Hornetsecurity alternative for Microsoft 365
Every site passes its sharing policy. Do you know what is inside them?
Hornetsecurity 365 Permission Manager assigns a sharing policy to every SharePoint, Teams and OneDrive site and has owners fix what breaks it. 1Security answers what a policy cannot: what the compliant sites actually contain, who touched it from where over three years, which AI agents and devices reach it, and what left by email. It runs next to Hornetsecurity on the same tenant, read-only until you enable actions, 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 Hornetsecurity does well.
Written so a Hornetsecurity customer nods. These are real strengths, and a team that likes them keeps them while 1Security takes the security side of the same tenant.
Per-site sharing policies with owner audit
Four built-in policies and custom ones, one per site, with the site owner notified first and asked to approve or fix. Violations nobody acts on are reverted automatically to the policy. Policy exclusions and a default policy for new sites round it off.
Quick Actions at scale
Fix permissions on many sites at once, set the external sharing level, remove indirect company-wide access through groups like Everyone, and clean up orphaned user permissions. A Tenant Risk Exposure dashboard for MSPs was announced for late 2026.
One suite, one Control Panel
Email filtering, advanced threat protection, encryption, archiving, backup and awareness training in the same panel as permissions, with notifications delivered into Microsoft Teams. For an MSP that already runs 365 Total Protection, permission reporting is one more tile.
European vendor, own data centres
A Hannover company, now part of Proofpoint, that stores customer data in its own regional data centres independent of Microsoft, with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2 on the certificate wall.
What it does not touch
Four questions a permission report was never built to answer.
Each one is a gap a security team feels during an incident, an audit or a Copilot rollout. None of them is on the 365 Permission Manager feature list, by design: it governs who may share a site, not what happens to the data.
- 01
What is inside the sites that pass
A site can satisfy its sharing policy and still hold a payroll export reachable by every guest it legitimately has. 365 Permission Manager governs the sharing settings and lists permission metadata; it does not read the content. 1Security scans files and emails with its own engine, more than 300 detectors plus OCR for scans and photos, on a standard licence, and never stores the content.
- 02
Forensics in minutes, not days
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. Hornetsecurity keeps an Activity Log of the actions taken through its own tool and sends a daily summary of critical sharing changes; the opening, downloading and sign-in history of your tenant is not its subject.
- 03
Anomalies, locations, devices
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. 365 Permission Manager reads permissions and sharing settings in SharePoint, Teams and OneDrive and has no sign-in, location or device layer.
- 04
AI agents and Copilot reach
Hornetsecurity positions its sharing policies as Copilot preparation, which is a fair start. 1Security goes on to show what Copilot and every agent in your tenant can reach today, who deployed each agent, what it did and when it broke its own pattern, with a fix list and a per-site indexing block. No agent or app inventory appears in the Hornetsecurity documentation.
Side by side
1Security vs Hornetsecurity 365 Permission Manager, row by row.
Three states, not two: where Hornetsecurity has a lighter version of something, or a different product does a neighbouring job, the row says so. Every Hornetsecurity cell carries a number that resolves to a public source below the table.
- 16Covered
- 0Partial or lighter
- 0Not covered
- 2Covered
- 8Partial or lighter
- 6Not covered
| Capability | 1Security | Hornetsecurity |
|---|---|---|
| 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 | HornetsecurityPartial or lighter Performed Actions list and Activity Log cover changes made through the tool, plus a daily summary of critical sharing changes; no tenant-wide activity history documented10 |
| Sign-in logs | 1SecurityCovered Per-user sign-ins with network, device and Conditional Access coverage | HornetsecurityNot covered Not in scope; the product reads permissions and sharing settings in SharePoint, Teams and OneDrive1 |
| Anomaly detection | 1SecurityCovered Learns what is normal per user, app and agent; threshold you set and re-apply to history | HornetsecurityNot covered Daily summary of critical permission changes; no behaviour analysis documented1 |
| Locations, networks and devices | 1SecurityCovered Country, city, VPN, Tor and datacenter classification, per-user travel; every device touching data, unmanaged ones flagged | HornetsecurityNot covered Not covered; no location, network or device layer in the documentation2 |
| Sensitive data detection | 1SecurityCovered Own engine with 300+ detectors and OCR, on any licence; Purview detections as a second opinion | HornetsecurityNot covered Sensitive information is protected through sharing policies on sites, files and folders; no content scanning or label reading documented2 |
