Quick answer: how to choose a SharePoint migration tool

For most enterprise moves to Microsoft 365, ShareGate is the right default: published pricing from $5,995 to $17,995 per year, unlimited data, and the deepest self-service coverage of SharePoint content and permissions. Choose AvePoint Fly when the migration crosses a government cloud boundary or FedRAMP authorization is a procurement requirement; it is quote-priced and runs as SaaS with a dedicated U.S. Government environment. The free Microsoft SPMT is genuinely adequate for file shares and out-of-the-box SharePoint Server sites. Quest Content Matrix earns its quote when the source is an old, heavily customized on-premises farm with Nintex workflows. And no tool, at any price, migrates InfoPath forms, custom code, or complex workflow logic: that part of the estate is re-engineering work, and pretending otherwise is where enterprise migrations fail.

Key Takeaways

  • The right SharePoint migration tool depends on your source environment and your compliance obligations, not on a feature benchmark or a vendor’s throughput table.
  • ShareGate is the enterprise default with published pricing from $5,995 to $17,995 per year as of July 2026; AvePoint Fly is the answer when the move crosses into GCC or GCC High or FedRAMP is a procurement gate; the free Microsoft SPMT and Migration Manager cover file shares and out-of-the-box SharePoint Server sites.
  • Every tool writes through the same throttled SharePoint Migration API: roughly 250 GB to 10 TB per day depending on content type, and Microsoft will not lift the throttle on request.
  • The migration tool is roughly 30 percent of success; the destination design and the permission, label, and audit fidelity are the other 70 percent.
  • Permission migration is the highest-risk part of any move, and a validation method that runs in three phases is what turns a migration into defensible audit evidence.
  • No tool migrates InfoPath forms, custom code, or complex workflow logic; that part of the estate is re-engineering work, not a license line item.

This guide is written for the VP of IT or the IT Director who already knows a migration is coming, often forced by the July 2026 end of support for SharePoint Server 2016 and 2019, and is being pitched a paid migration platform. It treats SharePoint migration tool selection as a compliance and fidelity decision, gives you a framework to match the tool to your obligations, and stays honest about where the free Microsoft tools are enough and where they are not.

The rest of this page shows the working behind that verdict: what each tool costs and covers on the vendor’s own published numbers, the throttling physics all four share, what breaks permissions and governance in flight, the validation method that makes the move defensible, and the honest boundary where tooling stops and migration services begin.

The Four Tools on the Dimensions Buyers Actually Decide On

Dimension Microsoft SPMT / Migration Manager ShareGate Migrate AvePoint Fly Quest Content Matrix
Published price Free with an eligible Microsoft 365 subscription From $5,995 to $17,995 per year by tier, unlimited data Not published; quote priced on user count or data volume Not published; quote only
Best for File shares and out-of-the-box SharePoint Server sites Self-service SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive migrations with permission and metadata control Tenant-to-tenant and cross-cloud moves, including commercial to GCC or GCC High Old or complex on-premises farms, including Nintex workflow migration
GCC / GCC High Supported; GCC High and DoD need a config change, and Migration Manager covers file shares only in government clouds SharePoint operations work in GCC, GCC High, and DoD; no Teams, Microsoft 365 Groups, mailbox, or sensitivity label migration there FedRAMP (Moderate) authorized; GCC and GCC High profiles run in a separate U.S. Government environment Installed software in your own environment; government suitability is an architecture question, not a SaaS authorization one
Workflows and customizations SharePoint 2010 out-of-the-box and SharePoint Designer 2010/2013 workflows only Nintex migration on the Enterprise tier; no custom code Content and collaboration workloads; no custom code Workflow migration including Nintex; preserves customizations where a modern equivalent exists
Speed reality All of these tools write through the same SharePoint Migration API and are throttled identically: roughly 250 GB to 10 TB per day depending on content type, and Microsoft will not lift the throttle on request Same API for cloud targets; on-premises to on-premises moves are bounded by your own farms instead
Support model Microsoft 365 support, migration-specific tickets Standard support; 24/7 premium on the Enterprise tier Vendor support with the subscription Vendor support with the license

Every figure in this table is the vendor’s own published number as of July 2026, sourced in the tool sections below and in the source list at the end of the page.

