June 12, 2026
CIPP vs. Microsoft 365 Lighthouse vs. ScopedIQ: Which Fits a Solo Consultant?
If you're a solo consultant or a 1-5 person shop managing a handful of Microsoft 365 tenants, you've probably landed on this comparison because you're evaluating how to actually keep tabs on client tenants without either running your own infrastructure or paying enterprise prices for capacity you don't need. Three tools tend to come up: CIPP, Microsoft 365 Lighthouse, and — full disclosure — ScopedIQ, which we built.
Here's an honest breakdown of where each one actually fits.
CIPP: powerful, free, but yours to run
CIPP (CyberDrain Improved Partner Portal) is a genuinely excellent open-source multi-tenant management tool. It's free, actively maintained, and can do far more than reporting — remediation, automation, alerting, the works.
The catch is right there in the name: it's a portal you deploy. You're standing up your own Azure infrastructure, keeping the app updated, and troubleshooting your own deployment when something breaks. For a technical MSP with the time and appetite for that, it's a fantastic deal. For a solo consultant whose actual job is client work — not DevOps — that's a real, ongoing tax on your time.
Microsoft 365 Lighthouse: built-in, but not built for your clients
Lighthouse is Microsoft's own multi-tenant management surface for partners, and it's already there if you have the right partner relationship set up — no separate infrastructure, no separate login.
Where it falls short for a client-facing consulting practice is exactly that: it's built for you to manage tenants, not for you to hand something to a client. There's no white-label export, no branded PDF, and the reporting is oriented around Microsoft's own priorities (Secure Score, deployment status) rather than the specific security-and-license-waste narrative a client actually wants to hear once a quarter.
ScopedIQ: self-serve, client-facing, read-only by design
ScopedIQ is scoped narrowly on purpose: connect a client tenant with a read-only Microsoft admin-consent flow, run a scan, and get a security posture score plus a license waste report — both exportable as a branded PDF with your logo, not ours or Microsoft's.
There's no infrastructure to run. There's no write access requested, ever, in the current version — which also means there's nothing here that remediates a problem for you. It's a reporting and client-communication tool, not a management console.
The honest comparison
| | CIPP | Microsoft 365 Lighthouse | ScopedIQ | |---|---|---|---| | Setup | Self-hosted, technical | Built-in for eligible partners | Self-serve OAuth, under 10 minutes | | Cost | Free (+ your hosting/time) | Included | Volume-tier pricing, self-serve | | Client-facing report | DIY | No | Core feature | | Remediation/automation | Yes | Partial | No — read-only by design | | Maintenance burden | On you | None | None | | Best fit | Technical MSP, wants automation | Microsoft partners already in that ecosystem | Solo consultant who needs a report to hand a client |
When CIPP is actually the better choice
If you're already comfortable running infrastructure, want remediation and automation (not just reporting), and are managing enough tenants that the time investment pays for itself, CIPP is a genuinely strong choice — arguably the more powerful tool of the three. We wouldn't tell you otherwise. ScopedIQ is deliberately narrower: it does one thing (read-only security and license reporting, made presentable to a client) and doesn't try to be a management platform.
Where ScopedIQ fits
If your actual bottleneck is turning "I checked your tenant and it's mostly fine" into something you can put in front of a client every month or quarter — a real score, real findings, real recommendations, your branding — that's the specific gap ScopedIQ is built for. No infrastructure, no write access to worry about, a report in minutes instead of an afternoon of screenshots pasted into a Word doc.