| Email and mailboxes | 1SecurityCovered Outbound sensitive content, send-as and delegated sending, shared mailboxes without an owner, actions on messages | HornetsecurityPartial or lighter A different product for a different job: 365 Total Protection filters mail with ATP, encryption and archiving; 365 Permission Manager does not cover mailboxes13 |
| Administration, compliance, AI | ||
| Permission graph | 1SecurityCovered Direct grants, links, groups, site roles, inheritance, apps, agents, mailboxes and guests resolved into one answer per file | HornetsecurityPartial or lighter SharePoint, Teams and OneDrive sites; nested groups broken down to effective access, view as a user; no apps, agents, mailboxes or devices1 |
| Sharing policies and remediation | 1SecurityCovered 40+ actions across users, sites, files, apps, licences, devices, agents and email; review queue, grace period, revert, read-back confirmation | HornetsecurityCovered Built-in and custom per-site policies, owner audit with approve or fix, automatic remediation, Quick Actions for Everyone and orphaned users1 |
| Stale guests and orphaned accounts | 1SecurityCovered Idle guests, users, apps, sites and mailboxes ranked by idle time, each with a reclaim or remove action in the review queue | HornetsecurityCovered Orphaned user cleanup today; Tenant Risk Exposure dashboard with inactive guests and orphaned accounts announced for the fourth quarter of 202612 |
| Compliance mapping | 1SecurityCovered 11 frameworks on shared requirements, weekly snapshots, dated evidence packs | HornetsecurityNot covered Compliance means adherence to the sharing policy a site is assigned; no mapping to regulations or standards in the documentation3 |
| AI agents | 1SecurityCovered What each agent can reach across files, sites and email, who deployed it, its activity and anomalies, quarantine and identity actions | HornetsecurityNot covered Not covered; AI readiness is addressed through permissions and sharing, no agent or app inventory documented12 |
| Copilot readiness | 1SecurityCovered Dedicated screen: what Copilot reaches today, fix list, per-site indexing block, progress since the first assessment | HornetsecurityPartial or lighter Automated compliance monitoring positioned as Copilot preparation; no Copilot-specific view or indexing control documented1 |
| Fit and deployment | ||
| Public API | 1SecurityCovered REST for logs, detections, alerts, users, compliance, readiness; MCP server with the same reads | HornetsecurityPartial or lighter Two monitoring endpoints since April 2026: tenant compliance summary and per-site compliance details, authenticated through the Control Panel6 |
| SIEM feed | 1SecurityCovered Enriched events pulled by Sentinel, Splunk or any SOC over the API | HornetsecurityPartial or lighter Compliance summaries for external monitoring tools; no event feed documented6 |
| Deployment and residency | 1SecurityCovered SaaS, your own Azure (BYOC) or on-premise at any size; a dedicated database per tenant | HornetsecurityPartial or lighter SaaS in the vendor's own regional data centres, independent of Microsoft's infrastructure; self-hosting not documented13 |
| Microsoft licence needed | 1SecurityCovered Nearly everything on Business Basic, E1 or E3; no E5 or Purview for content scanning | HornetsecurityPartial or lighter Required Microsoft plans not stated; priced by quote, also bundled in 365 Total Protection Plan 417 |
- Covered
- Partial or lighter
- Not covered
Sources for every Hornetsecurity claim
Verified 2026-10-25- 1.365 Permission Manager product page (scope, policies, Quick Actions, daily summary, reports, Copilot) - www.hornetsecurity.com/en/services/365-permission-manager/
- 2.365 Permission Manager fact sheet (PDF, January 2024) - www.vadesecure.com/hubfs/Ressource%20Marketing%20Website/Datasheet/Hornet%20Products%20Datasheets/EN/VADE_Fact_Sheet_365PM_EN_2024-01-24.pdf
- 3.Introducing 365 Permission Manager (built-in policies, three reports, Activity Log) - www.hornetsecurity.com/en/blog/introducing-365-permission-manager/
- 4.Microsoft 365 Permissions and Copilot Security (per-site policies, violations list) - www.hornetsecurity.com/en/blog/copilot-security/
- 5.365 Permission Manager release notes archive - www.hornetsecurity.com/en/blog/release-notes/release-notes-365-permission-manager-en/
- 6.Monitoring APIs for 365 Permission Manager, release of 23 April 2026 - www.hornetsecurity.com/en/release-notes/365-permission-manager-23-04-2026/
- 7.Release of 4 March 2026 (Teams notifications through AI Cyber Assistant) - www.hornetsecurity.com/en/release-notes/365-permission-manager-04-03-2026/
- 8.Release of 21 January 2026 (Policy Exclusion, Activity Log) - www.hornetsecurity.com/en/release-notes/365-permission-manager-21-1-2026/
- 9.Release of 15 September 2026 (redesigned interface) - www.hornetsecurity.com/en/release-notes/365-permission-manager-26-09-15/
- 10.Release of 10 September 2025 (To Do list with Pending and Performed Actions) - www.hornetsecurity.com/en/release-notes/365-permission-manager-10-09-2025/
- 11.Simplified compliance policies, release of 20 May 2025 - www.hornetsecurity.com/en/release-notes/365-permission-manager-policy-creator/
