026: five broad approaches and eight products competing for the job (Microsoft 365 Archive, Archive360, Preservica, ShareArchiver, Squirrel, ShArc, AvePoint Opus and, yes, ArchiveBridge). It also covers what to score them on and works through a 5 TB cost example. We name where each competitor wins.
One warning first. Search for SharePoint archiving tools and many of the results aren’t archiving software at all. They’re governance platforms, migration tools, forum threads and vendor Q&A. Knowing which category a product belongs to will save you more time than any feature table.
The five approaches to archiving SharePoint
The products fall into five strategies. Most arguments about the “best” tool are really arguments about which strategy makes sense.
- Buy more storage. The Office 365 Extra File Storage add-on, or the newer pay-as-you-go metering. There’s no migration risk and nothing new to learn, but it’s the most expensive answer per gigabyte: roughly US$0.20/GB/month for premium storage holding old files. It clears the banner. The bill stays.
- Clean up. Trim version history, empty the two-stage recycle bin, delete duplicates and orphaned sites. It’s free and worth doing. The relief is temporary, because the pool starts filling again when normal work resumes.
- Microsoft 365 Archive. Microsoft’s own cold tier, which moves inactive content to colder storage inside your Microsoft 365 so it stops counting against the main allowance. It’s built in and cheaper than the add-on. The files stay inside Microsoft, at Microsoft’s price.
- Third-party archiving with a link left behind. These tools move old files to cheaper cloud storage and leave a small link file, often called a stub, where each file used to be. ArchiveBridge, ShareArchiver, Squirrel and ShArc take this approach. The differences that matter are where the files go, how each move is checked, and whether the link stays searchable.
- Governance and lifecycle suites. Enterprise platforms such as AvePoint Opus include archiving as part of records management. They can also delete records on a schedule you can defend to an auditor. That extra capability means more software to run and pay for.
For a closer look at the built-in tier against the third-party approach, see our Microsoft 365 Archive vs third-party archiving comparison. This piece covers the wider field.
Where each product wins
Here’s where each of the main SharePoint archiving products earns its place, and where the fine print sits. Our descriptions of competitors come from their own sites, checked on 30 September 2026.
Microsoft 365 Archive is the safe default and, for many organisations, the right one. It bills archived data at US$0.05/GB/month, a quarter of the US$0.20/GB extra-storage rate. As of 2026, it can archive single files as well as whole sites at the same rate. Its strengths are that the data never leaves Microsoft’s compliance boundary and archived content stays searchable. There’s no new supplier to take on either. The catches: reactivation is now free, but reactivated content can’t be archived again during a set lockout period. The data still sits on Microsoft-priced storage. And because billing applies only to use above your allowance, the saving depends on how far over the limit you are.
Archive360 is built around regulatory risk rather than storage cost. Its material focuses on keeping SharePoint content defensible and finding it fast under legal pressure. In practice, its migration connectors may be the bigger draw, because they pull content out of old archives you want to retire. A regulator, or an abandoned email archive nobody wants to touch, is a harder problem than moving old files onto cheaper disks. That’s Archive360’s territory. The trade-off is how you buy it: it’s an enterprise platform sold through a conversation, and we couldn’t find a published price on its site. Evaluation starts with a demo.
Preservica (Preserve365) shows up in archiving searches, but its own material draws a firm line between archiving and preservation. Preservation keeps a record readable and provably authentic for decades, including moving file formats forward as they become obsolete. That’s a different duty from moving files to cheaper storage. For a government archive, or any organisation with retention schedules measured in decades, cheaper storage alone doesn’t meet the requirement. For everyone else, it’s far more machinery than a storage bill calls for.
ShareArchiver is a mature archiver that leaves stubs behind. Its own site says each stub keeps enough metadata for SharePoint search and Microsoft 365 Copilot to find the file. It lists S3-compatible, Azure and on-premises storage as destinations. It also says it can bring file-server data into the archive and publish stubs into SharePoint, which helps if you still keep files on local servers. Its limit is breadth. If the job is only to move old SharePoint files to cheaper storage, ShareArchiver is a lot of platform to buy and run.
Squirrel, by SmiKar, does one job cleanly. It moves inactive SharePoint Online documents into cheaper Azure Blob tiers according to rules you set, and advertises savings of 60–85%. Its site also says the stubs stay indexed by SharePoint search and Microsoft 365 Copilot. For a Microsoft-and-Azure organisation that wants its archive in its own Azure account, that focus is useful. The destination, however, is Azure Blob. If you’d rather use another provider, Squirrel isn’t designed for it. Pricing combines an annual platform fee with a per-TB archiving fee.
ShArc (by Layer2) is the “work in SharePoint, store in Azure” option. It archives inactive files to your own Azure Blob Storage in the background and advertises around 61% lower costs. It says file names, properties and custom columns stay searchable in SharePoint, though file contents aren’t indexed while archived. Like Squirrel, ShArc suits organisations committed to Azure that want a set-and-forget setup. Azure is also its limit: Azure’s storage rates set the floor.
AvePoint Opus plays a different game. It’s an information lifecycle platform, where archiving sits alongside records management and classification with Purview sensitivity labels, all from one console covering SharePoint, Exchange and more. If your driver is compliance and governance across all of Microsoft 365, Opus does more than any single-purpose archiver here. If the problem is an expensive storage bill, it’s more platform and more cost than you need.
ArchiveBridge (ours) is deliberately narrow. It backs up OneDrive and moves old SharePoint files to your own S3-compatible storage or to storage we run. OneDrive originals stay where they are. A SharePoint original is removed only after its stored copy passes a SHA-256 check and a link file that can restore it has been written in its place. ArchiveBridge is a storage and backup tool, not a records-management system. It skips files whose retention label locks them as a record, but it doesn’t read legal holds or retention policies, so keep sites under a hold out of scope. Its backups still copy held, labelled and record-locked files, because a backup never changes or removes anything.
