Augmentt vs CIPP: paid multi-tenant Microsoft 365 management against open source

Choosing between Augmentt and CIPP comes down to who you want on call when the tool breaks. If your team is comfortable running Azure resources, reading GitHub issues and updating its own deployment, CIPP gives you deep tenant standards and baselines for little or no licence cost. If you would rather pay a vendor to own uptime, updates and support, Augmentt is the safer fit. The Augmentt vs CIPP decision is about skill and appetite, not features.

Both tools manage many Microsoft 365 tenants from one place, and both overlap heavily on what an MSP actually needs day to day. The differences sit underneath: how you install them, how you pay, how standards get pushed, and what happens on the bad morning. Here is the comparison, piece by piece.

Augmentt vs CIPP at a glance

That table hides the interesting part, which is what each column costs you in staff time. If you want the wider field including Lighthouse and RMM-based options, our comparison of Microsoft 365 management tools for MSPs covers it.

Setup effort: an afternoon against a small project

A commercial SaaS tool is designed so that a non-specialist can connect tenants without touching infrastructure. You grant consent through your partner relationships, the vendor's platform does the rest, and updates arrive without you noticing.

Self-hosted CIPP is a different kind of job. You deploy it into an Azure subscription you control, set up the app registration and permissions, and connect it to your partner tenant through GDAP. The documentation is good and the community is active, but it assumes someone who knows what a function app is and does not panic at a failed deployment log.

The Tuesday test: picture the person who would rebuild the deployment if it broke on a Tuesday with tickets queuing. If you can name them, and they would enjoy it, self-hosting is realistic. If the honest answer is the founder at 11pm, it is not.

Licensing: free software is not free running

CIPP's code costs nothing. Running it does: Azure consumption for the hosting, plus the hours spent on updates, permission changes when Microsoft adjusts Graph, and investigating odd behaviour. For a team that would spend those hours anyway because they like the work, that cost is close to invisible. For a team stretched across the service desk, it is the most expensive line nobody budgets for.

Augmentt charges a subscription, and the price is the price. You should get a written quote and read the contract term, renewal clause and notice period as carefully as you would for any RMM, because a cheap first year and an automatic multi-year renewal is a familiar pattern across MSP software.

Baseline enforcement: where CIPP is strongest

Tenant standards are CIPP's centre of gravity. You define a set of standards, such as security defaults, audit logging, mailbox settings or sharing restrictions, and apply them across tenants in report, alert or remediate mode. Remediate mode actually changes the tenant. That is powerful and, applied carelessly, a way to break twenty clients at once, so start in report mode and widen gradually.

Augmentt approaches the same ground as a commercial product: configuration baselines, drift alerts and user and licence management presented for technicians who are not Microsoft 365 specialists. The exact depth of what it enforces versus reports changes as the product develops, so ask for a demo against one of your real tenants rather than trusting a feature grid.

Whichever you pick, a baseline is only as good as the audit behind it. Our guide to the Microsoft 365 settings to check at client onboarding is a sensible starting list for what your standards should contain.

Reporting: who reads it decides which wins

Reporting splits by audience. CIPP's reports are built for technicians: tables of standards compliance, MFA state, licence assignment and alerts, exportable and thorough. They are not designed to be handed to a client director.

Commercial tools generally put more effort into polished, client-facing output, because that is part of what you pay for. If your QBRs lean on Microsoft 365 findings, test whether the report you would send needs reworking every time. For the licence side specifically, a manual licence audit often produces the more persuasive story, whichever tool supplies the data.

When it breaks: the failure modes compared

• Microsoft changes an API. Augmentt's engineers fix it and you may not notice. With CIPP, the maintainers usually ship a fix, but you have to apply the update to your own deployment.
• A permission or GDAP relationship goes wrong. Both tools fail quietly for that tenant. With a vendor you open a ticket; with CIPP you diagnose it yourself or ask the community.
• Your key person leaves. A SaaS tool carries on. A self-hosted deployment understood by one technician becomes a liability the day they hand in notice.
• The vendor changes terms. This is the risk that runs the other way. CIPP's code is yours to keep running; a commercial contract can change at renewal.

Self-hosting moves the risk from the vendor's price list to your own rota.

Which one fits your team

Choose CIPP if you have at least one technician who is genuinely strong on Azure and Microsoft 365, you want granular, enforceable standards, and you would rather spend time than money. Choose Augmentt if your team is generalist, you need a supported tool with someone accountable, and polished reporting matters to how you sell. If you are not sure CIPP is even the right category, our CIPP vs Lighthouse comparison explains where Microsoft's free option fits.

Where this fits with Helios

Helios is not a tenant standards engine and does not replace CIPP's remediation. It monitors Microsoft 365 and Defender alongside endpoints, patching, backups and the helpdesk, so tenant alerts land in the same ticket queue your technicians already work, whether the machines belong to clients or to your own company. Many MSPs will reasonably run CIPP or Augmentt for standards and an RMM and PSA for everything else. Helios has pricing from £15 a month with every feature on every plan and no charge per technician.

Common questions about Augmentt and CIPP

Is CIPP really free for MSPs?

CIPP's source code is free and open source, so there is no licence fee to self-host it. An MSP still pays for the Azure resources the deployment runs on and for the staff time to install, update and troubleshoot it. The maintainers have also offered a paid hosted version for teams that want CIPP without running the infrastructure, so check current terms.

Can you use CIPP and Augmentt together?

Running CIPP and Augmentt side by side is technically possible, since both connect to tenants through partner permissions. The practical problem is two tools enforcing overlapping baselines, which can fight over the same settings and produce confusing drift alerts. If you trial both, keep one in report-only mode so only a single tool ever changes tenant configuration.

Do I need GDAP to use CIPP?

CIPP relies on delegated access through Microsoft's partner programme, and GDAP is the current model for granting an MSP scoped admin rights into client tenants. Setting up GDAP relationships with the right roles is part of the CIPP installation effort, and missing roles are a common reason specific standards or reports fail for individual tenants.

Researched and written with Helio SEO, our AI writer for business blogs.