AWS GuardDuty vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft are both solutions in the Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.4, while Microsoft is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.1. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 11.7% mindshare in CWPP, compared to Microsoft’s 13.6% mindshare. Additionally, 91% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

Amazon GuardDuty and Microsoft Defender for Cloud compete in the cloud security space, focusing on threat detection and monitoring. Amazon GuardDuty has a slight edge with its advanced log analysis features, while Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides comprehensive compliance and integration capabilities within multi-cloud and hybrid environments.

Features: Amazon GuardDuty focuses on threat detection, continuous monitoring, and native integration with AWS services such as CloudTrail and VPC Flow Logs. It excels in log analysis and real-time alerting for malicious activities, making it a valuable tool for AWS-based security. Microsoft Defender for Cloud integrates seamlessly with Azure environments, enhancing security across multi-cloud and hybrid infrastructures. It offers compliance scores and detailed policy-related features, providing robust security management for diverse cloud setups.

Room for Improvement: Amazon GuardDuty could improve its dashboard analytics, predict costs better for deployed features, and enhance data enrichment with threat intelligence. It also faces challenges regarding monitoring large account ranges and lacks automation in alert patching. Microsoft Defender for Cloud needs clearer UI consistency, improved integration with third-party solutions, and reduced false positives. Additionally, simplifying licensing and improving cost efficiency, especially in log retention costs, is necessary.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon GuardDuty is known for its straightforward setup and strong technical support within public cloud environments. Customers value the quality and responsiveness of AWS customer service. Microsoft Defender for Cloud supports a broader range of environments, including hybrid and private clouds. While its deployment versatility is attractive, its support responsiveness can be inconsistent, varying with the complexity of issues or environments.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon GuardDuty offers a flexible pay-as-you-go pricing model, allowing cost-efficiency by activating necessary services in active regions only. Microsoft Defender for Cloud, despite competitive pricing, may become expensive when deploying comprehensive security across varied environments. Its pricing structure can be complex for smaller organizations. Both solutions yield significant ROI by enhancing security postures, with Amazon GuardDuty recognized for proactive threat detection and Microsoft Defender for Cloud excelling in delivering extensive security insights.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS GuardDuty vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

AWS GuardDuty vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud

April 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

SentinelOne Singularity Clo...

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) category, the mindshare of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is 2.8%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS GuardDuty is 11.7%, down from 13.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is 13.6%, down from 17.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)

Featured Reviews

Andrew W

VP - Information Technology at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

Tells us about vulnerabilities as well as their impact and helps to focus on real issues

Looking at all the different pieces, it has got everything we need. Some of the pieces we do not even use. For example, we do not have Kubernetes Security. We are not running any K8 clusters, so it is good for us. Overall, we find the solution to be fantastic. There can be additional education components. This may not be truly fair to them because of what the product is going for, but it would be great to see additional education for compliance. It is not a criticism of the tool per se, but anything to help non-development resources understand some of the complexities of the cloud is always appreciated. Any additional educational resources are always helpful for security teams, especially those without a development background.

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Terence Dube

AWS Cloud Engineer at Standard Telephones and Cables

Comprehensive threat detection simplifies security management

GuardDuty is limited to AWS environments. While incorporating Amazon Detective for detailed investigation can be useful, including more granular details in findings, such as specific user actions or historical comparisons, would be beneficial. Furthermore, managing global AWS environments requires setting up additional tools for viewing GuardDuty findings across multiple regions. A unified dashboard that aggregates findings across all regions without requiring manual aggregation could enhance convenience for users.

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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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security can integrate all your cloud accounts and resources you create in the AWS account, We have set it up to scan the AWS transfer services, EC2, security groups, and GitHub."

"It used to guide me about an alert. There is something called an alert guide. I used to click on the alert guide, and I could read everything. I could read about the alert and how to resolve it. I used to love that feature."

"I rate SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security ten out of ten."

"The agentless vulnerability scanning is great."

"The most valuable feature is the easy-to-understand user interface, which allows even non-technical users to comprehend and resolve issues."

"The compliance monitoring feature of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security gives us a report with a compliance score to ensure we meet certain regulatory standards."

"The user-friendly dashboard offers both convenience and security by providing quick access to solutions and keeping us informed of potential threats."