- 12.Press release of 15 October 2026 (AI readiness, Tenant Risk Exposure, AI Cyber Assistant) - www.hornetsecurity.com/en/blog/ai-readiness-press-release/
- 13.365 Total Protection plans (Plan 4 permission control, regional data centres) - www.hornetsecurity.com/en/services/365-total-protection/
- 14.About Hornetsecurity (own regional data centres, certifications) - www.hornetsecurity.com/en/about-us/
- 15.365 Total Backup - www.hornetsecurity.com/en/services/365-total-backup/
- 16.AI Cyber Assistant - www.hornetsecurity.com/en/services/ai-cyber-assistant/
- 17.Hornetsecurity pricing (quote only) - www.hornetsecurity.com/en/pricing/
- 18.Proofpoint completes acquisition of Hornetsecurity, 8 December 2025 - www.proofpoint.com/us/newsroom/press-releases/proofpoint-completes-acquisition-hornetsecurity
Hornetsecurity, 365 Permission Manager, 365 Total Protection and 365 Total Backup are trademarks of their owner. This comparison was written by 1Security from public documentation and was not reviewed by Hornetsecurity. 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 and whether you can act on it from the same screen.
Who has access, and why
One graph across every path: direct permissions, sharing links, group membership, site roles, inheritance, apps, agents, mailboxes and guests. Every external organisation that touches your tenant resolved to a real company and reconciled with your trusted-domain settings, not only flagged as "external".
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. A sharing policy fixes the site; this fixes the tenant.
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 sharing policy with Copilot in the headline: what each agent can actually read across files, sites, users and email, 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 Hornetsecurity buyer asks about. The same connection opens every screen below on day one, each answering a question your tenant cannot answer about itself 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 in 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 mail flow to re-route, so the Hornetsecurity filter in front of your mailboxes keeps working untouched.
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.
If your team likes 365 Permission Manager for per-site sharing policies and owner audits, keep it. Keep 365 Total Protection for filtering, threat protection, encryption and archiving, and 365 Total Backup for backup; 1Security does none of those jobs. It takes content, incidents, anomalies, devices, locations, AI agents, compliance mapping and licence reclaim, and the two never fight over the same setting: 1Security changes nothing until you enable actions.
Email is the clearest example of two different jobs side by side. Hornetsecurity decides what reaches a mailbox and encrypts or archives what leaves. 1Security watches what left with sensitive content inside, who sent as whom through delegated rights, and which shared mailboxes have no owner, and lets you act on the messages themselves.
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 content inside sites that pass their sharing policy and are reachable by guests or Anyone links
- Unknown devices and locations in the last 90 days
- AI agents and apps, and what each can reach
- Anomalies on users, apps and agents over 90 days
- Mail that left with sensitive content and who can send as whom
- Licences, apps, sites and mailboxes you pay for and nobody uses
FAQ
Questions buyers ask when they already run Hornetsecurity.
Do I have to remove Hornetsecurity to use 1Security?
No. 1Security reads your tenant through its own Entra app with read-only consent and changes nothing until you enable actions. 365 Permission Manager, 365 Total Protection and 365 Total Backup keep working as before. Teams that keep both usually leave sharing policies, mail filtering and backup with Hornetsecurity and move content findings, incidents, anomalies, compliance and AI access to 1Security.
I already have 365 Total Protection for email. What does 1Security add there?
A different job. Hornetsecurity filters what comes in, encrypts and archives what goes out. 1Security looks at what already left: messages carrying sensitive content, sending through "send as" and delegate rights that business email compromise hides behind, shared mailboxes nobody owns. Both run on the same mailboxes without touching each other, because 1Security reads through Microsoft Graph and re-routes no mail flow.
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.
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 Hornetsecurity does and does not do?
From Hornetsecurity's public product pages, fact sheet, blog, release notes and press releases, each linked under the table with the date we last checked. Where their documentation is silent, the row says "not documented" rather than "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 Hornetsecurity keeps running throughout.
See both on your own tenant.
Book a demo, then a free side-by-side proof of concept next to Hornetsecurity. Read-only consent, first findings the same day, nothing changed in your tenant.
Or keep reading the daily summary and hope the incident waits for the next one.