We performed a comparison between Cloudflare and Microsoft Defender for Cloud based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Microsoft Defender for Cloud focuses on regulatory compliance, ransomware protection, access controls, incident alerts, collaborative services, UEBA features, and a single pane of glass view. On the other hand, Cloudflare provides good load balancing, DDoS protection, a user-friendly GUI, and a proxy for hiding servers. Microsoft Defender for Cloud needs work on consistency, customization, integration, collaboration, and resource coverage. Cloudflare could use improvements in reporting, support response time, traffic routing, and on-premise solutions.
Service and Support: Microsoft Defender for Cloud's customer service has received a combination of positive and negative feedback, with some customers reporting satisfactory experiences, while others have encountered difficulties with outsourced support and slow response times. On the other hand, Cloudflare's support is generally considered good, although some users have suggested that it could be enhanced, particularly for those who are new to the service.
Ease of Deployment: Microsoft Defender for Cloud's setup requires prior knowledge and policy creation while Cloudflare's setup is easy and comes with configuration instructions. Deploying Cloudflare may take a few days if many pieces of equipment are needed.
Pricing: Microsoft Defender for Cloud is seen as a fair and cost-effective option, despite complex licensing. In contrast, Cloudflare is generally considered expensive, although some users don't pay for licensing. Both solutions are viewed as cost-effective, but Cloudflare may benefit from a customized pricing model for enterprise customers.
ROI: Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides basic security features and facilitates the management of security service providers, while Cloudflare specializes in website protection and server overload prevention.
Comparison Results: Microsoft Defender for Cloud is the preferred option when compared to Cloudflare. It has a lot more security features, such as regulatory compliance, access controls, and ransomware protection. Despite Cloudflare's decent load balancing and DDoS protection, it falls short in terms of regulatory compliance and ransomware protection.
"The vulnerability management modules and the discovery and inventory are the most valuable features. Before using Wiz, it was a very manual process for both. After implementing it, we're able to get all of the analytics into a single platform that gives us visibility across all the systems in our cloud. We're able to correspond and understand what the vulnerability landscape looks like a lot faster."
"With Wiz, we get timely alerts for leaked data or any vulnerabilities already existing in our environment."
"The CSPM module has been the most effective. It was easy to deploy and covered all our accounts through APIs, requiring no agents. Wiz provides instant visibility into high-level risks that we need to address."
"The automation roles are essential because we ultimately want to do less work and automate more. The dashboards are easy to read and visually pleasing. You can understand things quickly, which makes it easy for our other teams. The network and infrastructure teams don't know as much about security as we do, so it helps to have a tool that's accessible and nice to look at."
"Our most important features are those around entitlement, external exposure, vulnerabilities, and container security."
"The security baseline and vulnerability assessments is the valuable feature."
"The product supports out-of-the-box reporting with context about the asset and allows us to perform complex custom queries on UI."
"Out of all the features, the one item that has been most valuable is the fact that Wiz puts into context all the pieces that create an issue, and applies a particular risk evaluation that helps us prioritize when we need to address a misconfiguration, vulnerability, or any issue that would put our environment into risk."
"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is that it has a free version. They give us the free version with the anti-DDoS features and also the load balancing solution."
"The web application firewall brought us good security and a view of the accesses/blocks of the entire domain and subdomain that were accessed both by region (country) and IPs."
"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."
"The UI is good."
"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."
"Easier http to https redirect using page rules"
"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."
"It works seamlessly on the Azure platform because it's a Microsoft app. Its setup is similar, so if you already have a Microsoft account, it just flows into it."
"Most importantly, it's an integrated solution. We not only have Defender for Cloud, but we also have Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Office 365, and Defender for Identity. It's an integrated, holistic solution."
"The security policy is the most valuable feature for us. We can go into the environment settings and attach any globally recognized framework like ISO or any benchmark."
"One of the features that I like about the solution is it is both a hybrid cloud and also multi-cloud. We never know what company we're going to buy, and therefore we are ready to go. If they have GCP or AWS, we have support for that as well. It offers a single-panel blast across multiple clouds."
"Technical support is helpful."
"The most valuable feature is that it's intuitive. It's very intuitive."
"Using Security Center, you have a full view, at any given time, of what's deployed, and that is something that is very useful."
"Defender is user-friendly and provides decent visibility into threats."
"One significant issue is that the searches are case-sensitive, so finding a misconfigured resource can become very challenging."
"We would like to see improvements to executive-level reporting and data reporting in general, which we understand is being rolled out to the platform."
"The remediation workflow within the Wiz could be improved."
