Acunetix vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud comparison

Invicti and Microsoft are both solutions in the Vulnerability Management category. Invicti is ranked #21 with an average rating of 8.3, while Microsoft is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.1. Invicti holds a 1.2% mindshare in VM, compared to Microsoft’s 5.5% mindshare. Additionally, 86% of Invicti users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 13, 2025

Acunetix and Microsoft Defender for Cloud are key players in the cybersecurity domain. Acunetix shows strength in web application vulnerability scanning, while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is adept at enhancing compliance and managing security postures across multi-cloud environments.

Features: Acunetix offers automatic testing modules, IAS for detailed analysis, and scheduling scans with detailed reports. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is strong in compliance, security posture management, and seamless integration with multi-cloud setups.

Room for Improvement: Acunetix needs to work on reducing false positives, enhancing authentication settings, and improving scan speed. Microsoft Defender for Cloud could enhance compatibility with non-Microsoft tools, simplify its pricing structure, and improve real-time alerting and user interface consistency.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Acunetix can be deployed both on-premises and in private clouds, though it requires more setup. Its customer support is mixed, with some reports of delays. Microsoft Defender for Cloud integrates seamlessly in public cloud environments but relies on tickets, often leading to slow support responses.

Pricing and ROI: Acunetix faces criticism for high costs, especially in comparison to competitors like Burp Suite, but it is valued for its flexibility and ROI through reduced manual testing. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is competitively priced but has complex pricing for additional features. Customers of both solutions appreciate their ability to improve security postures, with Acunetix reporting higher direct ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Acunetix vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Acunetix vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud

July 2025

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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

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Vulnerability Management category, the mindshare of Zafran Security is 0.9%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Acunetix is 1.2%, down from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is 5.5%, up from 5.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Vulnerability Management

Featured Reviews

Israel Cavazos Landini

Associate Director IT Security Operations at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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KashifJamil

CEO at Xcelliti

Has enabled teams to improve security testing with smooth integration and high accuracy

Acunetix has a very good ratio of fewer false positives, so users don't need to retest everything. Acunetix operates smoothly with no interruptions required, and it performs at 100% efficiency without issues in scanning anything. The solution is excellent at detecting SQL injection and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. Acunetix integrates with every type of tool, including CI/CD tools, offering 100% integration in DevOps environments. The main benefit of Acunetix is that at the first level, users can address security issues related to penetration testing, allowing them to expose vulnerabilities and ensure all required testing is completed with very few false positives.

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Vibhor Goel

Senior Cloud Platform Engineer at Deutsche Börse

A single tool for complete visibility and addressing security gaps

Currently, issues are structured in Microsoft Defender for Cloud at severity levels of high, critical, or warning, but these severity levels are not always right. For example, Microsoft might consider a port being open as critical, but that might not be the case for our company. Similarly, it might suggest closing some management ports, but you might need them to be able to log in, so the severity levels for certain things can be improved. Even though Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides a way to temporarily disable certain alerts or notifications without affecting our security score, it would be better to have more granularized control over these recommendations. Currently, we cannot even disable certain alerts or notifications. There should be an automated mechanism to design Azure policies based on the recommendations, possibly with AI integration. Instead of an engineer having to write a policy to fix security gaps, which is very time-consuming, there should be an inbuilt capability to auto-remediate everything and have proper control in place. Additionally, enabling Defender for Cloud at the resource group level, rather than only at the subscription level, would be beneficial.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Overall, we have seen about eighty-seven percent reduction of the number of vulnerabilities that require urgency to remediate, specifically the number of criticals."

"We are able to see the real risk of a vulnerability on our environment with our security tools."

"Zafran is an excellent tool."

"We saw benefits from Zafran Security almost immediately after deploying it."

"Zafran has become an indispensable tool in our cybersecurity arsenal."

"We are able to create a report which shows the PCI DSS scoring and share it with the application teams. Then, they can correlate and see exactly what they need to fix, and why."

"The solution is highly stable."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is the speed at which it can scan multiple domains in just a few hours."

"There is a lot of documentation on their website which makes setting it up and using it quite simple."

"For us, the most valuable aspect of the solution is the log-sequence feature."

"I find it to be one of the most comprehensive tools, with support for manual intervention."

"The most valuable feature of Acunetix is the UI and the scan results are simple."

"Their technical support has been very active. If I have an issue, I can reach out to them and get an answer pretty quick."

More Acunetix pros

"The scalability of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is very good."

"It offers virus management and addresses threats such as viruses, worms, spyware, and other critical security concerns."

"The first valuable feature was the fact that it gave us a list of everything that users were surfing on the web. Having the list, we could make decisions about those sites."

"The security alerts and correlated alerts are most valuable. It correlates the logs and gives us correlated alerts, which can be fed into any security information and event management (SIEM) tool. It is an analyzed correlation tool for monitoring security. It gives us alerts when there is any kind of unauthorized access, or when there is any malfunctioning in multifactor authentication (MFA). If our Azure is connected with Azure Security Center, we get to know what types of authentication are happening in our infra."

