Top SharePoint Reporting Tools in 2026: Built-In Options and Third-Party Solutions Compared

Quick answer: what are the best SharePoint reporting tools?

SharePoint reporting tools surface usage, permissions and content data — from built-in reports and Power BI through to dedicated third-party platforms. The best choice depends on what you need to report on.

Built-in Microsoft 365 and SharePoint admin center reports cover usage, storage and sharing. Data access governance reports and Microsoft Purview cover permissions and audit. Power BI covers custom business reporting on your own list and library data. Third-party tools — CardioLog Analytics, HarePoint Analytics, Netwrix, Syskit Point, ShareGate and AvePoint — add the history depth, scheduling, alerting and on-premises coverage that native reports do not provide.

Every SharePoint environment eventually raises the same three questions. Who is actually using these sites? Who can see this content? And what happened to that document? SharePoint holds the answers, but it does not hand them over in one place — usage data sits in one admin center, permission data in another, and audit events somewhere else again.

That gap is what the SharePoint reporting market exists to fill. Some tools go deep on a single question; others try to cover all of them. This guide sets out what the built-in options genuinely cover in 2026, compares the leading third-party solutions in one table, and gives you a short decision path so you buy only what your native reports cannot already do.

New to the platform itself? Start with our overview of what SharePoint is and how it works, then come back here.

What SharePoint reporting actually covers

“SharePoint reporting” is not one thing. It splits into four distinct families, and almost every tool on the market is strong in one or two of them rather than all four. Naming the family you need is the fastest way to shorten a shortlist.

Fig. 1. The four families of SharePoint reporting — usage, permissions, content and audit

Usage and adoption reports

Page views, active users, file activity, search queries, and which sites nobody has touched in six months. This is the data that answers “is the intranet working?” and it is the family that native Microsoft 365 reports handle best out of the box.

Permissions and access reports

Who can open what, and how they got that access — group membership, broken inheritance, sharing links, guest accounts, and content shared with “Everyone except external users.” This is the family that grows most painful as a tenant ages, and the one that most often justifies a third-party purchase.

Content and storage reports

Storage consumption per site, oversized libraries, duplicate and stale files, document popularity, metadata coverage, and reporting on the business data held inside lists and libraries. The last of those is a slightly different job — see our guide to building a list-level report in SharePoint if that is what you are after rather than a platform-wide roundup.

Audit and compliance reports

An evidence trail: file and folder events, permission changes, sensitivity label activity, retention and DLP outcomes, and administrative actions. Compliance teams typically need this retained far longer than any usage report.

Built-in SharePoint reporting options

Before evaluating any vendor, it is worth knowing exactly how far the reports you already pay for will take you. In 2026 that is considerably further than it was a few years ago.

1. Microsoft 365 admin center usage reports

The usage reports in the Microsoft 365 admin center are the default starting point. Under Reports → Usage → SharePoint you get three tabs: Site usage, Activity and Storage. The site usage report covers file counts, active files, storage used and allocated, page views, pages visited, sharing link counts, site owner, sensitivity label and external sharing setting — all exportable to CSV.

The limits are worth knowing up front. Trends run over 7, 30, 90 or 180 days; drilling into a specific day shows up to 28 days of detail. User, group and site names are concealed by default and have to be switched on in org settings. And there is no scheduling — someone has to log in and export.

Pic. 1. The SharePoint site usage report in the Microsoft 365 admin center

2. SharePoint admin center: active sites and data access governance

The SharePoint admin center adds two things the Microsoft 365 admin center does not. The Active sites page gives you a live, filterable inventory of every site — template, storage, last activity, sensitivity label, owner — which is the fastest way to find abandoned sites.

More significant are the data access governance reports, which are purpose-built for oversharing. Snapshot reports cover site permissions across the organization, all sites a given user can reach, content shared through the “Everyone” and “Everyone except external users” groups, and files carrying particular sensitivity labels. Activity reports track sharing links created and EEEU sharing over the last 28 days.