"Singularity Cloud Native Security provides us with a platform to scan instances when they are getting created, and the dashboard helps us to identify the critical issues."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pros

"Deployment is great, and we didn't face any big challenges."

"The solution will detect abnormalities in the AWS workload and alert us so that we can monitor and take action."

"The solution is easy to use."

"The way it monitors accounts is definitely a very important feature."

"It helps us detect brute-force attacks based on machine learning."

"We have over 1,000 employees, and we monitor their activity through AWS GuardDuty."

"GuardDuty is extensive in terms of configuration and security compliance."

"One of the advantages of cloud services is the ability to use them on demand. There's minimal installation involved; you can check the latest offerings and make new deployments while dismantling the previous ones. This approach keeps you ahead of potential services, showcasing the agility of AWS."

More AWS GuardDuty pros

"Microsoft Defender for Cloud can find potential phishing links and malicious code in data at rest."

"Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a valuable tool that integrates seamlessly with Azure Policy and our Security SIEM, simplifying implementation and enhancing security posture."

"The most valuable feature is the hunting feature, which integrates well into the entire Microsoft ecosystem."

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

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

"It is very intuitive when it comes to policy administration, alerts and notifications, and ease of setting up roles at different hierarchies. It has also been good in terms of the network technology maps. It provides a good overview, but it also depends on the complexity of your network."

"The tool's most valuable feature is its support for cloud-native services like Kubernetes, containers, managed storage, and databases. Protecting these without Microsoft Defender for Cloud would be extremely challenging. For threat protection specifically, I find the signature-based detection and heuristic detection features very effective."

"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."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pros

Cons

"I would like SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security's detections to be openly available online instead of only accessible through their portal. Other tools have detections that are openly available without going through the tool."

"The integration with Oracle has room for improvement."

"While SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security offers real-time response, there is room for improvement in alert accuracy."

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security takes four to five hours to detect and highlight an issue, and that time should be reduced."

"The cost has the potential for improvement."

"I would like additional integrations."

"There is no break-glass account feature. They should implement this as soon as possible because we can't implement SSO without a break-glass feature."

"Sometimes the Storyline ID is a bit wacky."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security cons

"One improvement I would suggest for AWS GuardDuty is the ability to assign findings to specific users or groups, facilitating better communication and follow-up actions."

"I would like to see more integration with other AWS provided services."

"It would be great if the solution had some automation capabilities."

"AWS GuardDuty needs to be more customer-oriented."

"For the next release, they could provide IPS features as well."

"I work in a bank, and it would be good if AWS GuardDuty could be integrated with other monitoring and detection tools we use."

"GuardDuty is limited to AWS environments."

"The solution has to be integrated with new services that AWS adds like QuickSight, Managed Airflow, AppFlow and MWAA."

More AWS GuardDuty cons

"Defender could improve how data is represented. It can be unstructured or slow to load. The recent update allowing policy grouping into control groups is beneficial, but further enhancements for speed and clarity are needed."

"Another thing is that Defender for Cloud uses more resources than CrowdStrike, which my current company uses. Defender for Cloud has two or three processes running simultaneously that consume memory and processor time. I had the chance to compare that with CrowdStrike a few days ago, which was significantly less. It would be nice if Defender were a little lighter. It's a relatively large installation that consumes more resources than competitors do."

"Microsoft Graph needs improvement."

"The user interface of Microsoft Defender for Cloud, like many Microsoft portals, undergoes frequent changes and feature relocation."

"We would like to have better transparency as to how the security score is calculated because as it is now, it is difficult to understand."

"Microsoft Graph needs improvement."

"I would rate Microsoft Defender for Cloud a six out of 10 due to its lack of necessary features to operate as a standalone solution."

"Another thing that could be improved was that they could recommend processes on how to react to alerts, or recommend best practices based on how other organizations do things if they receive an alert about XYZ."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Their pricing appears to be based simply on the number of accounts we have, which is common for cloud-based products."

"I am not involved in the pricing, but it is cost-effective."

"PingSafe is affordable."

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is costly."

"The tool is cost-effective."

"Singularity Cloud Workload Security's licensing and price were cheaper than the other solutions we looked at."

"While SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security offers robust protection, its high cost may be prohibitive for small and medium-sized businesses."