The Throttling Physics Every Tool Shares

Before comparing tools on speed, understand what they cannot change. SPMT and the third-party tools all move content through Microsoft’s SharePoint Migration API, staging through Azure, and Microsoft’s migration performance guide is blunt about the consequences. Microsoft applies tighter throttling to background applications, migration included, during weekday daytime hours, and states plainly that throttling cannot be disabled or suspended and that opening a support ticket does not lift it. The same guide publishes the honest throughput envelope: about 10 TB per day for metadata-light content such as large video or ISO files, about 1 TB per day for typical Office documents around 1.5 MB, and about 250 GB per day for metadata-heavy content such as list items with custom columns and small files around 50 KB.

Three planning consequences follow. First, schedule the heavy waves for evenings and weekends in your tenant’s region, when Microsoft says the service is ready to process a higher volume of background requests. Second, a vendor demo on a folder of PowerPoint files tells you nothing about your list-heavy legacy sites; the metadata profile of your estate, not the tool, sets the ceiling. Third, if the estate exceeds 100 TB, Microsoft asks you to open a support request at least 30 days before you start. A migration plan that ignores these numbers is a schedule written in crayon, whichever logo is on the tool.

Microsoft SPMT and Migration Manager: What Free Actually Covers

The SharePoint Migration Tool is Microsoft’s free migration path to Microsoft 365. It migrates from SharePoint Server 2010, 2013, 2016, and 2019, SharePoint Foundation 2010 and 2013, and file shares, into SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams, preserving permissions, versions, metadata, and taxonomy, with incremental passes to shrink the cutover window and full PowerShell parity for scripted runs. Its workflow support is narrow and worth quoting precisely: SharePoint Server 2010 out-of-the-box workflows and SharePoint Designer 2010 and 2013 workflows. Microsoft also ships the free SharePoint Migration Assessment Tool (SMAT) to scan a 2013 farm for migration blockers before you start, and SPMT 4.0 and later runs a built-in assessment that scans the source and produces a content inventory and a migration-risk report.

Two more version and configuration details matter for planning. SPMT 4.1 can convert SharePoint Designer 2010 and 2013 workflows to Power Automate, but read that as an assisted conversion, not a lift-and-shift: unsupported actions become placeholder Compose steps, out-of-the-box approval workflows need a designated flow owner, and anything complex or custom still needs a genuine rebuild. And if your on-premises server is configured with multiple authentication providers including Windows authentication, Microsoft does not support Windows authentication for the migration; you will need another method. Migration Manager, also free and built into the SharePoint admin center, handles file-share and cloud-source migrations at scale with agent-based scaling across multiple machines and centralized task management and reporting, which SPMT’s local model does not match at volume.

For government tenants, Microsoft’s own tooling works with a caveat each: Migration Manager supports only file share migration in government clouds, and GCC High and DoD customers must edit the agent configuration before install, setting SPOEnvironmentType to 2 for GCC High or 3 for DoD.

The honest verdict: if your estate is file shares plus standard team sites with out-of-the-box lists and libraries, SPMT does the job and the license line of your budget is zero, and the money you would have spent on a platform is better invested in the destination design and the validation work. What free does not buy you is deep permission remapping, delta-sync orchestration across hundreds of site collections, or coverage for anything customized. SPMT also does not support tenant-to-tenant migration; a move from one Microsoft 365 tenant to another needs ShareGate or AvePoint Fly. Enterprises rarely fail with SPMT because the tool is bad; they fail because their estate was never as plain as the inventory claimed.

