Hub Sites vs. Subsites: 10 Reasons Hub Sites Win

So let's start with sub sites.

Sub-sites is how we built SharePoint sites in the past.

And the way it worked, essentially, we had this site collection, which is pretty much a collection of sites, all right? So IT would typically provision the top level site, and then you could create sub-sites in that site collection.

And of course, the reason it was called site collection, because it was literally a collection of subsites.

And it pretty much followed like the folder, almost hierarchy, folder hierarchy.

It looked almost like a family tree, all right, if you looked at it, you know, top down.

So at the top was this main site that would be created by IT department.

And then you would create a subsite.

multiple maybe sub-sites and then you can create sub-sites and the sub-sites and the sub-sites so for example if we if we take an example of a typical company intranet right the main site would be kind of the main site right the main you know page where that users would access and then underneath inside of that site, you would create maybe a sub-site for HR department, right? And then finance and legal.

And then under each, under HR department, there would be, again, sub-sites for HR and so on.

So this concept was referred to as sub-sites being created within a site collection.

And we had this method, I mean, this is pretty much how we built sites since we almost had SharePoint since 2001 up until 2016, 2017.

What happened in 2017 was that Microsoft totally revamped the look and feel of SharePoint.

And they also revamped the whole architecture.

So the new direction from Microsoft was that we no longer need to create site collections and sub-sites inside of each site collection.

The new instruction was that every new site is pretty much its own site collection.

So in other words, if you wanted to have the main site, It would be just a site with nothing inside of it.

If you wanted to create an HR site, then once again, you would create a brand new site collection, all right? Even though it's just one site, but there would be nothing Above it, nothing below it, all right? We call this a flat architecture.

Essentially, the new piece of terminology that we started using was flat architecture.

Now, in order to unite all of this modern sites that we got in 2017, a new feature was released in 2018 called Hub Sites.

And essentially, Hub Sites allowed organizations to unite all these separate sites, if you will, in one common block of sites.

Because remember, with sub-sites, by design, they naturally kind of resided within the site collection.

They were physically attached to that particular site collection.

With hub sites, all the sites were independent, all right? All the sites were independent.

And hub sites allowed organizations to create pretty much kind of hub and spoke, you know, model, all right? So you essentially would unite all of the sites in one common entity with common branding and navigation, all right? So think of almost it being like, you know, the analogy would be planets being separate, but then they're all part of the solar system.