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Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps comparison

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Zafran Security
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
8.2
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (18th), Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) (2nd)
Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (9th), Cloud and Data Center Security (9th), Container Security (9th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (5th), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (6th), Compliance Management (6th)
Microsoft Defender for Clou...
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) (3rd), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (14th), Microsoft Security Suite (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Vulnerability Management
Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB)
 

Featured Reviews

Israel Cavazos Landini - PeerSpot reviewer
Weekly insights and risk analysis facilitate informed security decisions
I appreciate the weekly insights Zafran provides, which include critical topics for networks and IT security, allowing us to evaluate which insights apply to our environment. The organization score feature is valuable to keep the leadership team updated on how our infrastructure fares security-wise. The applicable risk level versus base risk level feature is beneficial because prior to Zafran, we only used the base risk level, but now understand that risk depends on the asset itself. Zafran is an excellent tool.
Bart Coddens - PeerSpot reviewer
Evolved cloud security with active monitoring but needs interface consistency
The user interface needs work. Sometimes, it is a transition from the old tool to the new CNAPP Two that I currently have, and remnants of the old environment can still be detected. I require consistency in the user interface to ensure everything is streamlined into the same look and feel. More work is needed in fine-tuning the threat data towards your CSPM and activity logs, aligning them with business intelligence, which requires a cohesive console interface. My assessment of CloudGuard CDRs in intrusion detection and threat hunting capabilities is that it still needs some work. All the threat data that comes in, you need to fine tune it a bit.
Jagadeesh Gunasekaran - PeerSpot reviewer
Saves us time, has good visibility, and a single dashboard
The solution is user-friendly and provides great visibility into threats. There are easy options available for specific workflow inspections. We can also get support by going through the Microsoft documentation, which is straightforward. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps helps us prioritize threats across our enterprise. It covers us from a compliance perspective and protects our organization's data. Data protection is a very important aspect of any new organization, as we need to protect our data from both external attacks and insider threats. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps helps us monitor for abnormal activity by insiders, which is one of the most important access points for attackers today. Additionally, the different cloud apps that Defender for Cloud Apps supports provide us with much more visibility into potential threats and activities on the internet. We have integrated Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps alerts with Sentinel. The integration is straightforward. We can find the configuration details on Microsoft's official documentation website. If we are familiar with how Microsoft products work, we will be able to follow the instructions clearly. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps and Sentinel work natively together to deliver coordinated detection and response across our environment. Our integrated Microsoft solutions provide comprehensive threat protection, covering most of the tactics and techniques relevant to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. Sentinel allows us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem. When implementing an SIEM solution, there are always prerequisites such as Active Directory logs, security logs, firewall logs, and DNS logs. These are important logs that need to be ingested into the environment. Sentinel has many third-party connectors available that make integrations straightforward. Microsoft provides the configuration details in the Sentinel platform. It is important to integrate all relevant log sources into the SIEM solution so that we can detect and be alerted to any type of threat factor, whether it is from an internal or external source. Integrating third-party solutions into the platform requires a separate configuration, but Microsoft provides the necessary information. However, we need to have the appropriate permissions to execute these setups. Sentinel provides a centralized dashboard that covers threat management and configuration. It gives us complete insight into what entities are accessing, as well as full details for investigation. We can see how the alerts and threats are relevant to suspicious activities, whether they are related to malicious IP addresses, suspicious ASHAs, or any other indicators of compromise. All of this relevant data can be seen in a single pane. Recently, Microsoft introduced a new investigation experience in a single pane. This means that we can now get a lot of details in a single pane, without having to go there and execute a query. There are a lot of new insights being developed in the Sentinel platform these days. It has software intelligence. They recently introduced Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence, which covers almost all IOCs. This protects organizational assets from threats and suspicious traffic associated with IOCs. If a match is found, alerts are generated. This is a very interesting feature. Another great feature is automation and logic apps. We can create a number of operations, such as posting in a team's channel if a severe incident occurs or sending an email notification. There are many operations available, so we can automate a lot of tasks. