Comparison & migration guide

AccessPoint vs. eCase

eCase is the case system behind much of Whitehall — FOI, subject access, ministerial correspondence and Parliamentary Questions in one platform. AccessPoint runs the information-rights and privacy mandate, PQs included, inside your own Microsoft 365 tenant — and is honest about where eCase's private-office depth wins.

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The short answer

eCase owns UK central government. The Home Office, DWP, the Ministry of Defence, the Cabinet Office, HMRC, DEFRA and HM Treasury are named customers, and Fivium cites more than 50 public sector organisations in total. Its scope is genuinely broader than ours in one direction: eCase runs ministerial and private-office correspondence alongside FOI, EIR and subject access, and that depth is its own. If the ministerial correspondence machine is the heart of your case load, eCase is built for that and this comparison should end there. Parliamentary Questions, often assumed to be the same dividing line, are not — AccessPoint handles PQs as a purpose-configured request type with their own clocks and reporting, shipped as the Order Paper type in the Canadian pack and configurable for a UK department. Where AccessPoint differs is architecture and the privacy half of the mandate: it runs inside your own Microsoft 365 and Azure tenant rather than the vendor's cloud, collects records from where they already live, and carries DPIAs, breach response, complaints and a risk register on the same audit ledger as the requests.

What is eCase (ecase.co.uk)?

eCase is made by Fivium Ltd, a London software company, and sold from its own product site at ecase.co.uk. It handles FOI and EIR requests, subject access and data protection requests, complaints, general correspondence, ministerial correspondence and Parliamentary Questions — a case-type spread shaped by exactly who buys it. It is delivered as UK-hosted cloud software and listed on G-Cloud, the Crown Commercial Service framework most UK public bodies buy through.

The customer list is the product's strongest argument. Named users include the Home Office, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Ministry of Defence, the Cabinet Office, HMRC, DEFRA and HM Treasury, with local authorities such as North Lincolnshire Council, Hampshire County Council and Herefordshire, and police forces alongside them; Fivium cites more than 50 public sector organisations overall. Its published outcome figures are vendor claims and should be read as such: Fivium says customers save an average of 52 minutes per case, that DWP logs cases three times faster, that the MOD saved 70,000 hours a year, and that North Lincolnshire spends 63.25% less time on a data protection request.

Two points deserve stating plainly rather than being buried. Parliamentary Questions are not the dividing line people assume: AccessPoint handles them as a purpose-configured request type with their own intake, clocks and reporting — the Canadian pack ships this as the Order Paper question type, and the same can be configured for a UK department. The genuine distinction is ministerial and private-office correspondence, which eCase carries as a first-class workflow shaped by how private offices work, and where its depth is its own. Departments whose case load is dominated by that side should know it at the start of an evaluation rather than the end.

eCase and AccessPoint, side by side

eCase AccessPoint
Parliamentary Questions Purpose-built workflows and a core strength of the product Handled as a configured request type with its own clocks and reporting — shipped as the Order Paper type in the Canadian pack, configurable for a UK PQ process
Ministerial & private-office correspondence A first-class workflow built around private-office practice — the product's own depth Not our focus. If this dominates your case load, eCase is built for it and AccessPoint is not
Where your data lives Fivium's UK-hosted cloud Your own Microsoft 365 and Azure tenant — no third-party cloud and no vendor access to your records
Records collection Documents brought into the platform Searched and pulled straight from SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook and Teams, with an intake mailbox message becoming a request in one step
Privacy programme FOI, EIR, subject access, complaints and correspondence casework The same request types plus DPIAs and algorithmic impact assessments, breach response with a live notification calculator, an Article 30 record of processing, and an ISO 31000 risk register
AI assistance Efficiency positioned through workflow and time-saving case studies Optional AI Assist running on Azure OpenAI in your own tenant's subscription — intake triage, grounded drafting that flags anything unverifiable rather than inventing it, and proposed redactions, all decided by a person
Redaction Within the platform Browser-native redaction studio with primary and fall-back exemption tagging, find-and-redact across a set, and reusable redactions from earlier requests on the same document
Statutory configuration Configured per customer during implementation 106 jurisdiction packs — the FOIA section 10 twenty-working-day clock, the section 12 cost limit, the EIR regulation 7 extension to 40, and the UK GDPR one calendar-month subject access clock, preloaded
Pricing Quoted, with pricing documents published per G-Cloud service Flat annual USD $2,990 / $7,990 / $14,990 by organisation size, no per-user fees, billed through the Microsoft commercial marketplace

Competitor capabilities vary by product edition and configuration; this table reflects each product's public positioning as of August 2026.

Where eCase fits

A fair comparison cuts both ways — eCase is a reasonable choice when:

  • Your case load is dominated by ministerial and private-office correspondence rather than information rights. That is eCase's core and its depth there is genuine — the clearest reason on this page to choose the other product.
  • You want the vendor with the deepest Whitehall footprint. When the Home Office, DWP, the MOD, the Cabinet Office and HMRC all run the same system, peer practice, shared templates and G-Cloud procurement all point the same way, and that has real value.
  • Vendor-hosted UK cloud suits your assurance posture and you would rather not deploy or bill Azure resources in your own tenant's subscription. AccessPoint deliberately requires that you do.

