Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 vs Microsoft Purview eDiscovery comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.2
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 provides enhanced security, yielding financial savings and efficiency gains through improved threat detection and data protection.
Sentiment score
7.7
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery boosts ROI by improving data efficiency, compliance, risk management, and reducing legal and IT workloads.
It has also decreased our time to detection and response by about 15 to 20 percent.
Overall, cost of owning and operating our system goes down.
It's hard to quantify the return on investment we've seen from Microsoft Defender for Office 365.
We have seen a 100% return on investment.
The ease of accessing necessary information promptly is the biggest return on investment.
It's hard to quantify the ROI in a dollar amount, but we realize value by doing more tasks in less time than we did before.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.0
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 generally offers efficient support, but improvements in responsiveness and handling complex scenarios are desired.
Sentiment score
7.6
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is praised for responsive support, despite some mixed experiences with wait times and outcomes.
Over the past two years, there have been no critical problems.
we opened tickets, and they typically resolve them quickly.
Customer service and support have been fantastic.
I would rate Microsoft Purview eDiscovery's customer service and technical support a ten.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.2
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 excels in scalability, accommodating any organization size with efficient cloud-based performance and seamless updates.
Sentiment score
7.9
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is scalable and efficient, seamlessly integrating with cloud infrastructures but lacks some search functions.
We have never faced scalability problems, and Microsoft manages it effectively.
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 scales transparently for us, as we grew from 1,000 users to 3,000 users, and we didn't notice much difference.
It scales with us seamlessly.
With the E3 licensing, I would rate the scalability of Microsoft Purview eDiscovery as a six because it lacks certain critical search functionalities.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 boasts 99.9% availability, resolving issues quickly, with users rating its reliability highly.
Sentiment score
8.6
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is generally stable, with minor slowdowns, but users seek more transparency on performance issues.
The solution is stable, as we have been using it for the past two years.
I would assess the stability and reliability of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 as very stable, with barely any issues.
Overall, the stability and reliability of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 are good.
For us, it has been one hundred percent reliable.
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is highly reliable.
 

Room For Improvement

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 requires enhancements in virus-blocking, compatibility, integration, phishing detection, and global support.
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery needs faster, more efficient features, better integration, NLP for queries, and affordable pricing for users.
The main area for improvement is simplifying the implementation and rollout process.
Microsoft could improve by offering recommendations for domain spoofing attacks, especially scenarios where DNS records like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are not properly published.
There is a different console for different things; I just want one consolidated console.
Adding more features, as Microsoft continues to expand their cloud offerings, would be beneficial.
Defining what constitutes a credit card because that is where I get the most false positives.
We find that many critical functions are available only to E5 license holders.
 

Setup Cost

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is cost-effective with extensive features but may be costly for smaller organizations with limited budgets.
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery pricing is complex, with E5 costly yet beneficial, while E3 is cheaper but limited.
We've likely saved 30% of costs.
Money-wise, it is a part of the Office 365 suite, making it slightly more expensive compared to Trend Micro.
Microsoft is quite affordable with a lot of features available for any size organization.
With CSP or MCE-style agreements with Microsoft, the process is streamlined since we have reps from both Microsoft and CDW working together.
As an M3, I find the Purview pricing of 1250 per user worthwhile.
The pricing and licensing with Microsoft can be complex, and licensing is known to be a challenge because it changes frequently.
 

Valuable Features

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 provides integrated threat protection, risk notifications, and productivity enhancements through a single management console.
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery ensures efficient data retrieval with multi-platform integration, automation, compliance visibility, and adherence to global data privacy laws.
It ranks the threats and allows us to prioritize those hitting us the hardest, such as email threats.
It provides end-to-end visibility on email threats such as phishing, extending beyond Exchange Online Protection.
The value of the DLP feature is significant to us because we have internal data, sometimes sensitive, and the users may not always be aware of security and privacy, which might lead them to send out information mistakenly to external parties.
The most valuable feature of Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is its ability to search across various platforms, including Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive.
Purview can connect to iOS, Mac, Android, and SaaS apps, which is critical for capturing SMS and MMS text message data.
Purview's inclusion of global regulations is critical because we're heavily regulated by FERC, Sarbanes-Oxley, and the SEC.
 

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Defender for Offi...
Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite
11th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
52
Ranking in other categories
Email Archiving (1st), Email Security (1st), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (1st), Secure Email Gateway (SEG) (1st)
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery
Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite
24th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
eDiscovery (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Microsoft Security Suite category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is 2.4%, down from 2.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is 0.7%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Microsoft Security Suite
 

Featured Reviews

Tolu Omolaja - PeerSpot reviewer
Great URL scanning and attachment scanning, but I would like more proactive threat analysis
The two main features that prove most beneficial for us are URL scanning and attachment scanning. URL scanning involves an automatic scan of links and emails. When a user clicks on a link within an email, the system promptly checks the link's safety. If the link is deemed safe, access is granted automatically. However, if it is flagged as unsafe, we receive feedback and notification to caution us about the potentially harmful link. At this point, we are presented with the option to proceed or return. I have personally witnessed the system identify a few unsafe links, making this the primary advantage of using the solution. The second crucial aspect is the scanning of attachments. When an email containing an attachment arrives, we receive a notification of the new email, along with information that the attachment is being scanned for threats. This additional layer of security provides peace of mind for our organization. While Microsoft Defender for Office 365 offers numerous features, these two stand out as particularly impressive and valuable to us.
Frank Radeck - PeerSpot reviewer
Tasks that took an entire day before we implemented the solution now take just 30 minutes.
The most valuable feature of Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is its ability to search across various platforms, including Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive. It enables a streamlined, unified process for searching across these platforms. It is critical for Purview to be able to connect to iOS, Mac, and Android devices and data in other SaaS apps. From a support perspective, I can do things while I'm eating lunch or something else. It's more dynamic and responsive. I think everybody appreciates it. We're not tied to one device. Purview's multi-cloud capabilities are also essential for the same reasons. Keeping everything under one umbrella further increases the time savings. Purview accounts for critical regulations from around the world. This is crucial because we hold ourselves accountable to standards and need to align with them. Working at a law firm, we have clients who dictate to us what standards they expect. The visibility is excellent. As we move more things into the cloud, more opportunities exist to put everything under one umbrella.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Microsoft Security Suite solutions are best for your needs.
850,236 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Government
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Legal Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Microsoft Defender for Office 365?
Threat Explorer is an invaluable tool for me, and it plays a crucial role in helping me discern the origins of various email campaigns, pinpointing where they emanate from, and identifying the indi...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Defender for Office 365?
Money-wise, it is a part of the Office 365 ( /products/office-365-reviews ) suite, making it slightly more expensive compared to Trend Micro. Although Defender is free, you have to pay separately f...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Defender for Office 365?
The main area for improvement is simplifying the implementation and rollout process. There are many conditions to be met, making it challenging to ensure every system is protected. Troubleshooting ...
What do you like most about Microsoft Purview eDiscovery?
The tool has been beneficial. Some of our previous users left the organization without sharing the information they had at a personal level. This information was related to the organization, and th...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Purview eDiscovery?
The setup process was very straightforward. We acquired pricing through our reseller in NASDAQ, eliminating the need to search for prices ourselves.
What needs improvement with Microsoft Purview eDiscovery?
The query language can be time-consuming to figure out if you don't know it initially. While there are options with dropdowns to select criteria, having a natural language feature would be benefici...
 

Also Known As

MS Defender for Office 365
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is trusted by companies such as Ithaca College.
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Defender for Office 365 vs. Microsoft Purview eDiscovery and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,236 professionals have used our research since 2012.