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps helps us stay compliant. It has predefined mechanisms in place to prevent attacks. For example, if an external user tries to access our SharePoint folders or files, an attack will be blocked. This is why it is important to give appropriate access to guest users. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps has many features and benefits. It provides a number of policies that can be configured to meet the specific needs of our security team. These policies can be used to customize cloud applications so that only authorized users can access them and perform operations that benefit the organization. In terms of safety and security, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is top-notch. Using the solution's automation features, we can suppress false positive alerts. We can also close alerts, lower their severity from "high" to "low" or "informational," or close them immediately with the appropriate commands. This will depend on the configuration automation rule and the perspective from which we are testing. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps provides a single console. We are also provided with Microsoft templates to enable workbooks instantly. Alternatively, we can build our own customized workbooks to provide better insights and improve our SOC efficiency and overall performance. Consolidating all of our security data into one dashboard has saved our security operations team a significant amount of time. From an analyst's perspective, it is now much easier to correlate events, investigate alerts, and visualize specific entities. For example, an analyst can quickly see all of the alerts associated with a particular IP address, or they can view all of the activity for a specific entity over the past 24 hours or 7 days. This level of detail and insight would not be possible if our data were siloed in multiple dashboards. The single dashboard saves our operations approximately 20 hours per week by eliminating the need to access multiple consoles and tabs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps threat intelligence can help us prepare for potential threats before they happen. However, it depends on how we develop the policies for the database to block or ignore things in our environment.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"We saw benefits from Zafran Security almost immediately after deploying it."
"Zafran is an excellent tool."
"We are able to see the real risk of a vulnerability on our environment with our security tools."
"Overall, we have seen about eighty-seven percent reduction of the number of vulnerabilities that require urgency to remediate, specifically the number of criticals."
"Zafran has become an indispensable tool in our cybersecurity arsenal."
"This solution provides threat prevention and detection of anomalies automatically and investigates the activity of each one of them."
"The ability to drill down to individual hosts on an account and see which ones are affected is valuable."
"The way they offer container security is a big highlight that I have noticed. The solution is also agentless, so the scanning, runtime, really everything is offered directly by CloudGuard."
"It has great scalability."
"It offers a range of features tailored to address the unique security challenges."
"The feature that I find most valuable is the blocking feature."
"The most valuable feature is the separate environment."
"I value the comfort and the ability to receive proper insights almost hands-off."
"Shadow IT discovery is the feature I like the most."
"The feature that helps us in detecting the sensitive information being shared has been very useful. In addition, the feature that allows MCAS to apply policies with SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive is being used predominantly."
"Defender for Cloud Apps has given us good visibility regarding what we've allowed in our environment until now. It helps us to know our inventory, understand what our customers are using, and steer them toward safer practices."
"One of the most valuable features is auditing. Some of the other protection services have issues with auditing. Microsoft Defender for Cloud has an excellent auditing technique that helps us avoid the risk of filtering or information loss. You can use different tools to guarantee these things. It allows you to conduct an in-depth exploration of applications, users, and files that are harmful or suspicious. You can also enhance your security setup by creating personalized rules or policies that help you better control traffic in the cloud."
"The most valuable feature is the seamless integration across different clouds."
"The ability to prevent users from using certain applications is one of the most valuable features. It doesn't require any configuration for implementation from the client perspective. It just works right away and gives you the information you need."
"The most valuable feature is its policy implementation."
"In Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, there is an option to enable files. Once you enable that, it will give you all the files in your organization and where they are located in the cloud... That feature is very useful for investigation purposes."
 

