Microsoft Purview eDiscovery vs Varonis Platform comparison

The compared Microsoft and Varonis solutions aren't in the same category. Microsoft is ranked #2 in eD , with an average rating of 7.5, and holds a 27.3% mindshare in the category. Varonis is ranked #9 in DLP , with an average rating of 8.0, and holds a 5.2% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Varonis users who would recommend it.

Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Read 8 Microsoft Purview eDiscovery reviews

1,557 Views
1,247 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Varonis Platform

Read 14 Varonis Platform reviews

1,240 Views
1,046 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Varonis Platform

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Microsoft Purview eDiscovery and Varonis Platform based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Google, Microsoft, Commvault and others in eDiscovery.

To learn more, read our detailed eDiscovery Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

eDiscovery

March 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

eDiscovery (2nd), Microsoft Security Suite (24th)

Varonis Platform

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) (9th), Data Governance (6th), SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) (5th), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (8th), Compliance Management (8th), Ransomware Protection (8th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (5th)

Mindshare comparison

Microsoft Purview eDiscovery and Varonis Platform aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is designed for eDiscovery and holds a mindshare of 27.3%, up 15.5% compared to last year.
Varonis Platform, on the other hand, focuses on Data Loss Prevention (DLP), holds 5.2% mindshare, up 1.8% since last year.

eDiscovery

Data Loss Prevention (DLP)

Featured Reviews

Frank Radeck

Director, IT Infrastructure & Cloud Technology at a legal firm with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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Frederic Delos

Senior Cloud Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Offers the ability to identify sensitive areas, allowing you to drill down into the sensitive data

The most effective feature for me is its ability to identify sensitive areas, allowing you to drill down into the sensitive data, provided you have access, to determine whether it's a false positive or a true positive. That's the best thing for me, out of all of it. It's got everything, like other ones, but I like to be able to look at something if I'm doing forensics on the alert and say, "Okay, do I really need to do something with this?" For example, we don't want sensitive data in our OneDrive. So it identifies the sensitive data that's possibly in the OneDrive. And what I can do is look at it and identify whether it's actually sensitive data in Datalert or whether it looks like sensitive data, but I know it's a false positive. If it is a false positive, I can basically say ignore this pattern based on X, Y, and Z, you know, whether it's Redjax or keyword proximity. So I like that. With other tools, I gotta go through a whole process because it's a little bit more complex. Here, I can tag it and bag it in one shot. And the next good time I scan, it slips over it. So it helps in that.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Our legal team benefits from using Microsoft Purview eDiscovery."

"The return on investment is saving the equivalent of one or two full-time IT department employees and a few hours per week for legal staff."

"The machine learning wasn't half bad. I really like that part. I thought it was novel. It pretty much automated it, once you trained the model."

"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 they didn't disclose it. Thanks to the product, it's easy for me to search and find out what communication a specific user has done, whether it's from SharePoint or any other platform. With Microsoft Purview eDiscovery, we can easily retrieve and restore this data."

"Tasks that took an entire day before we implemented Purview now take just 30 minutes."

"The ability to query everything that's in Microsoft and send links or add people, like managers, to review the documents is valuable. It's easy as I don't have to download and email anything. I just add them as a reviewer, and they can access it from there."

"The speed of it is valuable. I am able to search even 10,000 mailboxes for specific content. It helps search and accommodate the often limited information provided by users regarding what they need."

"I think eDiscovery Premium has made dealing with data from Teams much more accessible than any other platform."

More Microsoft Purview eDiscovery pros

"There's also a 90-day policy where if a user is not using the warehouse, it will automatically delete that username."

"The 24/7 support is the most valuable feature. They have been able to answer support questions pretty quickly."

"The analytics would have to be our most valuable feature."

"That alerting and reporting service is great."

"I also appreciate the reporting feature, which allows for the extraction of various reports based on specific needs. These reports can be used for audit purposes, such as tracking changes in file locations or deletions."

"It can easily identify unusual behavior or access patterns that may pose a potential threat, while operating as a unified reporting system."

"Varonis offers robust data access governance, allowing us to understand which sensitive data exists and who has access to it."

"The solution has significantly improved data security and compliance posture by allowing us to track and monitor activities. We can see who accesses data and when files are created and understand what's happening in our environment."

More Varonis Platform pros

Cons

"Purview eDiscovery works, but it's not entirely perfect. There were times when search results would get hung up or error codes would be presented and we'd have to contact Microsoft to get that sorted out."

"I see two significant challenges with many of my clients. One is that there are some functionality gaps compared to specialized tools in the legal industry, like a legal hold tool or a document review tool. They have features that Purview eDiscovery lacks. Those gaps create a situation where I almost have to do things twice. I need to collect all my data in eDiscovery and ship it to another platform to complete the review."

"The query language can be time-consuming to figure out if you don't know it initially."

"The sorting and filtering of the result data need improvement, and the interface for writing queries is not user-friendly for business users. We still need all the backend stuff. We have to use Graph API to interface with everything and create custom interfaces on the front end to make it easier for the end users, which is costly. The reporting, sorting, and filtering capabilities that other products have aren't available natively in Purview."

"We find that many critical functions are available only to E5 license holders. It would be beneficial to have more options available for E3 customers. Enhanced Teams functionalities and better capture of text message data, both SMS and MMS, would also be improvements."

