SharePoint offers several site types that cater to different needs and uses. Here are the most commonly used two:
- Team: Designed for collaboration within teams. They provide a platform where team members can share files, data, news, and resources. We sometimes refer to these as ‘file storage sites’.
- Communication: Meant for sharing information with a broader audience. They're useful for distributing news, reports, statuses, and other information across the organisation. We sometimes refer to these as ‘comms sites’.
And there are further site types available:
- Blog: A site for a person or team to post ideas, observations, and expertise that site visitors can comment on.
- Project: A site for managing and collaborating on a project. This site template brings all status, communication, and artifacts relevant to the project into one place.
- Community: A place where community members discuss topics of common interest. Members can browse and discover relevant content by exploring categories, sorting discussions, by popularity or by viewing only posts that have a best reply. Members gain reputation points by participating in the community, such as starting discussions and replying to them, liking posts, and specifying best replies.
- Developer: A site for developers to build, test, and publish apps for Office.
- Publishing Portal: A starter hierarchy for an Internet-facing site or a large intranet portal. This site can be customized easily with distinctive branding. Typically, this site has many more readers than contributors and it's used to publish web pages with approval workflows.
- Enterprise Wiki: A site for publishing knowledge that you capture and want to share across the enterprise.
- Product Catalog: A site for managing product catalog data that can be published to an Internet-facing site through search.
Microsoft has further details on the above available in their documentation here.