Presify vs the Microsoft 365 Teams activity report
If you administer Microsoft Teams, you already have a usage report built into the tenant. The Microsoft 365 admin center includes a Teams user activity report, and it is free, already turned on, and often the right place to start. Before you go looking for another tool, it is worth knowing exactly what that report answers, because it answers a different question than the one most people are actually asking when they search for Teams "activity."
The short version: the built-in report counts what people did. Presify records what their presence status showed over time. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is the whole reason Presify exists. We are not here to replace the admin center report, and we do not try to.
What the built-in activity report does
The Teams user activity report in the Microsoft 365 admin center tallies actions per user over a window you choose (7, 30, 90, or 180 days). For each person it shows counts and dates such as messages sent in channels and chats, meetings attended and organized, calls, and the last activity date, plus how many days the user was active. You can view it in the dashboard or export it.
That is genuinely useful, and for a real set of jobs it is the correct tool:
- Adoption tracking. Is the rollout landing? Are people actually using Teams, or just logging in?
- License review. Who has a license and has not touched Teams in 60 days? That is a candidate to reclaim.
- Spotting inactive accounts. A zero-activity, never-active account stands out immediately.
If those are your questions, stop here. The admin center already has your answer at no cost, and we would point you straight to it. For more on what Microsoft itself records, see our explainer on does Microsoft Teams track activity.
Where the built-in report stops
The activity report measures volume of actions. It does not record presence status (available, away, busy, offline) and it does not track that status over the day. "Active on a given day" is a count of activity, not a status timeline. Knowing someone sent 12 messages on Tuesday does not tell you whether they showed as available at 2pm or away from 1pm to 4pm.
It also does not expose message content, and neither does Presify. The point of comparison is not privacy posture here. It is the question each tool answers.
So if what you need is a presence history (when did this person's Teams status show available, when did it flip to away, what did the pattern look like across a week), the activity report was never built to give it. That is the specific gap Presify covers, and only that gap.
Counts vs presence history
| Feature | Microsoft 365 activity report | Presify |
|---|---|---|
| Core question | How much did each user do? | What did each user's presence status show, over time? |
| Unit of measure | Action counts: messages, meetings, calls, days active | Presence states: available, away, busy, offline, with timestamps |
| Status over the day | Not recorded | Recorded on a short, regular polling schedule, each change stored |
| Time view | Totals over a fixed window (7 to 180 days) | Presence timelines and online-time trends, per person and per team |
| Pattern detection | Not included | Anomaly flags, always with the math shown |
| Message content | Not exposed | Never read |
| Cost | Free, built into the tenant | Paid subscription |
| Setup | Already on | One-time, read-only Microsoft admin consent, no agent installed |
| Best at | Adoption, license review, inactive accounts | Presence history and presence patterns |
What Presify is, plainly
Presify reads Teams presence (available, away, busy, offline) through the Microsoft Graph presence API, polling on a short regular schedule and storing each change. It turns that into presence timelines, online-time trends, and anomaly flags, per person and per team.
It is deliberately minimal and read-only. It reads presence plus the basic directory fields needed to label and scope users, and nothing else. It never reads message content, chats, calls, files, or calendars. There is no endpoint agent, so nothing is installed on anyone's device, and there are no screenshots and no keystroke logging, ever. Data is tenant-isolated and US-based. Access is role-based (owner, admin, and monitor, a scoped limited-visibility role), every action lands in an append-only audit log, retention is trimmed automatically by plan, and per-user and workspace-wide deletion are built in. Guests are excluded from monitoring, and users located in the EEA, the UK, Switzerland, or Canada are not monitored.
One framing matters: presence describes what a status showed, not why. An anomaly flag shows the underlying math so it is evidence for a conversation, not a verdict.
Who each is for
This is a fit decision, not a contest. The two tools sit side by side and answer different questions.
Use the Microsoft 365 activity report if your question is about usage and adoption: how much are people using Teams, which licenses are idle, which accounts are inactive. It is free, already in your tenant, and the right instrument for that job. Reaching for a third-party tool to answer a usage question the admin center already answers is wasted effort.
Use Presify if your question is about presence over time: what a person's or a team's Teams status looked like across the day or the week, when it changed, and whether a pattern stands out. The built-in report cannot tell you that, because it counts actions rather than recording status. Presify fills exactly that gap, with the read-only, bounded-retention, role-controlled, auditable posture we built it around.
Plenty of teams will use both: the admin center for adoption and license hygiene, Presify when a presence-history question comes up that counts cannot answer.
If presence history is what you are after, see how Presify works or start with one Microsoft sign-in. For the wider landscape, including the DIY route, our pillar guide covers how to see Teams status history.
Microsoft 365 report behavior described here reflects the product as of June 2026 and can change; Presify is an independent product and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Microsoft.