Sharepoint - Sharepoint Lists vs. Sharepoint Libraries

Although in most of the UI and API they can be manipulated the same way, there are some significant differences between Lists and Libraries. The latter is a specialized type of the former.

Lists:

• Can have attachments
• Have major versions only
• Do not have Check-in/Check-out features

Libraries:

• Cannot have attachments (files are directly in the library)
• Have both minor (draft) and major (published) versioning
• Have Check-in/Check-Out
• Publishing Libraries can use Page Layouts
• Have Unique Document Ids out of the box

In code, you can always obtain an SPList from a SPDocumentLibrary but not the other way around.

A library is "just" a special type of list where the focus is on the File linked to the listitem

Anything you can do with a list you can do with a library and then some

Note:

Search acts very differently with documents in a library than it does with documents stored as attachments in a list.

In A library, search indexes 'reads' every word of the document and utilizes that information in search. Attachments in a List are not indexed.

Great Info! In an attempt to make a more exhaustive comparison (because none exist!) here are a couple of things left out:

List

1. list attachments are not indexed. This has a lot of implications. When searching, you cannot use the refiners to narrow down the doc type
2. List attachments will not work with the eDiscovery feature
3. No location based default column value settings
4. Cannot have a document set
5. No "Send to" functionality. Similarly, transfer to another location does not seem to work with a list content type, but I have not actually tried it
6. No Open with explorer (which is obvious)

Library

1. Does not have the "Read Access" setting (list settings-advanced settings)

Really they are quite a bit different. Libraries are for documents. It is a good idea to disable adding attachments on your list so that your lists are purely for tabular data, otherwise you may come across ECM features that do not work.

Please add more if you find them