Where AccessPoint differs

Your tenant, not the vendor's cloud No established UK information-rights product is Microsoft 365 tenant-resident — they are vendor-cloud SaaS, with the occasional on-premise option. AccessPoint is the exception: it deploys into the Microsoft 365 and Azure environment your department already runs, so the records under review — often the most sensitive documents you hold — are reviewed where they already sit, under your own Entra ID, Defender, Purview and Sentinel controls.
The privacy half of the mandate The team answering FOI and subject access is usually the team asked for a DPIA before a new system launches, the team assessing a personal data breach against the 72-hour clock, and the team answering the ICO afterwards. AccessPoint runs all of it on one platform and one hash-chained audit ledger, with the Article 30 record of processing and an ISO 31000 risk register beside it.
AI that never leaves your tenant Optional AI Assist runs on Azure OpenAI deployed in your own tenant's subscription: intake triage, drafting grounded strictly on the record with anything unverifiable flagged [VERIFY] rather than invented, and proposed redactions with confidence and reason. Microsoft does not train on your data, prompts and responses are never stored, a person decides on every output, and each case's audit trail discloses the AI calls made on it.
Priced in public Flat annual pricing published on the site, billed through the Microsoft commercial marketplace, no per-user fees, and a 30-day free trial in your own tenant. Azure hosting bills to you directly at typically around $175 a month with no vendor markup.

Migrating from eCase to AccessPoint

Departments and councils on eCase hold years of FOI, EIR and subject access history, and it should come with you — including cases still on the clock. AccessPoint's Data import & export panel is built for that: no ETL project, no developer, no cutover weekend.

  1. Export your caseload to Excel from eCase's reporting. Any report that reaches a spreadsheet is enough — you do not need a database extract or a vendor engagement.
  2. Download AccessPoint's import template from Settings → Data import & export. It is generated for your tenant, so its dropdowns already carry your own request types, stages and codes, and your existing case references travel with you in the Legacy reference column.
  3. Upload and read the per-row validation report — created, skipped, errors — before anything imports, with a fix-and-reupload error workbook for the rows that need attention. Imports are create-only, so re-runs are always safe.
  4. Stage your case documents in the pre-provisioned migration-staging container in your own tenant's Azure storage, with optional MD5 hash verification for chain of custody.
  5. Import in the background. Records arrive with their status, due dates and documents intact, so in-progress cases simply carry on — there is no cutover, no notifications fire, nothing recomputes, and every record carries an Imported entry in the audit trail.

If your department keeps eCase for ministerial and private-office correspondence, an information-rights migration is a partial move rather than a rip-out — bring the FOI, EIR, subject access and PQ history across and leave the private-office workflows where they are.

Plan your migration →  ·  Data Import & Export guide  ·  Migration & onboarding services

Questions people ask about eCase and AccessPoint

What is eCase and who uses it?
eCase is case-management software from Fivium Ltd of London, used across UK central government for FOI and EIR requests, subject access and data protection requests, complaints, correspondence, ministerial correspondence and Parliamentary Questions. Named customers include the Home Office, DWP, the Ministry of Defence, the Cabinet Office, HMRC, DEFRA and HM Treasury, along with councils such as North Lincolnshire, Hampshire County Council and Herefordshire and a number of police forces; Fivium cites more than 50 public sector organisations in total. It is delivered as UK-hosted cloud software and listed on G-Cloud.

Does AccessPoint handle Parliamentary Questions and ministerial correspondence?
Parliamentary Questions, yes — as a purpose-configured request type with its own intake, clocks and reporting, the same engine that runs access requests. The Canadian jurisdiction pack ships this as the Order Paper question type, and the equivalent can be configured for a UK department's PQ process. Ministerial and private-office correspondence is the honest distinction: eCase carries that as a first-class workflow built around how private offices actually work, and that depth is its own. So the fair summary is that PQs are covered on both sides, and if your case load is dominated by ministerial correspondence rather than information rights, eCase is built for that and we are not going to claim otherwise.

How does AccessPoint compare to eCase?
Two structural differences, plus one honest concession. Architecture: eCase is vendor-hosted UK cloud, while AccessPoint deploys into your own Microsoft 365 and Azure tenant and searches SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook and Teams directly rather than having documents uploaded to a vendor. Scope on the privacy side: AccessPoint adds DPIAs, algorithmic impact assessments, breach response with a live statutory notification checklist, an Article 30 record of processing and an ISO 31000 risk register on the same hash-chained audit ledger. The concession: eCase's scope is broader on the correspondence side, and its ministerial and private-office correspondence workflows are its own. Parliamentary Questions, often assumed to be the dividing line, are covered on both sides — AccessPoint runs them as a configured request type with their own clocks and reporting.

Are Fivium's time-saving figures reliable?
They are vendor case-study figures — an average of 52 minutes saved per case, case logging three times faster at DWP, 70,000 hours a year at the MOD, 63.25% less time per data protection request at North Lincolnshire — and they should be read as the vendor's own claims, ours included when we make them. The wider evidence counsels humility: mySociety's independent research into UK local-government FOI found no correlation between having a case-management system and better performance against the statutory deadline. Software removes the failure modes you control — the clock, the reminders, the handoffs, the search — but process and staffing decide the rest. Ask any vendor how a figure was measured, over what period, and against what baseline.

Can we migrate our eCase history into AccessPoint?
Yes, and it can be a partial migration if you are keeping eCase for the private-office workflows. Any eCase report that reaches Excel maps into AccessPoint's tenant-generated import template — historical and in-progress cases keep their old references as legacy references, requestor contacts import alongside them, and case documents stage through your own tenant's Azure storage with optional hash verification. Imported records arrive with their status, due dates and documents intact, so open cases continue with no cutover, no notifications and nothing recomputed, each carrying an Imported entry in the audit trail.

Competitor information on this page is drawn from public sources — vendor websites, government reports, and press coverage — and was last reviewed in August 2026. Products evolve, and a comparison is never the whole story: capabilities vary by edition and configuration. Spot something out of date? Tell us and we'll correct it.

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