ShareGate alternative for Microsoft 365
ShareGate moved your tenant. Who is watching what happens inside it now?
ShareGate Migrate is the tool most teams used to get into Microsoft 365, and ShareGate Protect tidies the sharing links and inactive workspaces left behind. 1Security closes the security gaps neither product was built for: who did what over three years, from which device and place, sensitive data found in the content itself, email, compliance evidence and what every AI agent can reach. It runs next to ShareGate, feeds your SIEM, and saves more than it costs.
- Verified 25 Oct 2026
- Keep both or switch
- Free side-by-side POC
- Every claim sourced below
Fair first
What ShareGate does well.
Written so a ShareGate customer nods. These are real strengths, and none of them is on the 1Security feature list: migration in particular is theirs to keep.
Migration
ShareGate Migrate copies SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, Exchange Online, Entra ID, Google Workspace and file shares, tenant to tenant or from on-premise, without touching the source. It is the reason the brand exists and the part every customer keeps.
Sharing-link cleanup
Protect finds Anyone links without expiry, edit links that need no sign-in, external links and expired links, and lets you fix them in bulk or with a daily policy that deletes matching links on its own.
Delegated Reviews
A batch of workspaces from any report goes to their owners by email. Owners sign in with Microsoft 365, no ShareGate account needed, and decide keep, archive or delete, remove guests or revoke stale links.
Storage, licences and one price
Inactive sites with their storage cost, orphaned OneDrives, version trimming, archiving to Microsoft 365 Archive, unassigned and inactive licences. One per-user price, no minimums, MCP server included.
What it does not touch
Four questions a tidy tenant still cannot answer.
ShareGate Protect is a snapshot of how your tenant is shared, refreshed about every 24 hours. Each question below needs a record of what happened, who did it and what was inside the file. None of that is on the Protect feature list, by design.
- 01
A history, not a snapshot
Three years of who did what, from where and on which device, as standard. "Is this an incident, and what is the blast radius?" is answered in minutes instead of a day of stitching logs together by hand. Protect records the governance actions taken inside Protect and keeps daily metrics; it has no per-user or per-file activity history.
- 02
Sensitive data in content, not only in site labels
Protect flags SharePoint sites that carry no sensitivity label; document contents are never read. 1Security scans the content of files and emails with its own engine, more than 300 detectors plus OCR for scans and photos: account numbers, contracts, identity numbers, passwords saved in files. Content is streamed through the scan and never stored.
- 03
Sign-ins, devices, locations, anomalies
1Security learns what is normal for each user, app and agent and flags what breaks the pattern: sign-ins from VPN, Tor and datacenter networks, from places nobody in your company works from, from devices you have never seen, and whether Conditional Access actually covers them. Protect keeps one last-sign-in date per user and cannot tell a person logging in from Outlook refreshing in the background.
- 04
Email
Protect reads mailbox calendars only to measure Teams activity; emails and chats are never collected. 1Security sees sensitive data leaving by email, impersonation through "send as" rights, shared mailboxes with no owner, and lets you act on the messages themselves.
Side by side
1Security vs ShareGate Protect, row by row.
Three states, not two: where ShareGate Protect has a lighter version of something, the row says so, and where it is ahead, the row says that too. Every ShareGate cell carries a number that resolves to a public source below the table.