The catch is licensing. Full functionality requires SharePoint Advanced Management. Administrators with Microsoft 365 E5 can see the activity reports, capped at 10,000 sites, but not the snapshot reports or the remediation actions. If permission reporting is your main need, check which tier you actually hold before assuming this is covered.

Pic. 2. Data access governance reports in the SharePoint admin center

3. Microsoft Purview Audit

For the audit family, Microsoft Purview Audit is the native answer. It records file and folder operations, sharing events, permission changes and administrative actions across SharePoint and OneDrive, and lets you search that log by user, activity type and date range. Standard retention covers most operational questions; longer retention and higher-bandwidth API access are licensing upgrades. For anything a regulator will read, this is the source of record — not a usage report.

4. Microsoft Power BI

No list of SharePoint reporting tools is complete without Power BI, Microsoft’s business intelligence platform. It is the right tool whenever the audience is business stakeholders rather than administrators, and whenever the report needs to combine SharePoint data with something else.

Power BI connects directly to SharePoint lists and document libraries, to exported usage data, and to on-premises SharePoint databases via SQL. Reports can be embedded back into a SharePoint page, refreshed on a schedule, and shared across the organization. Power BI Desktop is free to use; sharing reports with colleagues requires a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User license.

Its weakness is that Power BI reports nothing until you build them. There are no ready-made adoption or permission templates waiting for you — the model, the queries and the visuals are all work you or a colleague have to do, and then maintain when the tenant changes.

Pic. 3. A Power BI report built on SharePoint list data

5. PowerShell and Microsoft Graph

For one-off questions, scripting is often faster than any product. PnP PowerShell will export a full permission inventory, list every unique permission in a site collection, or dump library metadata in a few lines. The Microsoft Graph reporting endpoints return the same usage data the admin center shows, in a form you can pipe into anything. It costs nothing but time — and the time recurs, because scripts break when Microsoft changes an endpoint.

Comparison: top SharePoint reporting tools in 2026

The table below sets the native options against the leading third-party platforms. Coverage — Online versus on-premises — is the filter that eliminates candidates fastest, so check that column before the feature columns.

Trial lengths and licensing tiers change; verify current terms with each vendor before shortlisting.

Fig. 2. Built-in, build-it-yourself, or buy it — what each layer of SharePoint reporting gives you

Third-party SharePoint reporting tools in detail

CardioLog Analytics

CardioLog Analytics from Intlock is one of the longest-established names in SharePoint analytics, and it remains focused on intranet optimization rather than security. It reports on traffic sources, navigation paths, most and least popular pages, unused sites, content engagement and metadata, and layers on heat maps, click maps and scroll maps for page-level analysis. Recent versions extend coverage to Teams, OneDrive and Viva Engage, and add adoption assessment aimed at Copilot readiness.

It runs against both SharePoint on-premises and Microsoft 365, which keeps it relevant for hybrid estates that most newer platforms ignore. The trade-offs are cost and administration: it sits at the higher end of the market, and the on-premises deployment carries real maintenance overhead. Pricing is quote-based.

• Best for: communications and intranet teams who need to prove adoption, not admins chasing permissions.

HarePoint Analytics

HarePoint Analytics occupies the usage-reporting niche and does it thoroughly. It ships with a large catalog of prebuilt reports — page views, document popularity and size, user activity, search effectiveness, browser and device breakdowns, and performance metrics — with per-report customization and scheduled email delivery. Separate editions cover SharePoint Online and on-premises farms (2019, 2016, 2013 and 2010).

Its most distinctive use case is incident reconstruction: because it records granular activity, it can help retrace who did what, from which device, and in what order. Where it is weaker is visualization — charting is basic compared with Power BI — and its scope stops at usage. It will not tell you who has access to a library.

• Best for: administrators of on-premises or hybrid farms who need deep usage detail with scheduled delivery.