"DSPM is the most valuable feature."

"Everything is built into Azure, and if we go for cross-cloud development with Azure Arc, we can use most of the features. While it's possible to deploy and convert third-party applications, it is difficult to maintain, whereas Azure deployments to the cloud are always easier. Also, Microsoft is a big company, so they always provide enough support, and we trust the Microsoft brand."

"Microsoft Defender for Cloud has significantly enhanced our overall security posture by approximately 20 to 25 percent."

"The most valuable features of this solution are the remote workforce capabilities and the general experience of the remote workforce."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pros

Cons

"The dashboarding and reporting functionality of Zafran Security is an area that definitely could use some improvements."

"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."

"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."

"The pricing is a bit on the higher side."

"There's a clear need for a reduction in pricing to make the service more accessible."

"The solution limits the number of scans. It would be much better if we could have unlimited scans."

"Acunetix should improve by further reducing false positives and providing more customized reports, plus better integration with newer tools such as GitHub and Azure DevOps."

"It would be nice to have a feature to "retest" only a single vulnerability that the customer reports as patched, and delete it from the next scans since it has already been patched."

"It is difficult to create a proxy connection."

"While we do have it integrated with other solutions, it could still offer more integrations."

"There is room for improvement in the pricing."

More Acunetix cons

"An area where Microsoft Defender for Cloud could be improved is in getting away from having multiple menus that do the same thing, which seems imposing when looking at it."

"My experience with Microsoft Defender for Cloud has been largely negative due to a poor user experience."

"However, some Copilot features aren't available in the GCP environment. This is something we hope will be addressed in the future."

"After getting a recommendation, it takes time for the solution to refresh properly to show that the problem has been eliminated."

"Most of the time, when we log into the support, we don't get a chance to interact with Microsoft employees directly, except having it go to outsource employees of Microsoft. The initial interaction has not been that great because outsourced companies cannot provide the kind of quality or technical expertise that we look for. We have a technical manager from Microsoft, but they are kind of average unless we make noise and ask them to escalate. We then can get the right people and the right solution, but it definitely takes time."

"Features like code scanning and pipeline scanning are not included in the solution."

"Sometimes it's very difficult to determine when I need Microsoft Defender for Cloud for a special resource group or a special kind of product."

"I would like to see better automation when it comes to pushing out security features to the recommendations, and better documentation on the step-by-step procedures for enabling certain features."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"When compared with other products, the pricing is a little bit high. But it gives value for the price. It serves the purpose and is worthwhile for the price we pay."

"Implementing Acunetix needs a medium or larger business agency, because you need some money to get Acunetix. It is costly, but if you care about your agency's security, then maybe it's a cost that might help you in the future."

"The price is exceptionally high."

"The cost is based on two types of licenses, ConsultLite, and ConsultPlus, as well as the number of domains that are scanned."

"The pricing is a little high, and moreover, it's kind of domain-based."

"When we looked at all other vendors and what they were asking for, to provide a third of what Acunetix was capable of doing, it was an easy decision... But now that it's coming to a cost where it's line with market value, it becomes more of a competition... Acunetix is raising the cost of licensing. It's 3.5 times what we were initially quoted."

"Acunetix was around the same price as all the other vendors we looked at, nothing special."

"The solution is expensive."

More Acunetix pricing and cost advice

"There are improvements that have to be made to the licensing. Currently, for servers, it has to be done by grouping the servers on a single subscription... We don't have an option whereby, if all those resources are in one subscription, we can have each of the individual servers subject to different planning."

"The cost is fair. There aren't any costs in addition to the standard licensing fee."

"Microsoft's licensing and pricing are sometimes complicated. If someone is new to Microsoft's licensing, they might have difficulty with it."

"We only use the free tier, so we haven't faced any pricing, setup costs, or licensing challenges."

"This is a worldwide service and depending on the country, there will be different prices."

"The pricing and licensing of Microsoft Defender for Cloud have been good for us. We appreciate the licensing approach based on employee count rather than a big enterprise license."

"Pricing depends on your workload size, but it is very cheap. If you're talking about virtual machines, it is $5 or something for each machine, which is minimal. If you go for some agent-based solution for every virtual machine, then you need to pay the same thing or more than that. For an on-premises solution like this, we were paying around $30 to $50 based on size. With Defender, Microsoft doesn't bother about the size. You pay based on the number of machines. So, if you have 10 virtual machines, and 10 virtual machines are being monitored, you are paying based on that rather than the size of the virtual machine. Thus, you are paying for the number of units rather than paying for the size of your units."

"The licensing cost per server is $15 per month."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

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?

Since we stood Zafran Security up in our private cloud, we handle the maintenance on our side. As we opted not to use...

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What needs improvement with Zafran Security?

