SharePoint stores documents well. An ISMS is the relationships between them: controls, risks, assets, suppliers, deadlines. That is the difference.
SharePoint (and the Microsoft 365 stack around it) is genuinely good at storing documents: versioning, permissions, retention. If your business already pays for it, using it for ISO 27001 feels free. The problem is that an ISMS is not a pile of documents; it is a set of relationships between documents, controls, risks, assets and suppliers, and SharePoint has no idea those relationships exist.
| SharePoint / Microsoft 365 | ISOvault | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Included in M365, plus setup and admin time | £125/month + VAT, price for life |
| Document versioning | Good: native version history | Versioning plus a named approver and revision history on every version |
| ISO 27001 structure | None; you build folder taxonomies and lists yourself | 93 Annex A controls pre-loaded; registers structured out of the box |
| Cross-referencing | Manual hyperlinks and lookup columns, maintained by hand | Controls, risks, assets, suppliers and evidence linked natively |
| Compliance calendar | Build it in Lists / Planner and hope | Reminders at 90, 60 and 30 days, built in |
| Gap analysis | None | AI reads the whole ISMS and flags gaps with an opinion |
| Setup | Weeks of taxonomy and permission design | Self-serve, same day |
Keep using SharePoint for what it is excellent at: company-wide document storage, collaboration and retention. Plenty of ISOvault customers keep their general document estate in M365 and use ISOvault as the system of record for the ISMS specifically: the controls, registers, evidence links and deadlines that SharePoint would otherwise hold as disconnected files and lists.
Every SharePoint ISMS we have seen was built by one motivated person, and its structure lived in their head. When they left or changed roles, the taxonomy stopped being maintained and the lists drifted out of date. Structure that lives in software survives staff changes; structure that lives in conventions does not.
You are paying to avoid building and maintaining an ISMS structure by hand in a tool that does not understand ISO 27001. The comparison is £125/month against the hours spent building taxonomies, maintaining lookup columns and preparing audits manually.
Yes, policies stay as Word documents inside ISOvault with versioning, control tagging, review dates, and an approval step that records who approved each version and when, and you can keep master copies in SharePoint if you prefer.
Import your existing ISMS into ISOvault, run the AI gap analysis and generate your Statement of Applicability. 14 days free, no card required, walk away with the Word documents.