Netwrix Auditor

Netwrix Auditor approaches SharePoint from a security posture rather than an adoption one. It audits security policy changes, user permissions, SharePoint group membership and content access, generates automatic alerts on defined conditions, and stores audit logs in a searchable long-term archive — which is precisely what native audit retention limits make awkward. Netwrix also offers Access Analyzer for deeper entitlement analysis and the cloud-based 1Secure for tenant monitoring, so confirm which product covers your scenario.

Installation is straightforward and a free community edition exists, though its feature set is heavily reduced against the licensed version. The common criticisms are limited customization of report output and an interface that presents a great many options at once.

• Best for: security and compliance teams that need permission change alerting and long audit retention across on-premises and cloud.

Syskit Point

Syskit Point is a newer, Microsoft 365-native governance platform that consolidates what the admin centers scatter. Its core value is the permissions matrix: a single view of who has access to which sites, Teams, groups and OneDrive accounts, with drill-down into unique permissions, external sharing, inactive workspaces and license assignment. Reports can be scheduled, and site owners can be asked to review access on a recurring cycle rather than every request landing on IT.

It is Microsoft 365 only, so it is not an option for on-premises farms. A 21-day trial is available without a credit card, and pricing is quote-based.

• Best for: Microsoft 365-only tenants that have outgrown data access governance reports and want owner-driven access reviews.

ShareGate

ShareGate is best known for migration, but its governance product reports on oversharing and access risk across Microsoft 365 — external access, anonymous links, inactive workspaces, and content exposure relevant to Copilot rollouts. If you are already using ShareGate to move content off SharePoint 2016 or 2019, extending it into reporting avoids adding another vendor. It offers a 15-day full-featured trial.

• Best for: organizations mid-migration who want access reporting and migration tooling from one vendor.

AvePoint Insights

AvePoint Insights targets the enterprise end of the same problem: surfacing exposed content, risky permissions and anonymous sharing links across Microsoft 365, and feeding those findings into policy enforcement through AvePoint’s wider governance suite. It suits large estates where reporting has to connect to automated remediation rather than stopping at a list of findings. Pricing is quote-based; a trial is available through the Microsoft commercial marketplace.

• Best for: large enterprises that want reporting wired into automated policy enforcement.

Legacy options: Visio Services and PerformancePoint

Two entries that appear on older lists deserve a clear status note. Microsoft Visio combined with Visio Services can still render diagrams on a SharePoint page — useful for turning a complex process into something readable — but Silverlight-based rendering ended with SharePoint Server 2019, leaving only PNG-based rendering. It is a diagramming aid, not a reporting engine.

PerformancePoint Services and Dashboard Designer, once the standard way to build KPI scorecards on-premises, are deprecated. Microsoft’s own guidance is explicit: customers are recommended to explore Microsoft Power BI as an alternative to PerformancePoint Services. There is no SharePoint Online equivalent, and no new investment is going into it. Do not build anything new on it.

Fig. 3. Four questions that narrow the SharePoint reporting shortlist

How to choose a SharePoint reporting tool

Vendor feature lists all look similar. These five checks separate them in practice.

1. Name the report family first. Usage, permissions, content or audit. A tool that is excellent at adoption analytics will tell you nothing useful about broken permission inheritance, and vice versa.
2. Check deployment coverage before anything else. If you still run an on-premises farm, most of the modern market is unavailable to you and the shortlist narrows to HarePoint, Netwrix, CardioLog and scripting.
3. Match the output to the audience. Administrators want tables, exports and alerts. Executives want a dashboard. Buying an admin tool to satisfy a board request usually ends with someone rebuilding the output in Power BI anyway.
4. Separate one-off questions from standing reports. A single question is a native report plus a CSV export, or ten lines of PnP PowerShell. Scheduling, retention and alerting are what you are actually paying a vendor for.
5. Trial against your own tenant, not a demo environment. Permission reports are only as good as their accuracy on real inheritance sprawl, nested groups and guest accounts. A clean demo tenant proves nothing.

One further point that is easy to miss: reporting tools describe the platform, not the work happening on it. Knowing that a site had 400 page views does not tell you whether the project running on that site is on track.

