When your SharePoint tenant fills up, every vendor has a pitch — and every pitch conveniently leaves out the part where their approach costs you something. This is an honest comparison of the SharePoint archiving solutionson the market in 2026: the five broad approaches, the specific tools competing for the category (ShareArchiver, Squirrel, ShArc, AvePoint Opus and, yes, ArchiveBridge), what to actually score them on, and a worked cost example. We’ll name where each competitor genuinely wins, because on a decision this expensive, the honest guide is the useful one.
The five approaches to archiving SharePoint
Before you compare products, understand that they cluster into five fundamentally different strategies. Most “which tool is best” arguments are really arguments about which of these you should be doing at all.
- Buy more storage.The Office 365 Extra File Storage add-on, or the newer pay-as-you-go metering. Zero migration risk, zero learning curve — and the most expensive per-gigabyte answer there is, at roughly US$0.20/GB/month for hot storage you’re using to hold cold files. It solves the banner, not the bill.
- Clean up. Trim version history, empty the two-stage recycle bin, delete duplicates and orphaned sites. Genuinely worth doing, genuinely free — and genuinely temporary, because the pool refills as soon as normal work resumes.
- Microsoft 365 Archive.Microsoft’s own cold tier, which moves inactive content to colder storage inside your tenant so it stops counting against the active quota. Native, compliant, and cheaper than the add-on — but still Microsoft-priced and still locked in your tenant.
- Stub-based third-party archiving.A tool moves cold files to cheaper object or blob storage and leaves a lightweight “stub” behind so links keep working. This is where ShareArchiver, Squirrel, ShArc and ArchiveBridge all live — they differ mostly in where the data goes and how carefully the move is verified.
- Governance and lifecycle suites. Enterprise platforms like AvePoint Opus that treat archiving as one feature inside records management, classification, and defensible disposal. More capability, more cost, more to run.
For a deeper look at how the native tier stacks up against the third-party approach specifically, we wrote a dedicated Microsoft 365 Archive vs third-party archiving comparison. This piece is the wider field.
The vendor landscape, with honest strengths
Here is where each of the main SharePoint archiving solutions genuinely earns its place — and where the fine print lives.
Microsoft 365 Archive is the safe default and, for many tenants, the right one. It bills archived data at US$0.05/GB/month — a quarter of the standard US$0.20/GB rate — and, as of 2026, supports both site-level and file-level archiving at the same rate. Its real strengths are that data never leaves the Microsoft compliance boundary and there’s no new vendor to onboard. The gotchas: reactivating archived content is now free, but re-archiving anything you reactivate is restricted for a set lockout period, the cold data still lives on Microsoft-priced storage, and you’re billed only for what exceeds your quota — so its savings depend entirely on how far over the line you are.
ShareArchiverranks at the top of this category for a reason: it’s a mature, stub-based archiver with a strong story around fast retrieval. Its own material claims a stub click restores a file instantly, versus a wait it attributes to Microsoft’s native archiving. It also spans file servers, not just SharePoint — useful if you have hybrid on-prem data. Its honest limitation is that it’s a broad, feature-heavy enterprise product; if all you need is to move cold SharePoint files to a cheap bucket, there’s a lot of platform to buy and run.
Squirrel (by SmiKar) does one thing cleanly: it moves inactive SharePoint Online documents into cheaper Azure Blob tiers on lifecycle policies you set, and it advertises savings of 60–85%. For a Microsoft-and-Azure shop that wants its archive to stay inside Azure, that tight focus is a genuine strength. The trade-off is right there in the design: the destination is Azure Blob, full stop — if you’d rather use Wasabi or Backblaze B2 at a lower flat rate, that isn’t the model. Pricing is an annual platform fee plus a per-TB-archived charge.
ShArc(by Layer2) is the “work in SharePoint, store in Azure” option — it archives inactive files to Azure Blob Storage in the background and advertises around 61% lower costs. Like Squirrel, its strength is a low-friction, set-and-forget experience for Azure-committed organisations, and its constraint is the same: Azure is the destination by design, so the storage price floor is Azure’s, not the cheapest S3-compatible provider’s.
