Compare
Vitals vs Microsoft Secure Score
Isn’t this just Secure Score? No — and the honest version of no starts with the fact that Vitals reads your Secure Score and prints it in the report. Microsoft’s number sits beside ours. Here is what each one is for.
Use Secure Score for
The controls Microsoft recommends, in Microsoft's own portal, tracked continuously by the people who run the tenant. It is free, it is theirs, and Vitals reports it rather than replacing it.
Use Vitals for
The questions Secure Score does not ask — your email domain, your licences against your usage, your content — answered once, with evidence, for the person who is not going to log in to a portal.
Use both when
Somebody outside the tenant needs to see where it stands. Secure Score is a number the administrator watches; the Vitals report is a document the director reads, and it carries the Secure Score inside it.
Side by side
What Secure Score is, as Microsoft describes it, against what Vitals is.
| Microsoft Secure Score | Vitals | |
|---|---|---|
| What it measures | Your tenant against Microsoft's recommended security controls, as points out of a maximum. | Your tenant against twenty-seven checks across identity, email, data, licensing, workplace and Copilot readiness — including Secure Score itself. |
| Where it lives | The Microsoft Defender portal, for whoever has access to it. | A paginated report, delivered once by private link, written for whoever decides what happens next. |
| What it says about a finding | The control, the points available, and Microsoft's implementation guidance. | The finding, the evidence it was read from, why it matters in plain English, what to do, and whether it was read directly or inferred. |
| Email domain protection | Not covered — SPF, DKIM and DMARC are DNS records, outside the tenant. | Every custom domain checked in public DNS: who can send as you, and whether anything stops them. |
| What you already pay for | Recommends controls; does not compare entitlement with use. | Reads subscriptions and service plans against what is switched on — device management licensed for sixty-nine, fourteen enrolled. |
| Content and sharing | Not covered at file level. | The largest sites crawled for anonymous links, organisation-wide sharing, unlabelled and stale content, with the share of content covered stated. |
| Change over time | A history chart of points. | A second scan opens with what changed: resolved, new, and where each score moved. |
| Who operates it | Your administrators, continuously. | Nobody. It runs once, read-only, on consent you can withdraw; there is nothing to operate. |
| Price | Included with Microsoft 365. | £99 fixed, or £295 with the specific files and an hour together. |
Microsoft Secure Score is a Microsoft product; the description of it here is drawn from Microsoft’s own documentation. Vitals is not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft.
See both numbers in one report
The sample report is published in full. Microsoft’s Secure Score is on the security baseline page, beside the twenty-six checks it does not cover.