ShareGate: The Enterprise Default, Priced in the Open

ShareGate, now part of Workleap, is the one enterprise-grade tool in this comparison that publishes its prices, which is why it anchors so many migration budgets. On ShareGate’s published pricing, as of July 2026, Migrate Essentials starts at $5,995 per year for tenants up to 250 employees with one machine activation; Migrate Pro starts at $9,995 per year for up to 1,000 employees with five machine activations and adds Google Workspace, Exchange Online mailbox migration, and Microsoft Purview sensitivity label support; and Enterprise starts at $17,995 per year for larger tenants with 25 machine activations, Box and Nintex migration, and 24/7 premium support. All tiers carry unlimited data, so the budget question is employee count and how many parallel migration machines the schedule needs, not terabytes. The sensitivity-label mapping on Pro and above is worth more than it looks: it is the feature that makes a migrated estate Copilot-ready and DLP-aware on arrival.

The regulated-environment caveat is specific, and ShareGate’s own GCC documentation spells it out: because GCC High and DoD tenants do not permit regular access to the Graph API, ShareGate there cannot migrate mailboxes, cannot migrate or report on Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Groups, cannot map Purview sensitivity labels, and cannot use modern authentication. What remains, in ShareGate’s words, is that you can still perform most SharePoint operations in GCC, GCC High, and DoD tenants. For a defense contractor, that reads: ShareGate can carry your sites and documents into GCC High, and everything Graph-dependent needs another plan.

AvePoint Fly: The Quote-Priced SaaS for Cross-Cloud and Government Moves

AvePoint’s migration product is Fly, delivered as SaaS with an on-premises Fly Server variant, per AvePoint’s product page. AvePoint does not publish list prices; its subscriptions are priced on user count or the amount of data you migrate, quote only. That opacity is a real procurement cost, and it buys two things the others do not have. First, FedRAMP: AvePoint’s FedRAMP (Moderate) authorization, first sponsored by the Department of Energy in 2021, extends to Fly. Second, a genuine government-cloud lane: per the Fly documentation, commercial-environment profiles cannot touch GCC or GCC High tenants at all; those migrations run through app profiles in the separate U.S. Government environment of AvePoint Online Services. If your program is a commercial-to-GCC High move under CMMC pressure, that separation is precisely what your assessor wants to see, and it is the scenario where Fly is usually the right answer despite the unpublished price. Among the paid platforms it also carries the strongest permission engine and the most detailed compliance reporting, which is what produces the evidence an assessor will ask for.

Quest Content Matrix: For the Farm Everyone Is Afraid Of

Content Matrix is the veteran of on-premises SharePoint migration. Quest’s product page positions it for migration from any previous version of SharePoint Server to newer SharePoint or Microsoft 365, without incremental hop-by-hop upgrades, and states that it preserves content, metadata, permissions, and customizations and handles workflow migration including complex solutions like Nintex. Pricing is not published; it is quote via Quest. In practice this is the tool that gets shortlisted when the source is a 2010-era farm carrying a decade of accumulated structure that SPMT cannot read and a SaaS tool cannot reach, and when farm-to-farm consolidation has to happen before or instead of a cloud move. It is installed software in your own environment, which for some regulated networks is itself the deciding feature.

How Do You Migrate Without Breaking Permissions and Governance?

Most migration horror stories are not lost documents; they are broken access. The mechanics are predictable. On-premises permissions ride on Active Directory identities and SharePoint groups; Microsoft 365 permissions ride on Entra ID identities, Microsoft 365 Groups, and sharing links. Every account that does not map cleanly, every orphaned user, every domain group with no cloud twin, becomes either silently dropped access or, worse, a site that gets opened wide to make the errors stop. The hard cases are equally predictable: broken inheritance, unique permissions set at the item level, and cross-site group references. Item-level permission breaks multiply the problem: they migrate slowly, they are invisible in a folder listing, and they are exactly where the sensitive exceptions live. These are the cases a free tool handles least gracefully, and they are the single best reason a regulated estate reaches for ShareGate or AvePoint: not speed, but the permission engine and the pre-migration delta report that show you what will change before it changes.