"The pricing is fair. It is not inexpensive, and it is also not expensive. When managing a large organization, it is going to be costly, but it meets the business needs. In terms of what is out there on the market, it is fair and comparable to what I have seen, so I do not have any complaints about the cost"

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pricing and cost advice

"I prefer to have something on demand for myself. That's why I haven't been paying for GuardDuty specifically. AWS provides a wide range of offerings, especially in the security area."

"I don't have all the details in terms of licensing for Amazon GuardDuty, but my organization does have a license set up for it."

"We use a pay-as-you-use license, which is competitively priced in the market."

"On a scale of one to ten, where one is a high price, and ten is a low price, I rate the pricing a four or five, which is somewhere in the middle."

"The platform is inexpensive."

"The price of the solution is exactly right."

"Pricing is determined by the number of events sent."

"GuardDuty only enables accounts in regions where you have an active workload. If there are places where you don't have an active workload, you wouldn't even enable them. That's one area where they could allow you to cut down your cost."

More AWS GuardDuty pricing and cost advice

"Microsoft Defender for Cloud is pricey, especially for Kubernetes clusters."

"I'm not privy to that information, but I know it's probably close to a million dollars a year."

"It is bundled with our enterprise subscription, which makes it easy to go for it. It is available by default, and there is no extra cost for using the standard features."

"The pricing model for most plans is generally good, but the cost of the new Defender for Storage plan is high and should be revisited, as it could lead to disabling desirable security features due to cost."

"It has global licensing. It comes with multiple licenses since there are around 50,000 people (in our organization) who look at it."

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

"Pricing is difficult because each license has its own metrics and cost."

"I rate Microsoft Defender a three out of ten for affordability. The price could be a little lower."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about PingSafe?

The dashboard gives me an overview of all the things happening in the product, making it one of the tool's best featu...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PingSafe?

The pricing tends to be high.

See all answers

What needs improvement with PingSafe?

The price is on the higher side. The dashboard can be more detailed.

See all answers

What do you like most about Amazon GuardDuty?

With anomaly detection, active threat monitoring, and set correlation, GuardDuty alerts me to any unusual user behavi...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon GuardDuty?

GuardDuty is very cheap and operates on a pay-as-you-go basis. It's priced around a dollar per million requests, maki...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon GuardDuty?

GuardDuty is limited to AWS environments. While incorporating Amazon Detective for detailed investigation can be usef...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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 cost is generally reasonable. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Plan 2 costs $15 per server, per month. For a normal c...

See all answers

Comparisons

Wiz vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 22% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 18% of the time

Orca Security vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 4% of the time

Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 4% of the time

Aqua Cloud Security Platform vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 3% of the time

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security Competitors

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security vs AWS GuardDuty

Compared 14% of the time

Wiz vs AWS GuardDuty

Compared 12% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs AWS GuardDuty

Compared 6% of the time

Trend Vision One - Cloud Security vs AWS GuardDuty

Compared 5% of the time

Orca Security vs AWS GuardDuty

Compared 2% of the time

More AWS GuardDuty Competitors

Wiz vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 14% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 11% of the time

Microsoft Defender XDR vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 5% 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

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

April 2025

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security report

Download SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security product report

Buyer's Guide

AWS GuardDuty

May 2025

Download AWS GuardDuty product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

May 2025

Download Microsoft Defender for Cloud product report

Also Known As

PingSafe

No data available

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

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

SentinelOne

Demo not available

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Microsoft

Overview

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security protects cloud workloads, offering advanced threat detection and automated response. It integrates seamlessly with cloud environments and secures containerized applications and virtual machines against vulnerabilities.

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is renowned for its efficiency in mitigating threats in real-time. The platform integrates effortlessly with existing cloud environments, ensuring robust cloud security management with minimal manual intervention. Securing containerized applications and virtual machines, it excels in threat intelligence and endpoint protection. However, improvements are needed in performance during high workload periods, and more integrations with third-party tools and better documentation would be beneficial. Users often find the installation process complex, support response times slow, and the dashboard's navigation unintuitive.

What are the key features of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security?

Real-time Threat Detection: Identifies and mitigates threats as they occur.
Automated Response: Automatically responds to threats to minimize impact.
Ease of Deployment: Simple setup process with scalable options.
Machine Learning Insights: AI-driven insights enhance threat prevention.
Seamless Integration: Integrates with cloud environments for unified security management.

