CIPP vs Lighthouse | Deep Dive

If you are looking for a superior multi-tenant management tool for Microsoft 365, CIPP (opens in new tab) and Microsoft 365 Lighthouse (opens in new tab) are often two of the top considerations. To put things simply, Partner Center is a hot pile of garbage for managing tenants so you really should have moved to one of these tools by now but in case you haven’t, I wanted to provide you a deep-dive on the comparison of each.

Comparison Matrix#

I created an entire comparison matrix that we will be walking through but the entire PDF can be found here: CIPP_Lighthouse_Matrix_v1 (opens in new tab)

Overview:

• Cyberdrain Improved Partner Portal (CIPP) => Open Source project developed by a Microsoft MVP (an MSP expert) that allows you to perform multi-tenant management of your customers M365 environment. Can be self-hosted in your own Azure environment.
• Microsoft 365 Lighthouse => Microsoft’s solution for multi-tenant management for MSPs. Natively connected to your partner center environment.

User Management#

Highlights:

• Great Onboarding/Offboarding automation you can perform for users across orgs
• CIPP has additional MSP friendly management capabilities/features

Group Management#

Highlights:

• Lighthouse does not really have any Group management capabilities today
• Group Templates in CIPP is a great way to deploy groups with the same naming conventions or attributes out to one-to-many tenants

Device Management#

Highlights:

• Policy management is pretty consistent across the tools here
• CIPP has more to offer when it comes to deploying applications to devices

Application Management#

Highlights:

• CIPP makes managing applications across tenants very easy
• CIPP also includes basic management of your M365 apps like SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams

Policy Management#

Highlights:

• Awesome functionality in both tools to capture configurations in one tenant to deploy in another
• CIPP performs both reporting and remediation capabilities. They have a deeper set of policies and settings that you can configure.

Mailbox Management#

Highlights:

• Way more functionality for mailbox management in CIPP

Tenant Management#

Highlights:

• Both platforms have GDAP tools but CIPP has superior functionality for generating GDAP links for customers that you have not yet onboarded to Partner Center
• Lighthouse includes a sales tool for upsell/cross-sell opportunities

Reporting#

Highlights:

• Tons of great reporting from both tools. CIPP is superior in the fact that you can schedule recurring reports.
• CIPP has much more depth to Secure scoring reporting in the app and provides remediation capabilities

Alerting#

Highlights:

• CIPP has integration to PSA and Webhooks which is more than being able to set up an email connector in Lighthouse
• CIPP has more depth into the data/events that can be alerted on.

Integration Capability#

Highlights:

• Both tools have open APIs you can leverage. CIPP even uses the lighthouse app for data in that platform
• CIPP has the MSP friendly integrations for documentation and ticketing

Admin#

Highlights:

• CIPP can be very difficult to deploy and maintain for some users, especially on the self-hosted plan.
• Lighthouse has better overall performance (loading times, updates, error messages, etc.)
• There is much more maintenance with CIPP than Lighthouse which is fully managed by Microsoft.

Pricing#

CIPP

From CIPP FAQ:

“Assuming you’re running on the click-to-deploy configuration and average usage patterns it should cost $15 – $20 or £17 – £22 per month. You can check the costs, and estimated costs, for the resource group on the Azure Portal.

Please note it is your responsibility to ensure you are keeping an eye on costs within your instances.”

I personally just like to allocate a $100/m budget for this just to have something that would be a baseline.

Lighthouse:

$0

Full Deep Dive Demo#