Compare
LicenseMeter vs tracking licenses in Excel
A license spreadsheet is free, endlessly flexible and easy to hand to an auditor, which is why almost every IT team has one. This page is about the two things a sheet structurally cannot know: what changed since the last edit, and whether anyone actually uses the seats it lists.
Side by side, dimension by dimension
| Dimension | License spreadsheet | LicenseMeter |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free, apart from the hours spent keeping it honest - and those hours are the whole product. | Flat monthly price per tenant, sized by seat count. The first scan is free. |
| Freshness | Accurate on the day someone updates it, stale the day after. Licenses move without the sheet hearing about it. | Synced nightly from the source systems, with manual sync on demand and a full sync history. |
| Activity signal | None. A spreadsheet records what someone typed, not whether the seat was ever opened. | Joins license assignments with sign-in activity and per-workload usage reports, so idle and never-used seats surface with evidence. |
| Staff changes | Breaks silently. Leavers stay listed as active until someone remembers to edit the row, and nobody is notified that nobody did. | Disabled accounts still holding paid seats surface automatically, including the Adobe, Zoom or other connected-app seats the same people kept. |
| Per-seat cost | Formulas someone built once and now has to update whenever prices, tiers or seat mixes change. | An editable per-tenant price book prices every finding in euros per month, prefilled with list-price estimates. |
| Coverage | Whatever columns someone added. Every new vendor means another tab and more manual entry. | Connectors cross-check Microsoft 365, Adobe, Zoom, Atlassian, Salesforce, OpenAI, Anthropic, ChatGPT and Claude seats against Entra ID in the same pass. |
| Findings workflow | Cell colors and comments, reconciled across the copies of the file that inevitably exist. | Findings persist across syncs with an acknowledge and reopen workflow, so decisions survive the next update. |
| Finance handoff | Already a spreadsheet, which is genuinely convenient - but the numbers are only as current as the last edit. | One-click CSV export of all findings with owner, rule and monthly euro cost, current as of last night's sync. |
| Remediation | A to-do column. The actual cleanup happens somewhere else. | Generates the PowerShell remediation script for the seats you choose. Your IT reviews and runs it; LicenseMeter itself never writes to the tenant. |
When a spreadsheet is enough
Honestly: more often than vendors like to admit. A handful of subscriptions, one person who owns the sheet and actually maintains it, a once-a-year inventory before a renewal - a spreadsheet handles all of that for free. It is also genuinely good at what it was made for: contract metadata like renewal dates, owners and notes, which no API will ever tell you. The sheet fails only when it is asked to be a monitoring system, because it cannot observe anything.
What LicenseMeter adds to the sheet
Live sync instead of manual entry
Directory accounts, license assignments and connected-app seats are read from the source systems every night, read-only. Nobody retypes anything, so nothing goes quietly stale, and the sync history shows exactly when each picture was taken.
Findings, not rows
A sheet lists seats; LicenseMeter joins each seat with sign-in and usage activity and flags the ones that are wasted: leavers still licensed, seats idle for 90 days or never opened, unassigned paid seats, unused Copilot, licensed guests. Each finding names the account, the rule and the evidence.
A price book that does the math
Every finding carries a euro-per-month figure from an editable per-tenant price book, prefilled with list-price estimates and adjustable to your negotiated rates. When a price changes, you edit it once and every figure recalculates - no formula maintenance.
A workflow, and your exports back
Findings persist across syncs with acknowledge and reopen actions, so decisions are not lost in a copy of the file. And because finance still lives in spreadsheets, everything exports back out: a CSV of all findings with their monthly cost, plus a generated PowerShell script for the cleanup itself.
Start from the spreadsheet you already have
If you track licenses in a sheet, you already work in exports - so the natural first step needs no admin consent at all. The CSV trial computes your waste number from two Microsoft 365 admin center exports, with no consent at all. The link signs you in with Microsoft first. If the number justifies it, connect read-only afterwards and let the nightly sync take over from the uploads.
Keep the sheet for contracts. Stop asking it to watch usage.
Connect read-only, get activity-joined, priced findings in minutes, and export them straight back to the format finance already reads. The security overview lists every permission up front.
After the free scan, 14 days of full monitoring, free. No credit card, read-only access.