Compare Microsoft Security Exposure Management with secure score

This article discusses the differences between Microsoft Secure Score and Microsoft Security Exposure Management.

Comparison

Area	Security Exposure Management	Secure Score
Business goal	Provides a unified view of organizational security posture, and tools for identifying and exploring attack surfaces, and reducing security risk exposure.	Acts as an industry baseline and benchmark to measure organizational security posture.
Recommendations	Includes Secure Score recommendations, and recommendations from other sources, such as Microsoft Defender for Cloud.	Recommendations focus mostly on posture assessment of Microsoft Defender products.
Recommendation measurements	Views adherence to recommendations from a compliance/non-compliance perspective.	Measures recommendations in terms of points achieved out of a total number of points, and whether points regress or are gained based on specific actions.
Metrics	Gathers recommendations for similar assets together into metrics. Metrics enable you to quickly gauge exposure levels for groups of similar assets.	Uses security control metrics.
Initiatives	Metrics are gathered into predefined initiatives. For instance, the ransomware initiative gathers and defines multiple metrics/recommendations related to ransomware risk.	Not available.
Additional tools	Security insights help you to manage security exposure. Tools such as the enterprise exposure graph and the attack surface map enable you to query, review, analyze, and visualize cross-organizational attack surfaces. Security Exposure Management also generates and provides visibility into potential attack paths across the organization.	Secure Score metrics only.

Next steps

Review the prerequisites to get started with Security Exposure Management.