"The reporting isn't that great. They have executive summaries, but it's only a compliance report that maps all current issues to specific controls. Whether you look at one subscription or project, regardless of the size, you will get a multipage report on how the issues in that account map to that control. Our CSO isn't going to read through that. He won't filter that out or show that to his leadership and say, "Here's what we're doing." It isn't a helpful report. They're working on it, but it's a poor executive summary."
"We're looking at some of the data compliance stuff that they've got Jon offer. I know they're looking at container security, which we gonna be looking at next."
"We wish there were a way, beyond providing visibility and automated remediation, to wait on a given remediation, due to a critical aspect, such as the cost associated with a particular upgrade... We would like to see preventive controls that can be applied through Wiz to protect against vulnerabilities that we're not going to be able to remediate immediately."
"The solution's container security could be improved."
"The only small pain point has been around some of the logging integrations. Some of the complexities of the script integrations aren't supported with some of the more automated infrastructure components. So, it's not as universal. For example, they have great support for cloud formation and other services, but if you're using another type of management utility or governance language for your infrastructure-as-code automation components, it becomes a little bit trickier to navigate that."
"Cloudflare does not have an on-premise solution. If they had different approaches they could be better suited to accommodate more customers, such as on-premise and hybrid deployments. For example, hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud."
"The timing aspect can lead to it being considered overpriced. This is a particular concern we have with Cloudflare, as they may struggle with accurately detecting the client."
"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."
"We are a product integrator and reseller, and we would like to have a better partner relationship, similar to a channel sales relationship. Sometimes we are on our own or get diverted by Cloudflare because they have direct sales, which competes with us and makes it difficult to build a relationship with this company since we want to be an MSP or a managed service provider for the solution."
"There are some issues with the CDN services."
"One area of improvement is in the Access Rules. Hypothetically, if we wanted to block or challenge traffic outside of the United States, the only way to currently do that (as far as I know) is to enter every single country outside of the United States. That could be a labor intensive job. A solution could be to enable users to create a rule where traffic is only allowed within a certain country."
"I would like Cloudflare to offer a dedicated account manager for large enterprise clients like us."
"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."
"Microsoft sources most of their threat intelligence internally, but I think they should open themselves up to bodies that provide feel intelligence to build a better engine. There may be threats out there that they don't report because their team is not doing anything on that and they don't have arrangements with another party that is involved in that research."
"After getting a recommendation, it takes time for the solution to refresh properly to show that the problem has been eliminated."
"No possibility to write or edit any capability."
"For Kubernetes, I was using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). To see that whatever is getting deployed into AKS goes through the correct checks and balances in terms of affinities and other similar aspects and follows all the policies, we had to use a product called Stackrox. At a granular level, the built-in policies were good for Kubernetes, but to protect our containers from a coding point of view, we had to use a few other products. For example, from a programming point of view, we were using Checkmarx for static code analysis. For CIS compliance, there are no CIS benchmarks for AKS. So, we had to use other plugins to see that the CIS benchmarks are compliant. There are CIS benchmarks for Kubernetes on AWS and GCP, but there are no CIS benchmarks for AKS. So, Azure Security Center fell short from the regulatory compliance point of view, and we had to use one more product. We ended up with two different dashboards. We had Azure Security Center, and we had Stackrox that had its own dashboard. The operations team and the security team had to look at two dashboards, and they couldn't get an integrated piece. That's a drawback of Azure Security Center. Azure Security Center should provide APIs so that we can integrate its dashboard within other enterprise dashboards, such as the PowerBI dashboard. We couldn't get through these aspects, and we ended up giving Reader security permission to too many people, which was okay to some extent, but when we had to administer the users for the Stackrox portal and Azure Security Center, it became painful."
"The documentation and implementation guides could be improved."
"When you work with it, the only problem that we're struggling with is that we have 21 different subscriptions we're trying to apply security to. It's impossible to keep everything organized."
"They could always work to make the pricing a bit lower."
"Consistency is the area where the most improvement is needed. For example, there are some areas where the UI is not uniform across the board."
Cloudflare is ranked 11th in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) with 56 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 3rd in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) with 46 reviews. Cloudflare is rated 8.4, while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Cloudflare writes "It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Cloud writes "Provides multi-cloud capability, is plug-and-play, and improves our security posture". Cloudflare is most compared with Akamai, Azure Front Door, Imperva DDoS, AWS Shield and Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, whereas Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with AWS GuardDuty, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Microsoft Sentinel. See our Cloudflare vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud report.
See our list of best Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) vendors.
We monitor all Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