Sensitivity labels deserve the same suspicion, because Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels are not applied to content by the SharePoint Migration API. If your content needs to arrive labeled, for Copilot readiness, for data-loss prevention, or for a classification mandate, you either map the labels in flight with a tool that supports it or you plan a labeling pass after the move. Assuming labels carry over on their own is one of the more common and more expensive mistakes in a regulated migration.

The discipline that prevents all of it is not tool-specific. Inventory unique permissions and orphaned identities before the first wave and decide, in writing, what each unmapped principal becomes. Simplify before you move: a permission model too complex to audit at the source will not become auditable by being copied. Migrate a pilot wave and reconcile actual against intended access before scaling, then re-verify after cutover, because governance owners change during long programs. And carry the audit trail: in regulated environments the migration itself is an auditable event, and the reconciliation evidence is a deliverable, not a courtesy. i3solutions runs migrations against named control families across CMMC, HIPAA, SOC 2, and NIST 800-171, producing artifacts auditors can review, and that posture is set before wave one, not reconstructed after an incident.

A Validation Method for a Defensible SharePoint Migration

In our experience, and in the published experience of most credible migration practices, the tool accounts for roughly 30 percent of whether a migration succeeds. The other 70 percent is the destination design, the permission model, and the validation discipline, the work that determines whether the migrated estate is usable, governed, and audit-defensible. A migration that lands content into a poorly designed destination is not a success that used the wrong tool, it is a rebuild waiting to happen, which is the case our SharePoint Modernization ROI analysis makes for designing the target before you move. So treat validation as the deliverable, not an afterthought: for a regulated estate the migration is not done when the content arrives, it is done when you can prove the content arrived correctly. A defensible migration runs in three phases, and the source stays read-only until the third phase completes.

Phase 1: Pre-migration inventory

Before anything moves, generate a complete inventory of the source: item counts, site and library structure, permission map, metadata fields, and content checksums where they matter. This baseline is what every later phase reconciles against, and it is the artifact an auditor will ask you to produce.

Phase 2: Real-time migration logging

During the move, log every item’s success or failure, every permission mapping result, and every throttling event the tool encounters. Real-time logging is how you catch a partial failure while it is still cheap to fix, rather than surfacing an audit gap months later when an examiner asks for evidence you never captured.

Phase 3: Post-migration reconciliation

After the move, reconcile the destination against the Phase 1 baseline: every document, every permission, every metadata field. Only when reconciliation is clean does the source come off read-only. This three-phase record, baseline, log, and reconciliation, is the audit evidence that turns a migration from a hopeful copy into a defensible one.

When No Tool Is Enough

Every vendor page in this comparison is honest about content and quiet about the same three things. InfoPath forms do not migrate; the platform is retired and each form is a rebuild decision, typically into Power Apps. Enterprise InfoPath migration engagements at i3solutions typically run 13 to 16 weeks elapsed time across four phases. SharePoint 2010 and 2013 workflow engines are gone from Microsoft 365, so beyond the narrow set SPMT carries, workflow logic must be rebuilt in Power Automate, work we detail in our SharePoint 2013 workflow retirement guide. And custom code, farm solutions, event receivers, and hand-built web parts have no migration path at all; they are re-engineering projects wearing a migration line item.

This is the part of the estate that decides whether the program is a tool purchase or a services engagement. A useful test: if more than a handful of your business-critical processes live in InfoPath, Nintex, SharePoint Designer, or custom code, the tool license is the smallest line in the true budget, and the real plan is an application modernization program with a content migration inside it. Where the free tooling stops being the right answer is a question about your environment rather than your budget, and it is the question this page exists to answer. i3Solutions assesses that threshold before recommending a purchase, because recommending a licence nobody needed is not advice. i3solutions has been a Microsoft partner since 1997. i3solutions has completed more than 600 Microsoft platform implementations. i3solutions has delivered enterprise SharePoint and Power Platform programs for aerospace and defense manufacturers, major defense organizations, a financial-services firm, a national healthcare system, and military organizations. All i3solutions SharePoint developers, architects, and consultants are 100% U.S.-based. That matters when the content in flight is CUI.

