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REF / COMPARISON

A standalone EDMS product, or one built on the platform you already own

That is the actual choice. Bring in a second vendor platform with its own repository, its own identity store and its own per-user subscription. Or deploy the same capability on the Microsoft 365 your organisation already licenses, secures and audits.

Get a five-year costing Compare a specific product

REF / SIDE BY SIDE

The dimensions that decide it

Feature checklists all look identical by the time a vendor has finished writing one. These are the differences that show up later, in the budget, the timeline and the exit.

Dimension Standalone EDMS product EDMS by Sibasi
What you are buying A second platform, licensed per user per month, holding your documents in the vendor's own repository. A configured product and the delivery, on the Microsoft platform your organisation already licenses.
Ongoing software cost Microsoft 365 licences, plus a second per-user subscription, typically USD 10–75 per user per month, for as long as you use it. Microsoft 365 licences only. Optional annual maintenance, priced as a service rather than per seat.
Where staff actually work A separate application, with connectors back into Outlook and Office of varying depth. Inside Outlook, Teams, OneDrive and Office, with add-in task panes in Word and Excel, because the repository is SharePoint.
Identity and security surface A second identity store and a second security surface to integrate, review, patch and audit. Microsoft Entra ID, conditional access, Purview sensitivity labels and DLP applied directly to the repository. One surface, one audit log.
Records management and retention A core competence of the category, delivered on the vendor's own retention engine. Retention schedules against your functional file plan, record declaration, legal hold, disposition review by a named officer and destruction certificates.
AI over the document estate Increasingly available, often as a further paid tier on top of the base subscription. Azure AI Document Intelligence, SharePoint Premium and Microsoft 365 Copilot, security-trimmed to each user and included in the Premium deployment.
Finance and CRM integration Connectors, with depth varying by product and by which systems you run. Native Dynamics 365 Business Central, Dynamics NAV, Sales and Customer Service integration, plus Graph and Power Automate to everything else.
Time to a working system Fast for the vendor's standard configuration, slower where your processes differ from it. Four to six weeks for a Basic Deployment, three to six months for a full enterprise rollout with digitisation running alongside.
If the relationship ends An export and migration project, and the documents leave the system that governed them. Nothing moves. The repository, documents, metadata and version history are already in your own tenant, under your own licences.
Who is on site An overseas vendor, usually through a reseller layer and a time zone. Sibasi engineers in Nairobi, working East Africa Time, who travel to your offices.

The standalone column describes the category of per-user licensed document management products: iManage, M-Files, Laserfiche, DocuWare, OpenText and similar. Capabilities vary between them. The per-user licensing model and the second security surface do not. Compare a named product.

REF / TOTAL COST

Where the difference actually shows up

Deployment cost is a one-off line and easy to compare. The subscription is the line that compounds, and it usually gets waved through on a first-year figure.

Year one

A standalone product often looks cheaper. The deployment line is smaller and the subscription has only run for twelve months.

Year three

Subscription cost has typically overtaken the deployment difference, and it scales with every user you add.

Year five

The subscription is now the dominant number in the total, and it has bought nothing that was not already there in year one.

Run it against your own user count over five years before you sign anything. Most organisations that do this exercise find the subscription has quietly become the largest line in the total, and that it bought nothing that was not already there in year one.

REF / PLATFORM

SharePoint is not the competition. It is the foundation.

This is the part buyers most often have backwards. Microsoft SharePoint is what EDMS by Sibasi is built on, and that is the source of the advantage rather than a compromise.

Microsoft builds the platform

Storage, search, availability, identity and compliance tooling are engineered and operated by Microsoft, with commitments your security team can verify from Microsoft's own documentation.

Sibasi builds the system on it

Your file plan, metadata model, retention schedules, registry processes, workflows and integrations. This is the intellectual property, and it is what SharePoint does not ship with.

You already own the platform

Microsoft 365 Business Premium, E3, E5 and the non-profit and academic plans all include SharePoint. A large part of the system is already on your balance sheet.

It compounds in your favour

Every Microsoft investment in SharePoint, Purview and Copilot lands in your EDMS. A standalone vendor has to build its own equivalent and charge you for it.

REF / NEXT STEP

Put us against the product you are considering

Tell us which one and what your user count is. We will run the capability it is strongest on against one of your own documents, and put the five-year cost next to it.

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