Licensing Comparison
What Purview features you get at each license tier. Pick your current license and what you're considering, and see exactly what you'd gain.
Add-on licenses
If you're on E3, these add-ons let you get specific E5 Purview features without upgrading the whole license.
Microsoft Purview Suite
Full Purview suite for M365 E3 customers (formerly M365 E5 Compliance)
Includes: Insider Risk, Communication Compliance, Records Management, Information Barriers, Endpoint DLP, Adaptive Protection, eDiscovery Premium, Audit Premium
Microsoft 365 E5 Information Protection and Governance
Auto-labelling, trainable classifiers, exact data match, and data explorer
Includes: Auto-labelling (client + service), trainable classifiers, exact data match, data explorer, Double Key Encryption, Customer Key
Microsoft 365 E5 Insider Risk Management
Insider Risk + Communication Compliance for E3 customers
Includes: Insider Risk Management, Communication Compliance, Information Barriers
Microsoft 365 E5 eDiscovery and Audit
Premium eDiscovery and audit capabilities for E3 customers
Includes: eDiscovery Premium, Audit Premium (1-year+ retention)
Why DSPM is not in the table
Data Security Posture Management is one of the most visible things in Purview right now, so its absence above is deliberate rather than an oversight.
Microsoft does not publish it as an entitlement. The Purview service description has no DSPM section and no per-tier table for it, and neither does the enterprise plan comparison. Putting ticks in a row here would mean inventing data.
What is actually stated. The older classic DSPM page says it needs Microsoft 365 E5 or the Purview Suite. The current experience names no SKU at all: its prerequisites page defers to the service description, and the service description does not cover it. That circularity is Microsoft's, not ours.
DSPM for AI is not one licence either. Copilot coverage needs Microsoft 365 Copilot licences, and anything beyond Microsoft 365 AI apps runs on pay-as-you-go billing.
On the classic experiences. Both classic DSPM and classic DSPM for AI have stopped receiving new features and cannot support Agent 365. Microsoft has not published a retirement date on any page, including the product lifecycle register, so plan to move but do not build a timeline around a date you saw in a blog.
Microsoft 365 E7: what it changes for Purview
E7 sits above E5. It has been generally available since 1 May 2026 at $99 per user per month on an annual commitment, and bundles Microsoft 365 E5, Microsoft 365 Copilot, the Entra Suite, and Agent 365. It is not a column in the comparison above, because for the features listed there it changes nothing: E7 is a superset of E5. Where it does start to matter is agents.
Mostly E7 matters when a Purview feature depends on something outside Purview that E7 happens to bundle. The exception is agentic workloads: the Purview service description now states that Purview protections for agents on Microsoft Foundry and Entra-connected AI apps will be supported by the E7 and Agent 365 SKUs. That is future tense and carries no feature table yet, so treat it as direction of travel rather than something to budget against.
- 1.Network Data Security through Global Secure Access. That path needs an Entra Internet Access licence, which E7 covers in one line and Purview E5 on its own does not. The third-party SASE route avoids this entirely: it needs only Purview E5 plus pay-as-you-go.
- 2.Governing AI agents. This needs Agent 365, which E7 bundles and which Microsoft also sells on its own at $15 per user per month.
Everything else stays an E5 conversation: labels, DLP, insider risk, eDiscovery, communication compliance, retention, and DSPM. If you are weighing E7 purely for Purview, you are paying for Copilot, Entra, and agent governance, not for compliance features.
Confirm with your licensing desk, not the docs. Microsoft's own documentation disagrees with itself here. The Network Data Security page lists E7 as a qualifying licence for the Global Secure Access path, while the Purview service description (the canonical reference this page is built from) mentions E7 exactly once, in future tense, and its own network DLP entry still lists only E5-family SKUs. The Entra-side documentation for that same feature does not mention E7 at all, and E7 is still absent from the Microsoft 365 plan options list nearly three months after it shipped. Treat any E7 requirement as something to verify on a quote.
New meter to watch: requests. Network Data Security bills pay-as-you-go per request, meaning each network call a device or browser makes to a site or API. Responses do not count. Policies enforced through Global Secure Access are not charged while that path is in preview, but the third-party SASE route bills from day one. More on which meters are worth it in the pay-as-you-go guide.
Sources: Microsoft 365 plans and pricing and Learn about Network Data Security.
Security Copilot: included with E5
Microsoft 365 E5 customers get Security Copilot compute units at no extra cost. This covers AI-powered security across Purview, Defender, Entra, Intune, and Sentinel.
E5 tenants receive 400 Security Compute Units (SCUs) per month for every 1,000 licensed users, up to a cap of 10,000 SCUs. The allocation scales proportionally for smaller tenants. Unused SCUs reset each month and don't roll over.
| E5 licensed users | SCUs per month |
|---|---|
| 400 | 160 |
| 1,000 | 400 |
| 4,000 | 1,600 |
| 25,000+ | 10,000 (cap) |
What it covers: Chat, promptbooks, and agents across Purview, Defender, Entra, Intune, Sentinel, and the Security Copilot portal.
Setup: Auto-provisioned for E5 tenants. No Azure configuration required.
Need more? Additional SCUs are available at $6/SCU. Non-E5 customers can also purchase Security Copilot standalone at this rate.
Data sourced from the Microsoft Purview service description, with the E7 and pay-as-you-go detail from Microsoft's pricing and Network Data Security pages. Feature data last verified against the service description on 25 July 2026. Licensing changes often, and Microsoft's own pages do not always agree, so always verify with your Microsoft account team before a purchasing decision.
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