What Does a SharePoint Migration Actually Cost?

Put the license in perspective first: between $0 for SPMT and roughly $18,000 per year for ShareGate’s top published tier, on vendor list prices as of July 2026, tooling is rarely the number that decides the budget. A tool license that looks expensive next to free tooling can be the cheaper option once permission remediation effort is counted, and it can just as easily be an unnecessary purchase on an estate that never needed it. The services side is where real money moves, and we publish our own bands rather than gesture at “it depends.” Enterprise SharePoint strategy assessment engagements typically run four to six weeks elapsed time with two to three i3solutions consultants. Full migration project cost for defense contractors with SharePoint customizations and CMMC compliance scope typically lands in the $100,000 to $300,000 range. Regulated-industry SharePoint modernization carries roughly 25 to 35 percent cost overhead versus commercial work for equivalent scope, driven by control mappings, audit-trail discipline, and zero-downtime cutover patterns. Our SharePoint migration cost guide breaks those bands down by scenario.

How to Evaluate a Partner for a SharePoint Migration

If you bring in outside help, evaluate the partner on the dimensions that predict whether the migrated estate survives an audit, not on which tool they resell. First, regulated-sector record: has the firm run governed migrations in environments with real compliance obligations, and can it name the control families it worked against. Second, destination-design depth: does the partner lead with the target architecture and the permission model, or with a tool license. Third, validation discipline: will you receive the three-phase evidence record, or just a report that the job finished. i3solutions runs this work under a practice it calls Enterprise Delivery Assurance, the operating discipline that keeps regulated programs on-time, in-scope, in-production, and it frames its model as borrowed expertise: the engagement leaves your team able to run the governed estate without us. Our SharePoint migration services team scopes the engagement side of exactly this work.

Two patterns from regulated migrations show what that looks like. A defense contractor preparing for a CMMC assessment engaged i3solutions to migrate a SharePoint 2016 farm holding controlled unclassified information into GCC High, where permission fidelity and the 110 controls across 14 families of NIST SP 800-171 had to be preserved and evidenced; we used AvePoint for the permission engine and compliance reporting, kept the source read-only until reconciliation, and produced a per-item migration log the assessor could follow. A financial-services firm under SOC 2 engaged i3solutions after a cloud-first push had started moving content with the free tools and lost track of which legal-hold permissions transferred; the remediation was a permission audit, a re-migration with mapped sensitivity labels, and a three-phase validation record an examiner could read. In both, the deliverable the client kept was the evidence, not just a migrated site.

The Decision, by Scenario

File shares and plain team sites, commercial tenant: SPMT plus Migration Manager, and spend the savings on cleanup before you move. Governed enterprise estate with real permission and metadata complexity: ShareGate, sized by employee count and how many parallel machines your cutover calendar needs. Commercial to GCC or GCC High, or FedRAMP required in procurement: AvePoint Fly through its U.S. Government environment, with ShareGate as the SharePoint-content workhorse where its GCC High limits are acceptable. Aging customized on-premises farm, Nintex, farm consolidation: Quest Content Matrix. InfoPath, SharePoint Designer or Nintex logic, custom code, or a compliance regime that audits the move itself: a tool will carry the documents, and the program needs a services partner; that is the boundary this whole page has been drawing.

Ready to turn a tool question into a governed migration plan your auditors and your steering committee both accept? Leave with a destination design, a tool match, and a validation method you can defend.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which SharePoint migration tool should an enterprise use: ShareGate, AvePoint, or the Microsoft SPMT?

