Every now and then, someone asks me what the best intranet platform is.

It’s a reasonable question. It also has no answer, which makes it an annoying one to be asked at a party. (I’m fun at parties, honestly).

There are dozens of dedicated intranet products before you get anywhere near the various flavours of SharePoint and the growing pile of employee apps. Then come the demos. The analyst reports. The comparison matrices with forty rows and an encouraging quantity of green ticks. The sales teams who each explain that their product was designed specifically for organisations exactly like yours.

Somewhere around week three, IT joins the conversation with a list of things they will never support, procurement asks a question nobody can answer, somebody discovers a security requirement that apparently existed all along, and everyone quietly forgets what problem they were trying to solve.

Which is why the first job isn’t evaluating intranet platforms. It’s deciding how you’re going to evaluate them.

Why it’s usually SharePoint

For most large organisations, SharePoint is the default before anyone has made a decision at all.

It’s bundled with Microsoft 365. IT already knows how to run it. It handles documents and permissions properly. It connects to Teams, OneDrive and Outlook without requiring an integration project, three consultants and a small blood sacrifice.

And there’s a practical reason that gets less airtime: it’s considerably easier to get approval to build something on a platform you already own than to ask for money for a new one.

Plenty of SharePoint intranets exist not because anyone chose SharePoint, but because choosing anything else required a fight nobody had the appetite for.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. You can build genuinely excellent intranets in SharePoint. Most years, eight of the top ten in the Nielsen Norman Group Intranet Design Annual are built on it.

But in a world where everyone wants a fully formed toy, SharePoint is a box of Lego.

And as with Lego, what you end up with depends less on how many bricks you have than on your skills, imagination, time and budget.

Allow me to stretch this analogy well past the point of good taste.

Route one: the box of Lego

Native SharePoint, straight out of the box, is an effectively unlimited supply of bricks.

In theory, you can build anything. A castle. A cathedral. A working model of the Endurance.

In practice, you have a job, four other priorities and a stakeholder who wants their department’s page to be a different shade of blue.

So you build a small house with a door and two windows.

And that’s fine! It meets the brief. Everyone can get inside. It shuts people up for five minutes.

It just isn’t quite the magnificent thing everyone imagined when they heard the word flexible.

Because that’s the catch with infinite flexibility: every decision is now yours to make. And defend. And document. And remake when somebody sufficiently senior sees it for the first time six months after approving it.

You can build a spaceship.

You will spend six months arguing about where to put the rockets.

Route two: the Lego kit

Buy a Lego kit and you follow the instructions and get something genuinely impressive in an afternoon.

The intranet equivalent is an intranet-in-a-box: a product that sits on top of SharePoint and makes it behave rather more like a fully fledged content management system.

You get templates. A design system. Navigation. Governance features. Better publishing tools. Quite a lot of decisions somebody else has already made for you.

We’ve delivered one of these end to end, including all the content, in three and a half months.

The trade-off is that you’re stuck with the pieces in the box.

If you want to turn the record store into a bookshop, you’re out of luck because the kit only came with the orange and yellow storefront.

For a lot of organisations, this is exactly the right answer. In fact, the constraint is often the thing you’re paying for.

Fixed templates end the debate about page layouts before it starts. Information appears in the same place on every page. Editors don’t need to become amateur web designers. Readers don’t have to relearn the interface every time they move from HR to Finance.

Constraint can be a feature.

Expect pushback from content editors who want more control. Expect someone to ask why you’re paying licence fees for a thing that sits on top of another thing you’ve already paid for.

Both are perfectly winnable arguments if you’ve decided in advance what you’re optimising for.

Route three: make your own kit

If the standard kits don’t fit, you can have one made.

An agency builds you a set of templates, components and a design system on top of native SharePoint. You get your own box of parts and your own instructions, so teams can create consistent pages quickly without designing each one from scratch.

You end up roughly where the kit gets you, except it’s your bookshop rather than someone else’s record store.

It typically takes nine to twelve months.

And when, two years later, somebody wants the bookshop to become an airport, you go back to the agency or find someone who understands how it was built.

Again: not necessarily a problem.

But it is now a thing you own.

Customisation has a habit of being discussed as a one-off cost when it’s really a small pet you’ve agreed to feed indefinitely.

Route four: build the Millennium Falcon

With enough time, deep knowledge of every component and what amounts to a 3D printer — an in-house development team — you can build almost anything.