"It has been one of the most solid tools I have worked with. However, Purview Data Loss Protection for remediating policy violations needs refinement, for example, in defining what constitutes a credit card because that is where I get the most false positives."

"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 beneficial. Copilot is expected to add such functionality in the future."

"We find that many critical functions are available only to E5 license holders."

More Microsoft Purview eDiscovery cons

"I'd like to see automatic updates for this solution. Currently, it's a manual process to update all the keywords"

"Varonis requires more access permissions for its core functions compared to competitors, which can be a concern for companies about data safety."

"I would like it to have cloud integration."

"For unstructured data monitoring, it's one of the top ones, if not the top one, due to its usability."

"The solution's areas of improvement are the interface and the dependency on on-premises deployment for some components."

"The product is very complicated."

"One area for improvement is the calculation engine. When applying rules in Varonis, especially for large datasets (terabytes of data), the calculations can be slow and require time to process. Speeding up this process would be beneficial."

More Varonis Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The costs associated with E5 licensing are currently expensive for us, so we use the E3 license, which comes with fewer features and functionalities."

"The pricing and licensing with Microsoft can be complex, and licensing is known to be a challenge because it changes frequently. While the licensing for Purview is not as tricky as other Microsoft products, navigating licenses since the shift to E3 and E5 plans has been a task, as individual licenses must now be purchased separately."

"With the full bundle, pricing is not a significant concern. As an M3, I find the Purview pricing of 1250 per user worthwhile."

"Microsoft Purview eDiscovery comes as part of Microsoft 365 licenses."

"In the positions that I've had through contracting over the years, I've heard talk of it being overpriced and underperforming compared to its competitors."

"The platform is expensive. I rate the pricing a nine out of ten."

"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, with ten being the most expensive."

"It's expensive, kind of, really expensive."

"Licensing is on an annual basis. Maintenance and renewal fees are separate. Varonis Datalert is quite expensive."

"You could do a subscription, where you pay yearly, or you could purchase it outright. The licensing cost is based on the number of users on the system that you are monitoring."

"The pricing is good. It neither expensive nor cheap. It is average."

"Varonis Platform wasn't certainly the cheapest solution."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Government

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Legal Firm

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Varonis Platform?

The solution has significantly improved data security and compliance posture by allowing us to track and monitor activities. We can see who accesses data and when files are created and understand w...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Varonis Platform?

Varonis started as an on-premises solution and is transitioning to cloud. It hasn't fully moved yet, which is an area for improvement. Varonis requires more access permissions for its core function...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Varonis Platform?

The primary use case for Varonis Platform is data discovery, specifically for discovering sensitive data in our organization to protect it. We are looking for a solution that can scan our repositor...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 7% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

Relativity vs Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Compared 5% of the time

Nuix eDiscovery vs Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Compared 4% of the time

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Microsoft Purview Data Governance vs Varonis Platform

Compared 17% of the time

BigID vs Varonis Platform

Compared 13% of the time

Cyera vs Varonis Platform

Compared 12% of the time

Wiz vs Varonis Platform

Compared 7% of the time

Sentra vs Varonis Platform

Compared 1% of the time

More Varonis Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

March 2025

Download Microsoft Purview eDiscovery product report

Buyer's Guide

Varonis Platform

March 2025

Download Varonis Platform product report

Overview

Efficiently respond to legal matters or internal investigations with intelligent capabilities that reduce data to only what’s relevant. Discover data where it lives. Discover and collect data in place, within your Microsoft Purview boundary. Manage workflows efficiently. Streamline your eDiscovery process with an end-to-end workflow from one platform. Accelerate your process. Get insights quickly with built-in capabilities, reducing review time and costs.

To learn more about our solution, ask questions, and share feedback, join our Microsoft Security, Compliance and Identity Community.

Microsoft

Varonis Platform specializes in network security and data monitoring with modules for alerting, data classification, and access management, benefiting environments like Microsoft 365.

Varonis is designed to secure data by auditing and tracking data movement. It leverages data alert and classification modules to identify and manage sensitive information. The platform enhances network security by alerting users to unexpected data modifications and deletions, crucial for effective data loss prevention. It supports unstructured data management, ensuring proper data access and permission controls. Known for its 24/7 support, Varonis offers comprehensive analytics and unified reporting, helping prevent data overexposure and facilitating compliance efforts.

What are the key features of Varonis Platform?

24/7 Support: Provides round-the-clock assistance.
Data Monitoring: Tracks data activities efficiently.
Unified Reporting: Consolidates data access reports.
Data Classification: Identifies sensitive data effectively.
Permission Management: Simplifies managing access rights.
Behavior Analytics: Detects abnormal behavior patterns.

What benefits should be highlighted in user reviews?

Enhanced Security: Improves data protection measures.
Compliance Support: Assists in meeting compliance standards.
Data Transparency: Offers clarity in data access activities.
Access Control: Ensures proper access to data.
Centralized Remediation: Eases remediation procedures.

Varonis Platform is widely utilized in industries needing stringent data confidentiality and management, such as finance and healthcare, for tracking data modifications and unauthorized access. Enterprises deploy it to manage permissions within large datasets, benefiting Microsoft 365 environments. While Varonis requires enhancements in cloud integration, the current deployment is often based on-premises, with attention to addressing the security needs and effective data handling for critical infrastructure.

Varonis

Sample Customers

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