- 15Covered
- 1Partial or lighter
- 0Not covered
- 2Covered
- 10Partial or lighter
- 4Not covered
| Capability | 1Security | ShareGate |
|---|---|---|
| Gaps and incidents | ||
| Activity history | 1SecurityCovered 3 years as standard, each event carrying the user, file, device, location, app and the sensitivity of what was touched | ShareGatePartial or lighter Activity log of actions taken in Protect plus daily governance metrics for up to 365 days; no per-user or per-file activity13 |
| Sign-in logs | 1SecurityCovered Per-user sign-ins with network, device and Conditional Access coverage | ShareGatePartial or lighter One last-sign-in date per user, nothing before December 2023, no distinction between a person and a background app3 |
| Anomalies, locations and networks | 1SecurityCovered Learns what is normal per user, app and agent; country, city, VPN, Tor and datacenter classification, map, per-user travel | ShareGateNot covered Fixed-rule insights refreshed daily; no location, network or behaviour layer in the documentation3 |
| Devices | 1SecurityCovered Every device touching data, unmanaged ones flagged, disable action | ShareGateNot covered Not covered; no device permission in either consent set4 |
| Sensitive data detection | 1SecurityCovered Own engine with 300+ detectors and OCR, on any licence; Purview detections as a second opinion | ShareGatePartial or lighter One insight, "Sites with no sensitivity label"; document contents are never read8 |
| Email and mailboxes | 1SecurityCovered Outbound sensitive content, delegated sending, shared mailboxes, actions on messages | ShareGateNot covered Email content never collected; calendars read only to measure Teams activity5 |
| Administration, compliance, AI | ||
| Permission graph | 1SecurityCovered Direct grants, links, groups, site roles, inheritance, apps, agents and guests resolved into one answer per file | ShareGatePartial or lighter Permissions matrix for SharePoint and OneDrive refreshed every 24 hours, nested groups expanded; list items excluded, one action at a time9 |
| Remediation | 1SecurityCovered 40+ actions across users, sites, files, apps, licences, devices, agents and email; review queue, grace period, revert, read-back confirmation | ShareGatePartial or lighter Links, privacy, owners, guests, archive, delete, version trimming; policies run once a day and "cannot be undone"10 |
| Owner reviews | 1SecurityCovered Decisions routed to the people who own the resource; their answer runs as a confirmed, revertible action | ShareGateCovered Delegated Reviews by email, owners sign in with Microsoft 365; decisions apply immediately, no automated reminders at launch11 |
| Workspace archiving and storage | 1SecurityPartial or lighter Inactive and orphaned sites, groups and mailboxes ranked with idle time and reclaim actions; no version trimming or archive tier | ShareGateCovered Archive to Microsoft 365 Archive manually or by daily policy, version limits and trimming, storage cost per inactive site21 |
| Compliance mapping | 1SecurityCovered 11 frameworks on shared requirements, weekly snapshots, dated evidence packs | ShareGateNot covered No mapping to regulations or standards; "compliance reports" are custom lists exported as CSV7 |
| AI agents | 1SecurityCovered What each agent can reach across files, sites and email, who deployed it, its activity and anomalies, quarantine and identity actions | ShareGatePartial or lighter Copilot exposure through sharing links, guests and labels; no inventory of agents or their reach documented14 |
| Copilot readiness | 1SecurityCovered Dedicated screen: what Copilot reaches today, fix list, per-site indexing block, progress since the first assessment | ShareGatePartial or lighter "Improve Copilot results" insights: Anyone and external links, unlabelled sites, inactive workspaces8 |
| Fit and deployment | ||
| API and SIEM feed | 1SecurityCovered REST for logs, detections, alerts, users, compliance and readiness, pulled by Sentinel, Splunk or any SOC; MCP server with the same reads | ShareGatePartial or lighter MCP server for AI assistants reads workspaces, links, users, licences and insights; CSV export; no REST API or SIEM export documented13 |
| Deployment and residency | 1SecurityCovered SaaS, your own Azure (BYOC) or on-premise at any size; a dedicated database per tenant | ShareGatePartial or lighter SaaS only; data at rest in North America or Europe, all processing in the Azure East US region6 |
| Microsoft licence needed | 1SecurityCovered Nearly everything on Business Basic, E1 or E3; no E5 or Purview for content scanning | ShareGatePartial or lighter Required Microsoft plans not stated; archiving needs Microsoft 365 Archive, label insights need published Purview labels21 |
- Covered
- Partial or lighter
- Not covered
Sources for every ShareGate claim
Verified 2026-10-25- 1.ShareGate pricing (Protect per-user plan, one tenant, MCP included) - sharegate.com/pricing