In terms of areas for improvement, Zafran Security is doing a really great job as a new and emerging company. Oftenti...

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What is your primary use case for Zafran Security?

My use cases for Zafran Security revolve around two primary areas. One is around vulnerability management and priorit...

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What do you like most about Acunetix Vulnerability Scanner?

The tool's most valuable feature is scan configurations. We use it for external physical applications. The scanning t...

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What is your primary use case for Acunetix Vulnerability Scanner?

Most of the customers who use Acunetix are looking for security testing. The primary use case is performing penetrati...

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What advice do you have for others considering Acunetix Vulnerability Scanner?

Acunetix supports multi-user environments effectively. Acunetix is targeted for small to mid-size teams in a DevSecOp...

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How is Prisma Cloud vs Azure Security Center for security?

Azure Security Center is very easy to use, integrates well, and gives very good visibility on what is happening acros...

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What do you like most about Microsoft Defender for Cloud?

The entire Defender Suite is tightly coupled, integrated, and collaborative.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Defender for Cloud?

The pricing is pretty standard.

See all answers

Comparisons

Wiz Code vs Zafran Security

Compared 37% of the time

Vulcan Cyber vs Zafran Security

Compared 15% of the time

Tenable Vulnerability Management vs Zafran Security

Compared 9% of the time

ServiceNow Security Operations vs Zafran Security

Compared 8% of the time

Qualys VMDR vs Zafran Security

Compared 7% of the time

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OWASP Zap vs Acunetix

Compared 17% of the time

PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional vs Acunetix

Compared 11% of the time

HCL AppScan vs Acunetix

Compared 9% of the time

Invicti vs Acunetix

Compared 8% of the time

PortSwigger Burp Suite Enterprise Edition vs Acunetix

Compared 5% of the time

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AWS GuardDuty vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 25% of the time

Wiz vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 12% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 8% of the time

Microsoft Defender XDR vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 4% of the time

Orca Security vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 3% of the time

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Zafran Security

July 2025

Download Zafran Security product report

Buyer's Guide

Acunetix

August 2025

Download Acunetix product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

August 2025

Download Microsoft Defender for Cloud product report

Also Known As

No data available

AcuSensor

Microsoft Azure Security Center, Azure Security Center, Microsoft ASC, Azure Defender

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

Zafran Security

Demo not available

Invicti

Microsoft

Overview

Zafran Security integrates with existing security tools to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities effectively, proving that most critical vulnerabilities are not exploitable, optimizing threat management.

Zafran Security introduces an innovative operating model for managing security threats and vulnerabilities. By leveraging the threat exposure management platform, it pinpoints and prioritizes exploitable vulnerabilities, reducing risk through immediate remediation. This platform enhances your hybrid cloud security by normalizing vulnerability signals and integrating specific IT context data, such as CVE runtime presence and internet asset reachability, into its analysis. No longer reliant on patch windows, Zafran Security allows you to manage risks actively.

What are the key features of Zafran Security?

Threat Exposure Management: Utilizes existing tools to prioritize vulnerabilities and manage threats.
Integrative Analysis: Combines security data with IT context for precise vulnerability management.
Real-time Risk Reduction: Enables immediate risk management without waiting for patches.
Hybrid Cloud Compatibility: Functions across diverse cloud environments for comprehensive security.

What benefits can users expect from Zafran Security?

Improved Security: Enhances protection by efficiently identifying and mitigating risks.
Cost Efficiency: Reduces unnecessary patching expenses by confirming non-exploitable vulnerabilities.
Time Savings: Frees developers to focus on root causes by handling immediate threats.
Comprehensive Insight: Offers a holistic view of security threats and vulnerabilities.

In industries where security is paramount, such as finance and healthcare, Zafran Security provides invaluable protection by ensuring that only exploitable vulnerabilities are addressed. It allows entities to maintain robust security measures while allocating resources efficiently, fitting seamlessly into existing security strategies.

Zafran Security

Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner is an automated web application security testing tool that audits your web applications by checking for vulnerabilities like SQL Injection, Cross site scripting, and other exploitable vulnerabilities.

Invicti

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a comprehensive security solution that provides advanced threat protection for cloud workloads. It offers real-time visibility into the security posture of cloud environments, enabling organizations to quickly identify and respond to potential threats. With its advanced machine learning capabilities, Microsoft Defender for Cloud can detect and block sophisticated attacks, including zero-day exploits and fileless malware.

The solution also provides automated remediation capabilities, allowing security teams to quickly and easily respond to security incidents. With Microsoft Defender for Cloud, organizations can ensure the security and compliance of their cloud workloads, while reducing the burden on their security teams.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Joomla!, Digicure, Team Random, Credit Suisse, Samsung, Air New Zealand

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is trusted by companies such as ASOS, Vatenfall, SWC Technology Partners, and more.

Buyer's Guide

Acunetix vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud

July 2025

Free Report: Acunetix vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud

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