Microsoft 365 Secure Score vs M365Clarity — What's the Difference?

If you already use Microsoft Secure Score, the natural question when looking at M365Clarity is: do I need both? The short answer is yes — but they answer different questions. Understanding the difference helps you use each tool for what it's actually built for.

What Microsoft Secure Score does well

Secure Score is Microsoft's built-in security measurement tool. It scores your tenant against a set of security improvement actions — things like requiring MFA, blocking legacy authentication, enabling audit logging, and configuring Safe Attachments. It is free, always up to date with Microsoft's current recommendations, and gives you a single number you can track over time.

For security-focused IT teams, Secure Score is genuinely useful. It surfaces specific recommended actions with clear instructions for how to implement them. It integrates with Microsoft Defender and is recognised by enterprise security teams and auditors.

What Secure Score doesn't tell you

Secure Score answers one question: are the recommended security settings configured? It does not answer whether anyone is actually using the features those settings protect. A tenant can have a Secure Score of 80% and still have 40% of its users on unmanaged devices, 60% MFA registration coverage, 15 features in the plan that nobody has ever opened, and users syncing files to personal Google Drive because SharePoint external sharing is locked down too aggressively.

Secure Score is also purely security-oriented. It does not surface licence waste, adoption gaps, change management signals, digital friction, or renewal intelligence. It does not tell you what your users are doing when a configuration is making their work harder than it needs to be.

Where M365Clarity is different

M365Clarity starts from a different question: are the features included in your Microsoft 365 plan actually being adopted and used correctly? That question covers security configuration — but it also covers adoption, licence value, and user behaviour.

Specifically, M365Clarity adds things Secure Score doesn't have:

Side by side

Capability	Secure Score	M365Clarity
Security configuration assessment	✓ Microsoft recommended actions	✓ 170+ evaluated features across all categories
Adoption signals	✗ Not covered	✓ Active vs licensed users, workload adoption rates, never-activated features
Licence waste visibility	✗ Not covered	✓ Inactive users, unconfigured paid features, per-user licence detail
Digital friction detection	✗ Not covered	✓ Identifies config gaps driving user workarounds, with specific workaround behaviour predicted
MSP multi-tenant portfolio	✗ Single tenant only	✓ Portfolio view, per-client AI summaries, renewal briefings
AI-generated remediation	Improvement action list	Priority Actions, Executive Summary, Change Management, Adoption Roadmap, What Now guides — all grounded in the specific tenant's data
Renewal intelligence	✗ Not covered	✓ Renewal Partner Brief, licensing intent capture, inactive licence recommendations
Cost	Free (included in M365)	Free tier available. Pro from £49/month.

How they work together

The most effective approach is to use both. Secure Score handles the security configuration baseline — it is deeply integrated into Microsoft's ecosystem and will always be the authoritative source for Microsoft's own recommendations. M365Clarity sits alongside it as the adoption and visibility layer: it tells you whether the features Secure Score is asking you to configure are actually being used, whether your users have found workarounds for the ones that aren't, and whether the licences you're paying for are delivering value.

A tenant with a high Secure Score and poor M365Clarity results is one where the security controls are configured correctly but nobody has adopted the tools. A tenant with a low Secure Score and strong M365Clarity results is one where adoption is good but specific security configurations are lagging. Both pictures are useful. Neither alone is complete.