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IBM eDiscovery Manager vs Microsoft Purview eDiscovery comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM eDiscovery Manager
Ranking in eDiscovery
20th
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery
Ranking in eDiscovery
1st
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Microsoft Security Suite (22nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the eDiscovery category, the mindshare of IBM eDiscovery Manager is 2.0%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is 9.8%, down from 26.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
eDiscovery Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery9.8%
IBM eDiscovery Manager2.0%
Other88.2%
eDiscovery
 

Featured Reviews

IC
eDiscovery Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Stable with administrative aspects and an easy to navigate backend
The initial setup isn't exactly straightforward. It's a little complex. A company really should hire some experts that can navigate the implementation. Including testing, the deployment took about three hours. It's not a long or drawn-out process. Technically, you only need one person to handle the setup, however, it's advisable to at least have two people who are knowledgeable. In our case, we implemented it first in a separate environment and, once we saw everything was working as it should, then we sent it to production. There isn't much maintenance required. There's another application that handles that, however, we do have to monitor logs and the server where we put the searches.
John Alvis - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, Information Technology Operations & Security at a energy/utilities company with 201-500 employees
Enables us to guarantee that we followed the regulations
The ability to query everything that's in Microsoft and send links or add people, like managers, to review the documents is valuable. It's easy as I don't have to download and email anything. I just add them as a reviewer, and they can access it from there. Purview's inclusion of critical regulations is essential. Lawyers will ask how we gathered information. With Purview, we can guarantee that we've followed the regulations. The visibility into what's happening and who has access is great for legal matters and saves us a lot of time.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Creating and running queries on the solution is very good."
"The speed of it is valuable. I am able to search even 10,000 mailboxes for specific content. It helps search and accommodate the often limited information provided by users regarding what they need."
"Purview eDiscovery has made it significantly easier to handle rare litigation requests."
"The tool has been beneficial. Some of our previous users left the organization without sharing the information they had at a personal level. This information was related to the organization, and they didn't disclose it. Thanks to the product, it's easy for me to search and find out what communication a specific user has done, whether it's from SharePoint or any other platform. With Microsoft Purview eDiscovery, we can easily retrieve and restore this data."
"The ability to query everything that's in Microsoft and send links or add people, like managers, to review the documents is valuable. It's easy as I don't have to download and email anything. I just add them as a reviewer, and they can access it from there."
"Our legal team benefits from using Microsoft Purview eDiscovery."
"The machine learning wasn't half bad. I really like that part. I thought it was novel. It pretty much automated it, once you trained the model."
"The return on investment is saving the equivalent of one or two full-time IT department employees and a few hours per week for legal staff."
"The most valuable features are automatic content logging tagging. Performing these tasks manually would be impossible. Since most of our data is already in Microsoft, it's convenient to run it through this tool."
 

Cons

"The initial setup is a bit complex."
"I would suggest adding more platforms."
"Purview Data Loss Protection for remediating policy violations needs refinement, for example, in defining what constitutes a credit card because that is where I get the most false positives."
"The sorting and filtering of the result data need improvement, and the interface for writing queries is not user-friendly for business users. We still need all the backend stuff. We have to use Graph API to interface with everything and create custom interfaces on the front end to make it easier for the end users, which is costly. The reporting, sorting, and filtering capabilities that other products have aren't available natively in Purview."
"It has been one of the most solid tools I have worked with. However, Purview Data Loss Protection for remediating policy violations needs refinement, for example, in defining what constitutes a credit card because that is where I get the most false positives."
"We find that many critical functions are available only to E5 license holders."
"I would suggest adding more platforms. Currently, it's compatible with OneDrive, Teams, SharePoint, and Exchange. Adding more features, as Microsoft continues to expand their cloud offerings, would be beneficial. Exploring options like Azure Files might be an avenue for improvement."
"The query language can be time-consuming to figure out if you don't know it initially."
"We find that many critical functions are available only to E5 license holders. It would be beneficial to have more options available for E3 customers. Enhanced Teams functionalities and better capture of text message data, both SMS and MMS, would also be improvements."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The pricing and licensing with Microsoft can be complex, and licensing is known to be a challenge because it changes frequently. While the licensing for Purview is not as tricky as other Microsoft products, navigating licenses since the shift to E3 and E5 plans has been a task, as individual licenses must now be purchased separately."
"The costs associated with E5 licensing are currently expensive for us, so we use the E3 license, which comes with fewer features and functionalities."
"In the positions that I've had through contracting over the years, I've heard talk of it being overpriced and underperforming compared to its competitors."
"With the full bundle, pricing is not a significant concern. As an M3, I find the Purview pricing of 1250 per user worthwhile."
"Microsoft Purview eDiscovery comes as part of Microsoft 365 licenses."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Government
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
8%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Purview eDiscovery?
The setup process was very straightforward. We acquired pricing through our reseller in NASDAQ, eliminating the need to search for prices ourselves.
What needs improvement with Microsoft Purview eDiscovery?
The query language can be time-consuming to figure out if you don't know it initially. While there are options with dropdowns to select criteria, having a natural language feature would be benefici...
What is your primary use case for Microsoft Purview eDiscovery?
I sometimes use it for legal holds or to find lost items, and to determine what is going on. However, most of the time, my use case is legal-related.
 

Also Known As

eDiscovery Manager
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Hansgrohe
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Google, Commvault and others in eDiscovery. Updated: January 2026.
881,665 professionals have used our research since 2012.