Sightline 365Sightline 365
Purview alternative

Enterprise-grade content harvesting without the enterprise-wide tax.

Most teams assume Microsoft Purview is the only way to run a deep tenant search. Purview was built for regulated legal departments running multi-million-pound litigation holds — not for the day-to-day work of building insurance claim packs, auditing contract IDs, or pulling engineering parts lists. Here's how Sightline 365 compares.

Category
Licensing
Microsoft Purview
Tenant-wide tax

Typically requires E5 or a Purview eDiscovery add-on for every user whose SharePoint site or mailbox may be searched.

Sightline 365
Investigator seat pricing

You only license the specific staff running searches and building packs. Everyone else is untouched.

Category
Data & storage fees
Microsoft Purview
Pay-per-gigabyte

Active monthly charges for indexing data, holding review sets, and generating export packages.

Sightline 365
No data fees

Processing runs locally on your machine using your existing Microsoft Graph API allowance. Nothing leaves the tenant.

Category
The delivery workflow
Microsoft Purview
Raw exports only

Produces raw ZIP, PST or CSV bundles that a staff member has to download, unzip, sort, dedupe and re-upload.

Sightline 365
Ready-to-work library

Finds the documents, handles duplicates, preserves original metadata and pushes a clean pack straight to a target SharePoint library — in one click.

Category
Complexity & speed
Microsoft Purview
High overhead

Requires Global Admin or dedicated compliance roles, compliance-portal navigation and hours of indexing wait time before results appear.

Sightline 365
Instant desktop agility

Lightweight desktop UI. Sign in, type your KQL or search pattern, and watch parallel workers stream results in seconds.

The short version

Three reasons procurement approves it in one call.

01

Skip the E5 licensing trap.

You don't have to upgrade every mailbox in the tenant just because a handful of staff need to run searches. Sightline is priced per investigator, not per potential search target.

02

Automate the destination, not just the extraction.

Purview finds and dumps. Sightline finds, dedupes, preserves metadata and delivers a working SharePoint library ready for review, hand-off or claim submission — no manual re-upload step.

03

Built for scale, safely in the background.

Parallel workers, throttling-aware pacing and resumable runs. Handle a 200,000-item SharePoint site or a 50 GB mailbox sweep without a compliance portal, and without the risk of hammering your tenant.

Prove it on your own tenant.

21-day free trial, 500 operations included. No card required. Nothing leaves Microsoft 365.

Download for Windows

Microsoft, Microsoft 365, SharePoint and Purview are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Sightline 365 is an independent product and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Microsoft. Comparison reflects publicly documented Purview licensing and pricing behaviour as of 2026; individual tenant entitlements may vary. Spotted something out of date? Let us know.