If you've ever been inside the Microsoft 365 Defender portal, you've probably seen Microsoft Secure Score — a number out of a few hundred that tells you how "secure" your tenant is. It's built into Microsoft 365 and it's free. So why would you use something else?
Here's an honest comparison.
Secure Score analyses your Microsoft 365 and Azure configuration and assigns points for each recommended action you've taken. It covers a wide range of settings — identity, devices, apps, data — and gives you an improvement roadmap with recommended actions.
It's a solid tool. Microsoft's team knows the platform better than anyone, and the recommendations are generally sound. For anyone actively trying to improve their security posture, Secure Score's improvement actions are a useful to-do list.
Where Secure Score falls short: It's designed by Microsoft, for Microsoft's interests. It's presented in security language that assumes you're a security professional. The scoring system can be gamed — some high-point actions are less impactful than lower-point ones. And it doesn't tell you about features you're paying for but not using.
M365Clarity is an independent tool. It reads your Microsoft 365 configuration via the same Graph API that Microsoft uses internally, but it presents the results in a completely different way.
The key differences:
Secure Score will tell you to "Enable Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps shadow IT discovery." M365Clarity will tell you "Cloud App Discovery is not enabled — you can't see which third-party apps your users are signing into with their Microsoft accounts." Same setting, very different readability.
M365Clarity covers 97 Microsoft 365 features across every category — security, productivity, collaboration, compliance, identity, and devices. If you're paying for Business Premium and haven't enabled Intune device management, or haven't configured DLP policies, or haven't turned on Microsoft Defender for Business — M365Clarity shows you that. Secure Score doesn't.
M365Clarity is built for IT Managers and MSPs who want to understand their tenant configuration quickly, not security architects building threat models. Every finding comes with a plain-English explanation of why it matters and step-by-step instructions to fix it — no PowerShell, no prerequisites assumed.
If you manage multiple Microsoft 365 tenants, Secure Score only shows you one at a time. M365Clarity's MSP portfolio view shows you all your clients in one dashboard, with AI risk ranking so you can see which clients need attention most urgently.
Both. They're complementary, not competitive.
Use Microsoft Secure Score if you want a detailed improvement roadmap from Microsoft's own recommendations, particularly if you're working through a formal security programme or need to report to a board or auditor.
Use M365Clarity if you want a fast, plain-English overview of your entire Microsoft 365 configuration — including features you're paying for but not using — presented in a way you can actually understand and act on without a security background.
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