Some of these intranets are extraordinary. Many of them win awards.

They also take, on average, twenty-three months and a team of fifteen. That number is one of the most useful things in the whole NNg Design Annual, and it’s the bit that tends to get skipped over on the way to the screenshots.

Because screenshots travel rather better than resourcing models. If you’re a team of two with a year and no development budget, an award-winning intranet built by fifteen people over two years is not a benchmark. It’s something a completely different organisation was able to afford.

There is no useful lesson in staring at their Millennium Falcon and wondering why your box contains twelve red bricks and a little plastic tree.

And the option that isn’t Lego at all

You can, of course, leave the Microsoft ecosystem entirely.

Standalone intranet platforms often have markedly better user experience, editorial workflow and mobile support. Employee apps are mobile-first and task-focused, and they’re frequently the only serious option for reaching frontline, field or contracted staff who have never logged into a corporate laptop and never will.

If your workforce is mostly deskless, this isn’t really the alternative route. It may be the obvious one.

But now you inherit different plumbing: single sign-on, people data, integrations, syncing and the possibility of content and effort quietly duplicating across two estates.

None of this tends to be the exciting bit of the demo. All of it will be the exciting bit of year two.

Before choosing an intranet platform, decide how you’ll choose

None of the above tells you what to buy. That’s because the platform was never the first question.

Four things are.

What’s the actual mix?

Every intranet is balancing the same handful of jobs: communication, knowledge, transactions and collaboration. Every organisation weights them differently.

Jon and I call this the graphic equaliser because the sliders sit in a different place everywhere.

An intranet for lawyers and engineers has a very different job from one serving retail staff on shift. A company where the intranet is primarily a route into HR services needs something different from one where its main purpose is publishing news and knowledge.

Work out where your sliders are before you look at a single product.

Otherwise the product demo will decide your requirements for you.

Who genuinely has to use it?

Not the audience in the strategy deck.

The actual people.

The contractor who doesn’t have an email address. The warehouse worker sharing a device. The colleague in the acquired company who still has the wrong identity in Active Directory. The person who visits the intranet twice a year and absolutely will not remember what you named the expenses section.

This single question rules out more platforms than almost any feature comparison.

What are the red lines?

“It has to be SharePoint because IT won’t support anything else” is a common cry and sometimes a completely real constraint.

Fine.

Find that out on day one.

There is no prize for conducting an elegant eight-week platform selection exercise and discovering at the end that three of the four options were never actually options.

Budget can be a red line. Data residency can be one. Accessibility. Authentication. Procurement. The ability to reach people without Microsoft 365 licences.

A constraint you know about is a design input.

A constraint you discover after the preferred-vendor presentation is a massive pain in the arse.

What are you signing up to run?

This is the question most platform selection processes don’t spend nearly enough time on.

Every route has an ongoing cost in people, not just licences.

Someone has to govern it. Maintain the templates. Manage permissions. Keep the navigation coherent. Support editors. Fix the search. Challenge the director who wants a button on the homepage. Notice that 40% of the content hasn’t been reviewed since 2024.

The question isn’t simply which platform is best.

It’s which one can you realistically keep good?

You’re choosing constraints as much as features

There is no universally right intranet platform.

There is a right path for your organisation: one that balances technology, time, money, capability, what your people will actually use and whatever internal red lines turn out to exist.

And every route involves a trade-off:

• Native SharePoint gives you flexibility, but asks you to make more decisions.
• An intranet-in-a-box makes more decisions for you, but limits what you can change.
• A custom SharePoint build gives you control, but creates something you have to maintain.
• A standalone platform may give you a better experience, but adds another system to the estate.

Those aren’t flaws hidden in the small print.

They are the decision.

Most organisations don’t have unlimited time or money, so they compromise on something that’s good enough for now and meets most of what they need.

That’s not a failure of ambition. That’s just pragamtism.

What matters is being able to explain why: clearly, in a sentence, to someone who wasn’t in the room.

Ideally before the first vendor demo does the explaining for you.

Because you can build a perfectly good intranet out of almost any of these.

You just can’t build one out of a decision nobody can remember making.

This essay grew out of a weeknote from December 2024 and a conversation I keep having with clients. The Lego analogy, and a fuller breakdown of the solution paths, appears in Digital Communications at Work, written with Jonathan Phillips and published by Kogan Page.

If you’re at the start of this decision, Lithos Partners does discovery, requirements and platform selection for organisations that would rather not find out in year two.