ShareGate for most governed enterprise migrations: published pricing from $5,995 to $17,995 per year, unlimited data, and strong permission and metadata handling. AvePoint Fly when the move crosses into GCC or GCC High or when FedRAMP authorization is a procurement gate; it is quote priced. SPMT when the estate is file shares and out-of-the-box sites, because free is a real feature when nothing in scope needs more. The choice stops mattering the moment InfoPath, custom workflows, or custom code enter scope; at that point the decision is about the services partner, not the tool.

Which SharePoint migration tool is best for a regulated enterprise?

There is no single best tool; the right one follows your obligations. For highly regulated content under HIPAA, SOC 2, or CMMC, where permission fidelity and audit evidence are mandatory, AvePoint has the strongest permission engine and compliance reporting, and its separate U.S. Government environment is the lane for GCC and GCC High moves. For permission-heavy restructuring, tenant-to-tenant moves, or sensitivity-label mapping, ShareGate is the common choice. For straightforward SharePoint Server to SharePoint Online moves, the free SPMT is usually sufficient, and for large file-share or cloud-source volumes, the free Migration Manager scales well. Match the tool to the source environment and the governing obligation, then put the bulk of your attention into the destination design and the validation method, which matter more than the tool.

How much does a SharePoint migration cost?

Tool licensing runs from $0 (Microsoft SPMT) to $5,995 to $17,995 per year (ShareGate’s published tiers, as of July 2026), with AvePoint and Quest quote only. The services work around the tool is the real budget: i3solutions strategy assessments typically run four to six weeks with two to three consultants, full migration projects for defense contractors with SharePoint customizations and CMMC compliance scope typically land in the $100,000 to $300,000 range, and regulated-industry work carries roughly 25 to 35 percent overhead versus equivalent commercial scope for control mappings, audit-trail discipline, and zero-downtime cutover patterns.

How much do SharePoint migration tools cost?

The two Microsoft tools, SPMT and Migration Manager, are free with an eligible Microsoft 365 subscription. ShareGate publishes its prices: $5,995 to $17,995 per year by tier, covering unlimited data and tiered by employee count and machine activations. AvePoint is priced by custom enterprise quote rather than a public list price, and Quest Content Matrix is also quote only. Treat these as July 2026 figures and confirm the licensing model with each vendor. The more useful way to think about cost is that the tool is rarely the expensive part: on a regulated migration the larger line items are the destination design, the permission model, the workflow rebuild, and the validation work, which together account for most of the budget and almost all of the risk.

Can I migrate SharePoint Server to SharePoint Online for free?

Yes, for most straightforward moves. The free SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT) migrates SharePoint Server 2010 through 2019 to SharePoint Online and preserves permissions, versions, metadata, and taxonomy, with incremental passes to shorten the cutover. Paired with PnP PowerShell for scripting, SPMT covers the large majority of standard document-library migrations at no licensing cost. You move to a paid platform when a specific need exceeds the free tools: permission-heavy restructuring, tenant-to-tenant moves, sensitivity-label mapping, or detailed compliance reporting. For a regulated estate, the saved licensing budget is usually better spent on destination design and validation than on a platform you do not yet need.

Is the free Microsoft SPMT good enough for an enterprise migration?

For file shares and out-of-the-box SharePoint Server sites, yes, and its PowerShell support scales it further than its desktop interface suggests. Its limits are equally clear: workflow migration covers only SharePoint 2010 out-of-the-box and SharePoint Designer 2010/2013 workflows, and there is no deep permission remapping or orchestration across a large, customized estate. Run Microsoft’s free SMAT assessment first; it will tell you whether your farm is as plain as you think.

How do we migrate SharePoint to Microsoft 365 without breaking permissions and governance?