Reporting on the work, not just the platform

Usage and permission reports answer administrative questions. The questions teams ask day to day are different — what is in progress, who owns it, what is overdue — and those live inside SharePoint lists rather than in admin center telemetry.

That is the gap Virto apps for SharePoint fill. The Virto Kanban Board App turns any SharePoint list into a visual board with swimlanes, filters and card-level detail, so the status of work is readable without exporting anything — with an on-premises web part edition for farms that have not moved to Microsoft 365. Virto Calendar App does the same for anything date-driven, aggregating events from multiple SharePoint lists, Exchange and external calendars into one overlay view.

Used alongside the reporting tools above, they cover the other half of the picture: the platform reports tell you the environment is healthy, the apps show you the work is moving. Every Virto product comes with a free 30-day trial — no credit card required.

Pic. 4. Virto Kanban Board App

Frequently asked questions

What are the best SharePoint reporting tools?

Built-in SharePoint reports and Power BI cover the basics — usage, storage, sharing and custom dashboards. Third-party tools add deeper usage, permissions and content reporting: CardioLog Analytics and HarePoint Analytics for usage, Netwrix for security auditing, and Syskit Point, ShareGate or AvePoint for tenant-wide permission governance. Pick based on what you need to track rather than on feature counts.

Does SharePoint have built-in reporting?

Yes. The Microsoft 365 admin center provides SharePoint site usage, activity and storage reports. The SharePoint admin center adds an active sites inventory and data access governance reports for permissions and oversharing, though the latter require SharePoint Advanced Management for full functionality. Microsoft Purview covers audit events. All of these are report-and-export rather than scheduled-delivery tools.

How do I get a SharePoint permissions report?

For SharePoint Online, start with the data access governance reports in the SharePoint admin center — they show site permissions across the organization, sites a specific user can reach, and content shared with “Everyone except external users.” For a free alternative, PnP PowerShell can export a full permission inventory. For scheduled reports, cross-workload coverage or on-premises farms, use a third-party tool such as Netwrix, Syskit Point or ShareGate. Our SharePoint permissions guide covers the underlying model in detail.

Can Power BI report on SharePoint data?

Yes. Power BI connects directly to SharePoint lists and document libraries, to exported usage data, and to on-premises SharePoint databases via SQL. Reports can be embedded back into a SharePoint page and refreshed on a schedule. Power BI Desktop is free; sharing reports requires a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User license. The limitation is that nothing exists until you build it — there are no ready-made SharePoint templates.

What replaced PerformancePoint Services?

Power BI. PerformancePoint Services is deprecated, has no SharePoint Online equivalent, and Microsoft explicitly recommends Power BI as the alternative. Existing on-premises dashboards continue to work on supported SharePoint Server versions, but nothing new should be built on it.

Are there free SharePoint reporting tools?

Several. The Microsoft 365 and SharePoint admin center reports are included in your subscription. Power BI Desktop is free to build and model with — only sharing requires a paid license. PnP PowerShell and the Microsoft Graph reporting endpoints cost nothing. Netwrix offers a free community edition with reduced functionality. Free options generally lack scheduling, alerting and long-term history.

What is the difference between SharePoint usage reports and audit logs?

Usage reports are aggregated and statistical — how many views, how many active users, how much storage — and are designed to answer adoption questions. Audit logs are event-level records of individual actions with timestamps and actors, designed to answer “who did what, when.” Usage reports are the wrong evidence for a compliance investigation; audit logs are the wrong tool for measuring intranet engagement.

Conclusion

There is no single best SharePoint reporting tool, and any list that names one is answering a narrower question than yours. The market splits along report family and deployment model, and those two filters do most of the work of choosing.

The practical sequence is straightforward. Exhaust the native reports first — they cover more in 2026 than most teams realize, and they are already paid for. Move to Power BI or PowerShell when you need a custom view and have someone to maintain it. Buy a third-party platform when you need long-term history, scheduled delivery, alerting, or coverage the admin centers simply do not offer. Trial it against your own tenant before you sign, and check the report accuracy on your messiest site collection rather than a clean one.