SharePoint agents alternative: cross-app cited search without the 20-source limit

The limit that decides whether it can be your company search is published in Microsoft's own documentation: you can include up to 20 source items as the knowledge source of an agent, and those source items can be sites, document libraries, folders and files. Twenty. That is a deliberate design decision, not an oversight, because a SharePoint agent was built to be narrow and precise rather than broad. The supported file types are equally specific: DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX, XLSX, PDF, TXT and RTF, with images, meeting recordings, videos and OneNote listed as coming later.

Then there is the licensing question, which is where most evaluations stall. To create an agent you need a Microsoft 365 Copilot license and the ability to add files to the site. To use one you need either that license or a pay-as-you-go billing policy your admin sets up as a resource in Azure. With neither, Microsoft's own comparison table says plainly that users cannot create or use agents. And because SharePoint agents are grounded in the tenant graph, Microsoft documents that each interaction with a SharePoint agent uses 12 messages, 10 for tenant graph grounding and 2 for the generative answer, billed through the Copilot Studio meter for anyone without a Copilot license.

InSearch is the alternative for the other requirement, the one that starts with someone asking a question and not knowing which of your dozen apps holds the answer. One search across Google Drive, Slack, Notion, Confluence, Gmail, Jira and Salesforce, a written answer with inline citations back to the exact source documents, item-level permissions enforced live at query time, and a published per-seat price with no meter and no Azure subscription in the setup path. If your knowledge fits in 20 SharePoint sources and everyone already has Copilot, use the SharePoint agent. If it does not, this is the gap it leaves.