Data Protection and Cryptography vs Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)

Short answer

Developers and security teams building applications that need lightweight data masking without infrastructure overhead should reach for Data Protection and Cryptography. The free pricing and 630 GitHub stars signal active use in production environments where byte-level manipulation of sensitive data needs to happen inside application code rather than in a separate gateway. Skip this if your requirement is policy-driven data discovery across your entire data estate; this tool assumes you already know what to mask and where. Organizations with Microsoft 365-heavy workflows should pick Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention because it requires zero configuration for cloud workloads and catches sensitive data movement across Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive without additional agents or console sprawl. The integration with Microsoft 365 Copilot means you're protecting data at the point where employees are actually working, not just at the perimeter. Skip this if your critical data lives outside Microsoft's ecosystem or you need network-layer DLP that works equally well on non-Microsoft SaaS applications; Purview's strength is depth within one vendor's stack, not breadth across your entire software inventory.