- 2.ShareGate Protect overview (workloads, pages, 24-hour refresh) - help.sharegate.com/en/articles/10237286-sharegate-protect-overview
- 3.ShareGate Protect known limitations (sign-in data, Multi-Geo, EU processing) - help.sharegate.com/en/articles/15519047-sharegate-protect-known-limitations
- 4.Microsoft 365 permission sets required for ShareGate Protect - help.sharegate.com/en/articles/12557766-microsoft-365-permission-sets-required-for-sharegate
- 5.ShareGate Protect security and privacy overview (data collected, processing region) - help.sharegate.com/en/articles/10562011-sharegate-protect-and-migration-assessment-security-and-privacy-overview
- 6.Data residency for ShareGate Protect (North America or Europe) - help.sharegate.com/en/articles/12630559-data-residency-for-sharegate-protect-and-the-migration-assessment
- 7.ShareGate Protect reporting overview (templates, CSV export) - help.sharegate.com/en/articles/13455400-reporting-overview
- 8.Oversharing insights in ShareGate Protect (link insights, sites with no sensitivity label) - help.sharegate.com/en/articles/17300935-oversharing-insights-in-sharegate-protect
- 9.ShareGate Protect permissions matrix report - help.sharegate.com/en/articles/15122124-sharegate-protect-s-permissions-matrix-report
- 10.Policies in ShareGate Protect (daily run, cannot be undone) - help.sharegate.com/en/articles/14472659-policies-in-sharegate-protect
- 11.ShareGate Protect Delegated Reviews overview - help.sharegate.com/en/articles/15809998-delegated-reviews-overview
- 12.Reduce costs insights in ShareGate Protect - help.sharegate.com/en/articles/15346300-reduce-costs-insights-in-sharegate-protect
- 13.Get started with the ShareGate Protect MCP server - help.sharegate.com/en/articles/15587414-get-started-with-the-sharegate-protect-mcp-server
- 14.ShareGate AI security / Copilot page (what Protect shows for Copilot) - sharegate.com/solutions/copilot-security
- 15.ShareGate Protect product page (Microsoft 365 governance) - sharegate.com/microsoft-governance
- 16.ShareGate trust center (SOC 2 Type I attestation) - sharegate.com/trust-center
- 17.ShareGate Snapshot, June 2026 (MCP launch, consent levels) - sharegate.com/blog/sharegate-snapshot-june-2026
- 18.ShareGate Snapshot, July 2026 (permissions matrix V1, Delegated Reviews, EEEU removal) - sharegate.com/blog/sharegate-snapshot-july-2026
- 19.ShareGate Migrate product page (workloads, concurrency) - sharegate.com/microsoft-migration
- 20.ShareGate Protect notification emails (owner-facing notifications) - help.sharegate.com/en/articles/10517378-not-receiving-sharegate-protect-notification-emails
- 21.Archive workspaces in ShareGate Protect (Microsoft 365 Archive required) - help.sharegate.com/en/articles/13975152-archive-workspaces-in-sharegate-protect
- 22.Version Storage report in ShareGate Protect - help.sharegate.com/en/articles/17154798-version-storage-report-in-sharegate-protect
- 23.ShareGate MCP product page - sharegate.com/mcp
ShareGate is a trademark of Workleap Technologies Inc. This comparison was written by 1Security from public documentation and was not reviewed by ShareGate or Workleap. If a row is out of date, write to us and we will fix it.
Richer administration
Beyond the gaps: the same questions, answered deeper.
Where both tools have a feature, the difference is how far the answer goes, how fresh it is, and whether you can act on it from the same screen without waiting for tomorrow’s crawl.
Who has access, and why
One graph across every path: direct permissions, sharing links, group membership, site roles, inheritance, apps, agents and guests, down to the file. Every external organisation that touches your tenant resolved to a real company and reconciled with your trusted-domain settings.
Remediation under control
More than 40 actions on users, sites, files, apps, licences, devices, agents and messages. Each one is staged in a review queue with a grace period, can be reverted, and is read back from Microsoft to prove the change landed. Nothing runs on a daily timer you cannot undo.
Compliance without manual mapping
Eleven frameworks today, more arriving: GDPR, NIS2, DORA, the EU AI Act, ISO 27001 and 42001, SOC 2, NIST CSF, HIPAA and the Polish KSC and KRiBSI acts. One requirement counted everywhere it applies, weekly snapshots, a dated evidence pack for the auditor or the investor.
AI agents and Copilot
Not a list of oversharing tiles: what each agent can actually read across files, sites, users and mail, who deployed it, what it did and when it broke its own pattern. Copilot readiness with a fix list and a per-site indexing block, so the rollout starts from a clean reach.
The rest of the tenant
Beyond the comparison: the whole Microsoft 365 stack from one read-only connection.
The table covers what a ShareGate buyer asks about. The same connection opens every screen below on day one, each answering a question your tenant cannot answer on its own today.