Cons

"The dashboarding and reporting functionality of Zafran Security is an area that definitely could use some improvements."
"Initially, we were somewhat concerned about the scalability of Zafran due to our large asset count and the substantial amount of information we needed to process."
"I think the ability to have some enhanced reporting capabilities is something they can improve on, as they have good reports but we have asked for some specific reporting enhancements."
"Integration could be improved."
"The entire system is complicated, and the setup process may not cater to the company's demands."
"The tool should incorporate more use cases like improving security scores. It should also improve documentation."
"The security of Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management could improve. There are always new security issues coming out."
"It feels somewhat fractured to me. I haven't grasped all the parts yet, and better integration would make CNAPP most valuable."
"Automation and advanced threat prevention have room for improvement."
"I'd like to see more advanced encryption for local features, which is not present right now."
"CloudGuard could be more customizable. It has built-in standards for things like GDPR compliance. But depending on your business lane, you might want to build your own controls based on your own standards."
"Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps’s technical support services needs improvement."
"We would like to get more information from the endpoint. I don't get enough detailed information right now on why something failed. There is not enough visibility."
"Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps' initial setup was quite technical but we were prepared. The time of the implementation depends on the job and how many users are being set up."
"I would like to see them include more features in the older licenses. There are some features that are not available, such as preventing or analyzing cloud attacks."
"Sometimes, we'll get false positive alarms. For example, when a SharePoint path has no file sharing, but there is an external user, it will trigger an alarm that the file has been shared with an external user... the alerting mechanism should be more precise when giving you an alert about what activity has been done with the file..."
"Sometimes the support is actually lacking."
"There could be more granular roles that are out of the box included in the product."
"The insights could be improved, especially in reporting."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"CloudGuard is fairly priced."
"The solution’s pricing is a little bit high."
"The pricing is extremely competitive."
"Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management is always known as a good solution but an expensive one. When you're using Cisco, Check Point, or Palo Alto, you know that you will pay more, but you know that it will work."
"The license for CloudGuard Posture Management is about $80 a year, and it's based on your cloud footprint, not the number of users. So you could have a million users, and it doesn't matter."
"The licensing and costs are straightforward, as they have a baseline of 100 workloads (number of instances) within one license with no additional nor hidden charges. If you want to have 200 workloads under Dome9, then you need to take out two licenses for that. Also, it does not have any impact on cloud billing, as data is shared using the API call. This is well within the limit of free API calls provided by the cloud provider."
"The pricing is tremendous and super cheap. It is shockingly cheap for what you get out of it. I am happy with that. I hope that doesn't get reported back and they increase the prices. I love the pricing and the licensing makes sense. It is just assets: The more stuff that you have, the more you pay."
"The license fee is high."
"The cost could be improved when you need to pay for anything. For example, refreshing files takes time to load, though it may be my Internet. To improve the refresh time, Microsoft says that we need to pay for a Premium license, and I don't like paying for things that help make a solution better."
"Where we are right now, this is an acceptable pricing. I would like to see more transparency given to the end user. The end user given to us is via the cloud service provider. There are different programs and license models. Some include this, and some include that. It is all over the place. There can be a little more consistency or simplification in the pricing so that your parts list is not ten pages long, and you are not trying to determine, "If I have an E3, does this cover that?", or "Do I need to pay separately for the license?" Simplification would probably be better."
"It has fair pricing. You pay for what you get. As far as I know, there are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fee."
"Its pricing is on the higher side. Its price is definitely very high for a small-scale company. As an enterprise client, we do get benefits from Microsoft. We get a discounted price because of the number of users we have in our company. We have a premier package, and with that, we do get a lot of discounts. There are no additional costs. It only comes in the top-tier packages. Generally, the top-tier license is the best license that you can get for your organization. If you want, you can buy it separately, but that's not a good idea."
"The pricing is fair."
"This product is not expensive."
"The E5 license offers everything bundled. People are moving to Microsoft because you buy one license and it gives you everything."
"The pricing is in the middle. It isn't too cheap or expensive compared to other antivirus or security products. It is priced according to industry standards."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Educational Organization
5%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zafran Security?
The current pricing of Zafran Security is fair overall. They were good to work with to accommodate our organization w...
What needs improvement with Zafran Security?
The dashboarding and reporting functionality of Zafran Security is an area that definitely could use some improvement...
What is your primary use case for Zafran Security?
Zafran Security is helping reduce the amount of critical vulnerabilities in our environments that require prompt reme...
Which is the better security solution - Cisco Umbrella or Microsoft Cloud App Security?
Cisco Umbrella is an integral component of the Cisco SASE architecture. It integrates security in a single, cloud-nat...
What do you like most about Microsoft Cloud App Security?
It does a great job of monitoring and maintaining a security baseline. For us, that is a key element. The notificatio...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Cloud App Security?
My impression on the pricing, setup costs, and licensing of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is that it's fair. I do...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management, Dome9, Check Point CloudGuard Workload Protection, Check Point CloudGuard Intelligence
MS Cloud App Security, Microsoft Cloud App Security
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Symantec, Citrix, Car and Driver, Virgin, Cloud Technology Partners
Customers for Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps include Accenture, St. Luke’s University Health Network, Ansell, and Nakilat.
Find out what your peers are saying about Qualys, Tenable, Wiz and others in Vulnerability Management. Updated: June 2025.
859,579 professionals have used our research since 2012.