A Contrast and Comparison of Retention and Sensitivity Labels

[Updated September 2025] My infographic linked to below now contains 20 key behaviors compared between sensitivity labels and retention labels. (formerly 10 behaviors)

In Microsoft Purview, whether you’ve implemented sensitivity labels before retention labels (most common) or the other way around, it’s helpful to understand some key similarities and differences between their behaviours and not assume they’re the same. This knowledge can help inform your enablement strategy across users and locations in your organization.

For the majority of my customers, Purview information protection (uses sensitivity labels) is implemented before Purview Records management (uses retention labels). I routinely witness IT Administrators making the assumption that some of the behaviours of the 2 types of labels are the same. This post was created to help clear some of this misunderstanding.

To crystalize my thoughts, I’ve created a 1-page, summarized infographic listing 20 key behaviors I commonly see misunderstandings around. There are details on each one that the infographic doesn’t go into; however, knowing what’s different is the first step.

Here are the 20 behaviours listed in the infographic:

1. Typical volume of labels
2. Can change the label name
3. Can have multilingual label names
4. Can manually apply the label
5. Can default a label for a user
6. Can default a label on a document library
7. Can default a label on a specific folder
8. Can recommend a label to a user
9. Can auto-apply a label on client-side
10. Can auto-apply a label on service-side
11. Can make the label mandatory
12. Can require justification to change the label
13. Can automatically overwrite a label that’s already applied
14. Can assign a label priority
15. Label remains with content even outside of tenant
16. Can support a label hierarchy end-users see
17. Can delete a labeled item
18. Where labels can be published to
19. Copilot integration
20. Can leverage administrative units

Link: INFOGRAPHIC – Contrast and Comparison

I hope you found this helpful to get a birds-eye view of the differences between them.

Thanks for reading.

-JCK