- Microsoft 365 Alerts ToolOne alert model across policies, activity and anomalies - with the evidence attached and the alert threshold in your hands.
- Microsoft 365 Monitoring ToolReal-time monitoring that catches a mass download while it is unfolding - across users, files, apps, AI agents and devices.
- Copilot Security ToolEvery AI agent's real blast radius - quantified before rollout, watched and constrained after.
- Shadow Device DetectionEvery device touching your data, reconstructed from real activity - including the machines that never enrolled anywhere.
- Impossible Travel DetectionLocations as identities, not IPs: country, city and network for every action, first-seen origins, travel timelines with verdicts - no E5, no P2.
- Conditional Access MonitoringDeclared Conditional Access compared against observed sign-ins: coverage verdicts, ungoverned traffic share, and the ranges your offices outgrew.
- Office 365 Access ManagementEffective access, resolved - who can reach what, through which grant, and one place to take it away.
- SharePoint Governance ToolEvery site ranked by exposure and abandonment - links, guests and Copilot access under control.
- Office 365 User ProvisioningLifecycle access from day one to offboarding - reach, dormant accounts and license reclaim in one flow.
- Microsoft 365 Audit ToolUp to three years of searchable activity history - every action tied to an actor, device and location.
- Microsoft 365 Inventory ToolEight live inventories on one permission graph - including the sites, devices and AI agents that were never registered anywhere.
- Office 365 ReportingAnswers, not exports - regulator-grade numbers, saved views and a read-only API for your SOC.
- Microsoft 365 File PermissionsWho has access to any file, and why - people, links, apps and AI agents on one map, with the fix in the same place.
- Sensitive Data DiscoveryWhere regulated data lives and everything that can reach it - two detection engines, no premium licence required.
- Office 365 Email MonitoringOutbound sensitive content, delegated-send abuse and whole-thread evidence that survives deletion.
- Purview Label CoverageWhat your sensitivity labels actually cover, and which of them protect anything at all.
- AI Agent InventoryEvery agent in the tenant with its real reach counted, its blueprint reviewed, and guardrails you can verify.
- AI Data RestrictionDeclare a data type off-limits to AI and every agent, app and user still reaching it becomes a live violation - recorded for the auditor.
- AI Spend TrackingInteractions, Copilot credits and Azure tokens in one ledger per agent - with the spend column next to what each agent can reach.
- Microsoft 365 User Access ReviewEvery identity with what it can reach, what it did, and whether it should still exist - including SharePoint-only guests that live outside the directory.
- Group Access AnalysisWhat membership in a group actually unlocks - nesting resolved, external members surfaced, blast radius counted.
- App and OAuth Consent GovernanceEvery app with a foothold in the tenant: how it got in, who let it in, and what it can actually read.
- Remediation AutomationFindings become fixes at tenant scale, counted before you enable them and staged behind a review window.
- Microsoft 365 Licence OptimizationThe seats you pay for and nobody uses - unassigned units, licences on guests, and dormant accounts still billing.
- Microsoft 365 Anomaly DetectionEvery policy, user, app and agent measured against its own baseline - with an alert line you move and see the answer to at once.
- Office 365 Sign-in LocationsEvery place your tenant is reached from, with your Conditional Access configuration laid over observed reality.
- Microsoft 365 Unified Audit LogWho did what, when, from where and on which device - retained up to three years on a standard licence.
- SharePoint Site InventoryEvery site, channel site and OneDrive in one list, ranked by external reach, abandonment and what Copilot can read.
- Microsoft 365 Activity AnalyticsThe extremes rather than the averages - a mass download inside the hour, and everything nobody has touched in a year.
- Microsoft 365 Trend TrackingAny number in the tenant followed over time, with the change and the deviation attached - and alerting on the same object.
- Microsoft 365 Compliance MonitoringReadiness for eleven regulations measured from live tenant data - with weekly snapshots and a dated evidence pack per framework.
- Microsoft 365 Security ScoreMicrosoft Secure Score beside the score measured from what actually happens - one worklist ranked by points still on the table.
- External Domain MonitoringEvery organisation your tenant exchanges data with, resolved to a real company - with drift flags and an enforceable verdict per domain.
- All featuresEvery screen on one list
Fits what you run
Native to Microsoft 365, open to the rest of your stack.
