There is a moment in life for almost every enterprise when the conversation shifts. Not to cloud adoption, not to cost saving, but to separation.
A business unit, a division, sometimes an entire region, breaking away to stand on its own. It could be driven by a strategic sale, a merger, a realignment. Or simply a board deciding it’s time for a part of the business to operate independently.
In those moments, technology leaders face a reality that is both deeply strategic and brutally practical: you’re not just moving workloads, your untangling lives, digital lives, at enterprise scale.

Today we’re talking about that.
And not in the abstract, we’re focusing on the complex, high stakes case of separating a division from a hybrid Microsoft 365 tenant.

We’ll explore what makes it hard, what the market offers, and how the right choice in migration tooling can mean the difference between a controlled handover and a six-month nightmare. 

Picture this:

you’ve got one active directory forest, synced into a single Microsoft 365 tenant. That tenant runs your Exchange Online, your SharePoint, your Teams. You’ve also got Power Platform apps, integrated SaaS tool, and a very healthy list of security and compliance controls that can’t just be dropped mid-migration.

Now the spin-off company wants, no, needs, three things:

1. All their users, data, and applications moved
2. A clean coexistence period where calendars, Teams chats, even shared files keep working between the two organizations.
3. A new identity, a new domain, visible to customers and partners before the migration is even finished

If you’re an IT leader, you know what that means:
This isn’t a long weekend job, this is a multi-phased, multi-tool, multi-team orchestration with every hour of downtime costing goodwill, money or both.

When you start evaluating how to do it, you quickly find there are plenty of migration tools on the market, but most of them were designed for something much simpler, clean cloud-to-cloud moves, or small-scale tenant consolidations.

That’s why the names that keep coming up for enterprise-scale divestitures are different. Today we’ll talk about four: Quest on Demand Migration, BitTitan MigrationWiz, AvePoint Fly and ShareGate.

And before you ask, no, this is not a sponsored segment. These are simply the tools we see over and over in serious RFP’s, project decks. And successful case studies.

Let’s start with Quest On Demand Migration.

Quest has been in the migration business for decades, and it shows. Their platform doesn’t just copy mailboxes and files, it was built for hybrid environments, where you have to split on-premises AD-objects, sync them to a new Entra ID, and keep everything in sync during coexistence period.

And coexistence here isn’t just ‘we can still send emails’ It’s GAL sync, so the address book stays complete in both organizations. It’s free/busy visibility so executives can still schedule meetings across the separation line. It’s keeping Teams collaboration alive while parts of your workforce are officially moving to another company.

Add to that something Quest calls domain rewrite, powered by its Binary Tree technology. That’s the ability to change everyone’s email address and UPN mid-Flight, so the new company can launch under its new brand before all the data has been moved. If you’ve ever had marketing breathing down your neck about timelines, you know how valuable that is.

Quest wraps all of this in subscriptions tiers (T3, T5, and T7) so you’re not cobbling together licenses for each workload. One subscription, one per user cost and no data caps. Every workload, Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, PowerBi, Teams, even Teams private Chats, is included. And that matters when you realize just how much data a 3,000-person division can generate.

Now contrast that with BitTitan MigrationWiz

For Years MigrationWiz was the default answer for fast, Saas-based Microsoft 365 migrations. It’s still great at that, fast setup, cloud-hosted management, and straight forward pricing for per-user bundles.

What’s changed, and why it now deserves a closer look for divestiture, is that BitTitan now has Active Directory migration capabilities.
You can migrate users, groups, and OU’s into a new AD forest, sync changes with delta runs, and even rewrite UPN suffixes. That closes a big gap it used to have in hybrid scenarios.

But and this is a real consideration, MigrationWiz still has data size limits in its pricing. Large OneDrive accounts or big SharePoint libraries can hit tier thresholds, which means more licenses or higher costs. And while it can handle UPN rewrite, it doesn’t have a built-in, end-to-end domain branding solution. Full coexistence, GAL sync, free/busy, would still require pairing it with another product.

In other words, if you want quick familiar, cloud-first tooling, MigrationWiz is attractive, especially for the M365 workloads. But if your divestiture hinges on complex identity and coexistence, it’s probably part of a stack, not the whole stack.

Then there’s AvePoint Fly

AvePoint positions itself as a content migration and transformation powerhouse. And in SharePoint and Teams, that’s exactly what it is. Fly can pre-scan your content, identity permissions issues or unsupported customizations, and restructure things before you cut over. That alone can save days of troubleshooting after migration.

Pricing here is usually per-user subscription, also with no data caps. That means you can move massive document libraries without worrying about hitting a size ceiling. For divestitures where teams and SharePoint are the heaviest lifts. AvePoint can be a lifesaver.

Where it’s weaker is in the hybrid identity story. It doesn’t migrate AD, doesn’t handle coexistence, and doesn’t offer domain rewrite. So, in our scenario, AvePoint is best as a specialist tool alongside something else, you’d use it when the business says, “Our SharePoint and Teams have to be spotless on Day One.”

Finally, ShareGate

This one comes up all the time, usually in the same breath as SharePoint migrations. ShareGate’s strength is content governance and migration. It gives you deep reporting, cleanup tools, and an interface so straightforward you can hand it to a junior admin and they’ll be productive in a day.

Licensing is per machine, per year, with unlimited users and unlimited data. That’s attractive if you have a lot of content to move and multiple admins working in parallel.

But and this is why it’s not the first name in divestiture playbooks; it’s content-only. No AD-migration, no coexistence, no domain rewrite. It’s the scalpel in the migration surgeon’s toolkit, not the operating table.

Conclusion 

So what does all this mean when you’re standing up in front of your steering committee, trying to justify your tool of choice?
It means that Quest On Demand Migration is the only one of these four that can truly cover every aspect of our divestiture scenario in a single platform.
Hybrid AD separation, coexistence, domain rebranding, all major workloads, unlimited data and a subscription model that scales cleanly.

BitTitan MigrationWiz comes close if you combine it with other tools, especially now that it supports AD migration, but you’ll need to account for coexistence gaps and data-size-based cost.

AvePoint Fly and ShareGate remain extremely valuable, but in focused roles, AvePoint for transforming and cleaning Teams and SharePoint at scale, ShareGate for deep content cleanup and governance.

And here’s the thing most people don’t realize until they’re halfway into divestiture, sometimes you need more than one tool.

If you have Quest ODM handling the heavy lift of identity and coexistence, but your SharePoint environment is a tangle of broken permissions, you might still bring in AvePoint or ShareGate for a targeted cleanup phase

What matters is not brand loyalty, it’s fit for purpose, and in divestitures, the purpose is bigger than “get the data over here” It’s get the right data, to the right place, at the right time, without braking business continuity or delaying the new company’s market launch.

So, if you take nothing else from this, take this;
In a divestiture, your migration tool is not just a utility. It’s a strategic asset. Choose it, or them, with the same rigor you’d apply to any critical business system.
Map your identity, your coexistence, your workloads. Match them to what each tool actually does, not just what’s in the brochure. And make sure the licensing model aligns with the scale and shape of your data.

Because once you start that separation clock, the last thing you want is to realize your chosen tool can’t keep up.

That’s it, we covered the landscape, the strengths and weaknesses, and the reality of matching tools to the one of the migration scenarios out there.
Whether you go all-in on Quest, mix and match, or bring in specialist like AvePoint or ShareGate, remember, the right choice isn’t about today’s migration. It’s about letting companies continue to do business with minimal disruptions.