Comparison of different types of SharePoint List

Comparison of SharePoint’s List Types
Type of List	When to Use It	What Makes It Special
Announcements	To display brief announcements on your site’s home page.	You can enter expiration dates for announcements.
Contacts	To track contacts, especially if you want to use Outlook for data entry.	You can remove columns that you don’t need.
Discussion Board	To create a discussion forum where people can post messages and reply to them.	Evaluate third-party add-ons if you want a robust discussion forum.
Links	To track hyperlinks.	Uses a Hyperlink column that automatically formats entered text as HTML anchor links.
Calendar	To track calendar items.	Can synchronize with Outlook and knows how to handle recurring events.
Tasks	To track tasks.	Can synchronize with Outlook; Tasks lists can be grouped with summary tasks.
Project Tasks	To track work items for a project.	Can display as a Gantt chart. Many people consider this SharePoint’s Project Lite offering.
Issue Tracking	To track trouble tickets.	Works well with issues that have three states — open, closed, and resolved.
Survey	To take a poll.	Allows you to create a set of questions that users must walk through.
Custom	To create a list with columns that you define.	Allows you to create a list specific to your content and can for example act on certain content in special ways.
KPI (Key Performance Indicator)	To display graphical status indicators.	Lets you evaluate selected business data against specified goals and display that information in various formats such as scorecards and dashboards.
Import Spreadsheet	To create a list based on an existing spreadsheet.	Lets you use an existing Excel spreadsheet as the basis of the list; can help avoid rework and repeated effort entering data.
External	To create a list based on a data source outside SharePoint.	Lets you display data from other (non-SharePoint) databases or web services.