Every action runs through Microsoft Graph, roles sync from Entra, setup takes minutes, and the platform stays read-only until you decide to enable writes. There is no agent to install and no mailbox to re-route, and nothing to migrate: ShareGate already did that part.
A public REST API and an MCP server expose logs, detections, alerts, users and compliance status, so your SIEM, SOC or MSSP receives events that already carry the user, the file, the device, the location and who could reach what, instead of raw audit rows.
Run it as SaaS, in your own Azure subscription with our container images, or on-premise, air-gapped if needed. Each tenant gets its own database, and disconnecting removes the data within seven days.
Savings, last and measured
It runs on the licences you already have, and finds the ones you do not use.
Most of what 1Security does needs no premium Microsoft plan: content scanning without E5 or Purview, locations without premium sign-in logs, three years of history without a SIEM contract. On top of that it ranks what you pay for and nobody uses, each item with its idle time and a reclaim action waiting in the review queue.
- Business Basicthe plan most features run on
- 3 yearsof activity history without a SIEM contract
- 0E5 or Purview add-ons needed for content scanning
- 1 queueunused licences, dead apps, orphaned sites and mailboxes, reclaimed from one place
Keep both or switch
You do not have to choose on day one.
Keep ShareGate Migrate for every move you still have ahead, and keep Protect if your team likes its link cleanup, archiving and Delegated Reviews. 1Security takes security, incidents, sensitive content, compliance and AI access. Both read your tenant through their own Entra apps, and 1Security stays read-only until you enable actions, so the two never fight over the same setting.
The free proof of concept runs side by side on your own tenant: read-only consent in the morning, first findings the same day on a small tenant, and one meeting to compare what each tool showed.
What the side-by-side POC compares
- Sensitive data that carries no label and is reachable by guests or Anyone links
- Who opened, downloaded or shared those files in the last 90 days, and from where
- Unknown devices and locations behind sign-ins Protect shows as a single date
- AI agents and apps, and what each can reach
- Anomalies on users, apps and agents over 90 days
- Mail leaving with sensitive content and who can send as whom
FAQ
Questions buyers ask when they already run ShareGate.
Do I have to remove ShareGate to use 1Security?
No. 1Security reads your tenant through its own Entra app with read-only consent and changes nothing until you enable actions. ShareGate Migrate and Protect keep working as before. Teams that keep both usually leave migrations, archiving and Delegated Reviews with ShareGate and move incidents, sensitive data, compliance and AI access to 1Security.
Which Microsoft licence do I need?
Nearly everything works on Business Basic, Office 365 E1 or Microsoft 365 E3. Content scanning, locations and three-year history need no premium plan. The few features that read premium Microsoft data, such as Purview detections or per-sign-in detail, are listed on the requirements page with what you get without them, and the free licence checker tells you before you connect.
Does 1Security store my file or email content?
No. Content is streamed into the sensitivity scan and discarded when it finishes. What persists is the detection type, the match count and a confidence bucket linked to the file, never the matched values. The data handling page lists exactly what is read and what is stored.
Can the data stay in my own cloud?
Yes. Besides SaaS you can run 1Security in your own Azure subscription from our container images, or on-premise. Each tenant gets its own database in every model, data at rest and processing stay where you deploy it, and there is no minimum user count for self-hosting.
How does it feed our SIEM or SOC?
Through the public REST API: logs, detections, alerts, security alerts, users, compliance status and Copilot readiness, with scoped API keys per tenant or organisation-wide for MSSPs. The same reads are available as MCP tools. Sentinel and Splunk pairings are described on their own pages.
How do you know what ShareGate does and does not do?
From ShareGate's public help center, pricing page, product pages and monthly Snapshot posts, each linked under the table with the date we last checked. Where a Microsoft certification record or a feature could not be confirmed, the row says so instead of saying no. If something has changed or we got a row wrong, tell us and we will correct it.
What does the free POC include, and how long does it take?
A read-only connection to your tenant, a full scan, and a comparison meeting. A small tenant shows first results within one to two hours; a tenant with around a million files takes six to twelve hours for the first full map. Nothing is changed in your tenant during the POC, and ShareGate keeps running next to it.
See both on your own tenant.
Book a demo, then a free side-by-side proof of concept next to ShareGate. Read-only consent, first findings the same day, nothing changed in your tenant.
Or refresh the report tomorrow and hope nothing happened overnight.