Map identities before content: inventory unique permissions, orphaned users, and unmappable domain groups, and decide in writing what each becomes in Entra ID. Simplify the permission model at the source, pilot a wave, reconcile actual against intended access, and re-verify after cutover. In regulated environments, treat the migration as an auditable event and keep the reconciliation evidence; i3solutions runs migrations against named control families across CMMC, HIPAA, SOC 2, and NIST 800-171, producing artifacts auditors can review.

Do ShareGate, AvePoint, and SPMT work in GCC High?

All three, with different edges. ShareGate performs most SharePoint operations in GCC High and DoD but cannot migrate mailboxes, Teams, Microsoft 365 Groups, or sensitivity labels there, because those tenants do not permit regular Graph API access. AvePoint Fly handles GCC and GCC High through app profiles in its separate U.S. Government environment and carries FedRAMP (Moderate) authorization. Microsoft’s Migration Manager supports government clouds for file share migration only, with a required SPOEnvironmentType configuration change (2 for GCC High, 3 for DoD).

Why is every migration tool slow, and can Microsoft lift the throttling?

No. Every tool here writes through the same SharePoint Migration API, and Microsoft states that throttling cannot be disabled or suspended and that a support ticket does not lift it. Microsoft’s published planning envelope is about 10 TB per day for metadata-light files, about 1 TB per day for typical Office documents, and about 250 GB per day for metadata-heavy small files and list items, with the best throughput in your region’s evenings and weekends. Plan waves around those numbers rather than around any vendor’s demo.

Can SharePoint migration tools move my old workflows?

Partly, and with caveats. SPMT 4.1 can convert SharePoint Designer 2010 and 2013 workflows to Power Automate, but it is an assisted conversion rather than a lift-and-shift: unsupported actions become placeholder steps, out-of-the-box approval workflows need a designated flow owner, and anything complex or custom still requires a genuine rebuild. Classic workflow engines are retired in SharePoint Online, so for most regulated estates the honest plan is to rebuild the workflows that matter in Power Automate and retire the ones no one uses, rather than carry dead automation into the new tenant. Treat workflow migration as its own project inside the larger move, not a checkbox the migration tool handles.

Can a migration tool move our SharePoint workflows, Nintex forms, or InfoPath forms?

Only narrowly. SPMT carries SharePoint 2010 out-of-the-box and SharePoint Designer 2010/2013 workflows; ShareGate Enterprise and Quest Content Matrix can migrate Nintex workflows. Nothing migrates InfoPath into Microsoft 365’s modern stack, and the 2010/2013 workflow engines no longer exist there, so most workflow and form logic is a rebuild into Power Automate and Power Apps. That rebuild, not the content move, is usually the long pole in an enterprise migration schedule.

How long does a SharePoint migration take?

The honest answer is a planning range, not a single number. A mid-size estate often runs three to six months end to end, and a large or highly regulated one can run six to eighteen months, with the regulated migration sitting at the deliberate end because each phase is validated against its baseline before the source comes off read-only. The timeline is driven far more by governance than by tooling: inventorying the source, designing the destination, mapping permissions and labels, rebuilding workflows, and reconciling the result. A phased, validated approach lets you show progress early without forcing a single high-risk cutover.

Sources

All third-party figures on this page were read from the following primary sources in July 2026:
ShareGate pricing;
ShareGate GCC limitations;
AvePoint pricing;
AvePoint Fly product page;
AvePoint FedRAMP announcement;
AvePoint Fly documentation;
Microsoft SPMT overview;
Microsoft migration performance guide;
Microsoft Migration Manager government cloud settings;
Quest Content Matrix product page.
i3solutions engagement figures are i3solutions’ own published delivery data.

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About the Author

By , Founder/COO, i3solutions

Michael Branson co-founded i3solutions 30 years ago and brings executive, operational, and technical perspective to organizations working in complex, secure, and mission-critical environments. His insights focus on business process consulting, automation, data analytics, collaboration, secure operating models, and the operational discipline required to turn technology investments into practical business systems with measurable value.