What are the primary benefits or ROI to expect from SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security?

Enhanced Threat Mitigation: Improved security against real-time threats.
Reduced Manual Intervention: Automated processes save time and resources.
Scalability: Easily adapts to growing security requirements.
Centralized Management: Manage security across platforms from a single console.
Advanced Threat Intelligence: Provides in-depth analysis and protection.

In specific industries, SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is implemented to safeguard critical data and infrastructure. Organizations in finance, healthcare, and technology depend on its real-time threat detection and automated response to protect sensitive information. Its ability to secure containerized applications and virtual machines is particularly valuable in dynamic environments where rapid scaling is necessary.

SentinelOne

Amazon Guard Duty is a continuous cloud security monitoring service that consistently monitors and administers several data sources. These include AWS CloudTrail data events for EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) audit logs, VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) flow logs, DNS (Domain Name System) logs, S3 (Simple Cloud Storage), and AWS CloudTrail event logs.

Amazon GuardDuty intuitively uses threat intelligence data - such as lists of malicious domains and IP addresses - and ML (machine learning) to quickly discover suspicious and problematic activity in a user's AWS ecosystem. Activities may include concerns such as interactions with malicious IP addresses or domains, exposed credentials usage, or changes and/or escalation of privileges.

GuardDuty is able to easily determine problematic AWS EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances delivering malware or mining bitcoin. It is also able to trace AWS account access history for evidence of destabilization. such as suspicious API calls resulting in changing password policies to minimize password strength or anomalous infrastructure deployments in new or different never-used regions.

GuardDuty will continually alert users regarding their AWS environment status and will send the security discoveries to the GuardDuty dashboard or Amazon CloudWatch events for users to view.

Users can access GuardDuty via:

AWS SDKs: Amazon provides users with several software development kits (SDKs) that are made up of libraries and sample code of numerous popular programming languages and platforms, such as Android, iOS, Java, .Net, Python, and Ruby. The SDKs make it easier to develop programmatic access to GuardDuty.
GuardDuty HTTPS API: This allows users to issue HTTPS requests directly to the service.
GuardDuty Console: This is a browser-based intuitive dashboard interface where users can access and use GuardDuty.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)

Kubernetes protection is an optional add-on in Amazon GuardDuty. This tool is able to discover malicious behavior and possible destabilization of an organization's Kubernetes clusters inside of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS).

When Amazon EKS is activated, GuardDuty will actively use various data sources to discover potential risks against Kubernetes API. When Kubernetes protection is enabled, GuardDuty uses optional data sources to detect threats against Kubernetes API.

Kubernetes audit logs are a Kubernetes feature that captures historical API activity from applications, the control plane, users, and endpoints. GuardDuty collates these logs from Amazon EKS to create Kubernetes discoveries for the organization's Amazon EKS assets; there is no need to store or turn on the logs.

As long as Kubernetes protection remains activated, GuardDuty will continuously dissect Kubernetes data sources from the Amazon EKS clusters to ensure no suspicious or anomalous behavior is taking place.

Amazon Simple Cloud Storage (S3) Protection

Amazon S3 allows Amazon GuardDuty to actively audit object-level API processes to discover possible security threats to data inside an organization's S3 buckets. GuardDuty continually audits risk to the organization’s S3 assets by carefully dissecting AWS CloudTrail management events and AWS CloudTrail S3 data events. These tools are continually auditing various CloudTrail management events for potential suspicious activities that affect S3 buckets, such as PutBucketReplication, DeleteBucket, ListBucket, and data events for S3 object-level API processes, such as PutObject, GetObject, ListObject, and DeleteObject.

Reviews from Real Users

“The most valuable features are the single system for data collection and the alert mechanisms. Prior to using GuardDuty, we had multiple systems to collect data and put it in a centralized location so we could look into it. Now we don't need to do that anymore as GuardDuty does it for us.” - Arunkumar A., Information Security Manager at Tata Consultancy Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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

autodesk, mapbox, fico, webroot

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

Buyer's Guide

AWS GuardDuty vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud

April 2025

Free Report: AWS GuardDuty vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Find out what your peers are saying about AWS GuardDuty vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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