Tools compared
Every partner uses one of these five. What each does well, where each stops, and the honest pick for five common situations — from a partner who resells none of them.
By Alex Makey · 5 September 2026 · 7 min read
Every migration partner uses one of these. When a partner implies the tooling is proprietary, be sceptical: the software underneath is almost always one of five products, and you are paying for the judgement around it, not the product.
Here is what each does well, where each stops, and the honest answer to the question people actually ask — which one, and do I need anyone else.
MigrationWiz (BitTitan). Cloud-hosted, licensed per mailbox or per user, nothing to install. Covers mail, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams, and it is the tool most partners reach for on a straightforward tenant-to-tenant move. Its pitch is that you do not need professional services, and for a clean estate under a hundred users that pitch is often right.
ShareGate. A desktop application built around SharePoint and Teams. Where it stands out is the pre-migration analysis: it shows you the permission mess before you copy it, and it is the tool we would pick when the file estate is the hard part rather than the mail. Weaker as a mail tool, because it is not trying to be one.
AvePoint Fly. Cloud-hosted, multi-workload, aimed a step above MigrationWiz in estate complexity. Handles mail, files, Teams and Google Workspace sources, with more scheduling and reporting than the entry-level tools. Common in larger consolidations where several source platforms are in play at once.
Quest On Demand Migration. The enterprise option. What sets it apart is that it covers directory synchronisation and coexistence — the identity plumbing between two live tenants — not only the data copy. That is the part every other tool leaves to you. Priced and scoped accordingly.
CloudFuze. Built around file storage rather than mail: Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, SharePoint. If the move is fundamentally about getting files out of a consumer or third-party cloud into Microsoft 365, this is the specialist. Not the tool for an Exchange migration.
The list is short, and it is where migrations actually fail.
Decide the target structure. Which duplicate identities merge and which stay separate. What the SharePoint hierarchy should look like. Which anonymous sharing links get recreated and which quietly die. Every tool copies what you tell it to copy; none of them tells you what to tell it.
Sequence around a domain. A custom domain can be attached to one tenant at a time. The tool moves data; the domain cutover is a scheduling problem the tool has no opinion about.
Rebuild what does not migrate. Conditional Access policies, retention policies, litigation holds, mail-flow rules, third-party integrations authenticating against the old tenant. None of these move. They are tenant configuration, and someone recreates them by hand.
Handle the failure case. When a pass re-runs after cutover and duplicates mail into live mailboxes, no tool cleans it up. Microsoft used to allow bulk mailbox operations at 10,000 objects per pass; that is no longer available at the same scale, so recovery is now far more expensive than prevention.
These are our picks, not the vendors’. We use MigrationWiz and ShareGate most, AvePoint on larger consolidations, and we would rather tell you which one to buy than sell you the wrong engagement.
“Which tool” is usually a proxy for “can I do this without a partner”. The answer has a five-part test: under a hundred mailboxes, clean permissions, simple identity, nothing under hold, and an administrator with real time. All five true, buy the tool. Any of them false, and the tool is still the right tool — you just need someone who has watched it fail before.
There is a middle option most partners will sell and few advertise: buy the assessment, run the migration yourself. Two weeks of discovery produces the inventory, the mailbox size distribution, the permission report and a written sequence. You execute it with your own licence of whichever tool fits. We will quote that without arguing for the full engagement.
Product characterisations reflect our use of these tools on client projects as of September 2026. Vendors change capabilities and pricing; check theirs before you buy. We are not resellers of any of them and receive nothing for mentioning them.
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Related questions
They answer different questions. MigrationWiz is the general-purpose tenant-to-tenant tool, strongest on mail. ShareGate is built around SharePoint and Teams and its pre-migration permission analysis is the reason to choose it when the file estate is the hard part. Many projects use both.
Not necessarily. For a clean estate under about a hundred users with simple identity and nothing under legal hold, the tool and a competent administrator are usually enough. The tool stops being enough when tenants are being merged rather than moved, when a domain cutover has to be sequenced, or when Conditional Access and retention policies have to be rebuilt.
They do not decide the target structure, sequence the domain cutover, rebuild tenant configuration such as Conditional Access and holds, or clean up duplicated mail after a failed re-run. Those are the parts of a migration that a partner is paid for.
When two tenants have to run live side by side for months and identity has to be synchronised between them. Quest covers directory sync and coexistence, which the entry-level tools leave to you.
MigrationWiz and AvePoint Fly both handle Gmail and Drive sources. The tool matters less than mapping the Google sharing model to Microsoft 365 before the move, which no tool does for you.
No. We use MigrationWiz and ShareGate most, AvePoint on larger consolidations, and we receive nothing for mentioning any of them.
Assessment only is a real option
Inventory, mailbox size distribution, permission report, written sequence. You execute with your own tool licence. We will quote that without arguing for more.