SharePoint Enterprise Search Products Compared

This chart shows some of the key differences between the four SharePoint 2010 products that offer enterprise search capabilities, as well as their intended audiences and approximate prices. The list of features is not exhaustive but focuses on features that are new since the last versions of the products, or that differ significantly between the products.

In general, FAST for SharePoint (rightmost column) offers the most features for helping users refine search queries and for adjusting search rankings to yield more relevant results. SharePoint Server offers a subset of its capabilities. Search Server Express and Search Server offer an even more basic set of capabilities; the two products differ mainly in the size of installations they allow.

Although SharePoint Foundation 2010 (the free successor to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0) uses the same basic search technology as SharePoint Server 2010, searches are limited to material stored on the server where the query is conducted. SharePoint Foundation 2010 does not crawl networked resources, and therefore is not a true enterprise search product.