AvePoint Opusplays a different game entirely. It’s an advanced information lifecycle management platform — archiving sits alongside classification with Purview sensitivity labels, records management, and defensible disposal, all from a central console spanning SharePoint, Exchange, and beyond. If your driver is compliance and governance across the whole estate, Opus is genuinely more capable than any single-purpose archiver here. If your driver is simply a storage bill that’s too high, it’s more platform — and more cost — than the problem needs.
ArchiveBridge — ours — is deliberately narrow: move cold SharePoint files to your own S3-compatible bucket (Wasabi, Backblaze B2, or hosted), verify every file byte-for-byte with SHA-256 beforedeleting the original, and leave a stub that restores on one click. The honest framing: we don’t do records management or physical-records governance, and the data does leave SharePoint’s native boundary (a well-built tool stays Purview- and legal-hold-aware to compensate). What we optimise for is the lowest defensible cost per terabyte and an exit path that isn’t locked to one cloud.
How to score SharePoint archiving solutions
Feature lists are noise. Four questions separate the SharePoint archiving solutions that will still look like good decisions in three years from the ones that won’t:
- Does it verify before it deletes?Archiving is a move, and a move is only safe if the copy is confirmed intact before the original is removed. Ask specifically whether the tool hashes both sides (e.g. SHA-256) and what the audit record looks like. “Trust us” isn’t an answer — see our note on verify-before-delete and the audit trail.
- Can you bring your own storage?Azure-only tools inherit Azure’s price floor. Tools that write to any S3-compatible bucket let you shop the cheapest durable provider — often a large gap at scale.
- What’s the exit path?If you stop paying, what happens to your archived files and their stubs? A clean answer (your bucket, your data, documented restore) beats a proprietary vault you can’t leave.
- Per-seat or per-terabyte? Cold data scales with terabytes, not headcount. Per-seat pricing quietly punishes small teams with big archives; per-TB pricing tracks the actual cost driver.
A cost comparison worked example
Take a mid-size tenant sitting 5 TB over quotain cold, rarely-touched files. Here’s roughly what each approach does to the annual bill for that same 5 TB (figures are indicative — confirm current rates and your own numbers before deciding):
- Buy more storage: ~US$0.20/GB/month × 5,120 GB ≈ US$12,000+/year, forever, and rising as the data grows.
- Microsoft 365 Archive: ~US$0.05/GB/month ≈ ~US$3,000/year — a real cut, with the data still inside Microsoft.
- Stub-based to object storage (ArchiveBridge with your own bucket): A$29/TB/month management plus object storage at roughly US$6–8/TB/month — a low four-figure annual total, with the files still searchable and one click from restore.
The spread between “buy more” and “archive to a cheap bucket” is the whole game — often a five-to-tenfold difference on the same bytes. Put your tenant’s actual numbers through the SharePoint storage cost calculator rather than trusting any of these round figures.
Which SharePoint archiving solution fits which org
There isn’t one winner — there’s a right fit per situation, and an honest guide should say so:
- Small overage, compliance-first, no appetite for a new vendor: Microsoft 365 Archive. Native, simple, and the savings are enough when the overage is modest.
- Enterprise governance and records management across the whole estate:AvePoint Opus. You’re buying lifecycle control, not just a cheaper gigabyte.
- Azure-committed, want a clean set-and-forget archiver: Squirrel or ShArc. Both do the core job well if Azure Blob is where you want the data to land.
- Hybrid file-server + SharePoint, want a mature feature-rich platform: ShareArchiver.
- Large or growing cold-data bill, want the lowest cost and no cloud lock-in: ArchiveBridge — bring your own bucket, verify-before-delete, per-TB pricing, and an exit path that’s just your own storage. See exactly how the archive-and-stub pipeline works.
Whichever way you lean, the decision runs on your numbers, not a vendor’s headline percentage. The fastest way to get them is a free, read-only tenant scan: it reports how many gigabytes of aged files you’re paying the premium rate to keep, and what moving them would save — before a single file moves, and with no commitment to us or anyone else.