Here ArchiveBridge loses a point to the stub-based archivers above. While a file is archived, SharePoint search finds only its link file, by name, not the words inside it, and old links to it won’t open it. After a restore it’s back at the same path, but old sharing links don’t return.
In return, we publish a per-terabyte price, and leaving is plain. Files are stored as ordinary files under their original names and folder paths. With your own storage, they’re already yours. If we run the storage, you have three choices. Restore everything to SharePoint, at no charge. Or we hand you the admin details of that storage account, and you keep paying for it or move the files to an account of your own. Or we delete it on request. A full export to storage elsewhere, done by us, is quoted first. The link files need ArchiveBridge to work, so restore before you leave.
Many of the “archiving tools” in your search results aren’t archivers
Search for SharePoint archiving tools and you’ll see four kinds of product mixed together. Only one kind will cut the storage bill, so sort them out first.
- Actual archivers move old files to cheaper storage and leave something in their place that points to the copy. The section above covers them.
- Governance and workspace-lifecycle platforms. Orchestry is the one you’ll see most, and it frames the choice as archiving versus offloading. These find the abandoned Teams and SharePoint workspaces nobody has opened in two years and help you retire them. That’s a real problem, and if yours is sprawl rather than volume it may be the one to solve first. But retiring empty workspaces doesn’t move a terabyte of old files off premium storage.
- Migration and management tools. ShareGate is the recurring name. It’s excellent at moving content between Microsoft 365 organisations and reporting on what you have, but it isn’t designed to sit there permanently moving old files to cheaper storage.
- Forum threads and vendor Q&A. A surprising share of the first page is Reddit and Microsoft’s own community answers. They’re worth reading because admins there are blunt about pricing in a way vendor pages rarely are. But they’re opinions, often about a version of the product that has since changed.
Here’s the practical test. Ask a vendor what happens to a 40 MB file nobody has touched since 2021. If the answer is that it’s copied somewhere cheaper and something is left in its place, you’re talking to an archiver. If the answer is reports, labels, policies or a retired workspace, it’s a different product. You may still need it. It just won’t change the storage invoice.
How to score SharePoint archiving tools
Feature lists are noise. Four questions tell you whether a SharePoint archiving product will still look like a good decision in three years:
- Does it check before it deletes? Archiving is a move, and a move is only safe if the copy is confirmed intact before the original goes. Ask whether the tool compares a fingerprint, or hash, at both ends. Ask to see the audit record too. “Trust us” isn’t an answer. See how we check each copy before removal.
- Can you bring your own storage? An Azure-only tool ties you to Azure’s rates. A tool that supports S3-compatible storage, the standard many cloud storage providers use, lets you choose the provider. At scale, the difference can be large.
- What does leaving look like? If you stop paying, what happens to your archived files and the links left in SharePoint? We prefer an unglamorous answer: ordinary files in ordinary storage, with a documented route back. A vault you can’t leave is a bad archive.
- Per seat or per terabyte? Old files grow with terabytes, not headcount. Per-seat pricing punishes small teams with big archives. Per-TB pricing tracks what drives the cost.
A worked cost example
Take a mid-size organisation that’s 5 TB over its allowance, all of it in old files that are rarely touched. Here’s roughly what three approaches do to the yearly bill for those 5 TB. The figures are indicative, so check current rates and your own numbers before deciding. Microsoft charges in US dollars, so its figures in other currencies are estimates.
- Buy more storage: about US$0.20/GB/month × 5,120 GB, roughly US$12,288 each year. The bill rises as the data grows.
- Microsoft 365 Archive: about US$0.05/GB/month, roughly US$3,072 a year. That’s a real cut, with the data still inside Microsoft.
- ArchiveBridge with your own storage: US$24 per terabyte a month for management plus your provider’s own storage rate. If we run the storage, the all-in price is US$2,100 a year. Both prices are before tax. Restores back to SharePoint are never charged, and there’s no yearly limit.
“Buy more” and “archive to cheaper storage” put very different prices on the same 5 TB. Use the SharePoint storage cost calculator with your own figures instead of trusting round numbers.
Which SharePoint archiving solution fits which organisation
There isn’t one winner. Match the product to the problem:
- Slightly over, compliance first, no appetite for a new supplier: Microsoft 365 Archive. Built in and simple, and the saving is enough when you’re only a little over.
- Regulatory risk, eDiscovery, or an old archive to retire: Archive360. Its migration connectors may justify the purchase if you’re closing an old email archive.
- Statutory retention measured in decades: Preservica. If you must produce a readable, authentic record in twenty-five years, you need preservation. A cheaper storage tier isn’t enough.
- Governance and records management across all of Microsoft 365: AvePoint Opus. You’re buying lifecycle control rather than a cheaper gigabyte. If the storage bill is the real driver, read where a narrower tool costs less before committing to a platform.
- Committed to Azure, want a set-and-forget archiver with searchable stubs: Squirrel or ShArc. Both do the core job well if Azure Blob is where you want the data.
- File servers plus SharePoint, want a mature platform with searchable stubs: ShareArchiver.
- Large or growing bill for old files, want published per-terabyte pricing and files kept as ordinary files: ArchiveBridge. Use your storage or ours. Restoring to SharePoint is free. See how archiving and restore work.
Whichever way you lean, decide on your own numbers, not a vendor’s headline percentage. A free scan gives you those numbers without a commitment to us or anyone else.