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AWS Security Hub vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 2026

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

Qualys TotalCloud
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
8th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (11th), Container Security (12th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (8th), SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) (2nd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (7th)
AWS Security Hub
Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
12th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (7th)
Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
89
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (6th), Container Management (6th), Container Security (4th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (1st), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (4th), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (6th), Microsoft Security Suite (7th), Compliance Management (4th), Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) category, the mindshare of Qualys TotalCloud is 1.9%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Security Hub is 2.7%, down from 4.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is 5.6%, down from 9.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Defender for Cloud5.6%
Qualys TotalCloud1.9%
AWS Security Hub2.7%
Other89.8%
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
 

Featured Reviews

YashwantShinde - PeerSpot reviewer
Soc Analyst at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Risk-based visibility has transformed how I prioritize cloud vulnerabilities and protect key assets
The best features Qualys TotalCloud offers are cloud asset visibility, vulnerability assessment, and risk prioritization. This risk-based prioritization helped me quickly identify high-risk vulnerabilities and focus on remediation instead of going through every finding. TrueRisk-based prioritization is useful for understanding which vulnerabilities need attention first. It improved our workflow mainly by giving us a single view of cloud assets and their risk, so we could focus on the higher priority vulnerabilities instead of reviewing every finding manually. This helped us prioritize remediations more efficiently and reduce the time spent on vulnerability assessment and follow-up. Qualys TotalCloud helped us identify exposures that might otherwise have been missed, especially across cloud assets, vulnerabilities, and identities. With the SaaS configuration, the unified inventory and risk view made it easier to connect vulnerabilities with asset criticality, exposure, and access permissions, allowing us to investigate high-risk exposures first and address them before they could become bigger security issues.
Karthik Ekambaram - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at Scybers
Has helped identify misconfigurations and prioritize risks but lacks multi-cloud support and deeper integration features
AWS Security Hub cannot scale up to multiple different cloud environments; it only works for AWS. There are other products in the market for CSPM that can give you multi-cloud environment misconfigurations, even Microsoft for that matter. Regarding the integration of AWS Security Hub with third-party tools, I am not certain whether we can integrate them, but there is no need to do so. However, AWS Security Hub cannot integrate with other cloud providers, so it only supports the AWS environment. The compliance checks within AWS Security Hub are good, but we don't use them much. We utilize compliance frameworks such as CIS compliance frameworks and ISO 27017 framework, which are beneficial, but it can improve in other areas too, such as including NIST and other frameworks beyond just ISO and CIS. Improvements can be applicable for scalability, particularly on integration with multi-cloud environments, and compliance frameworks can be added for more variety as well. The unified dashboard in AWS Security Hub is adequate; I cannot say it is exceptional, but the content available in the dashboards is satisfactory for now.
RW
Head Of IT at Cirrus Response
Cloud security has cut investigation time and now reveals threats faster but needs simpler oversight
When deploying AI applications, my key security concerns with Microsoft Defender for Cloud are data loss, leakage of data, and guardrails around the actual AI, and I am hoping that this is going to help me put those guardrails in place and identify data exfiltration. Microsoft Defender for Cloud has not helped me manage and secure multi-cloud environments, as we are 100 percent Microsoft and have not really got it in any other environment at all. I am not yet using the unified AI-powered security feature offered by Microsoft Defender for Cloud, but that is coming. I am not yet using the integrated XDR feature of Microsoft Defender for Cloud, but that is coming. I am not yet utilizing the GenAI threat protection features of Microsoft Defender for Cloud. That is also coming and a lot of that will come from learning it here. I have enabled the agentless scanning in my cloud environment with Microsoft Defender for Cloud. Assessing the impact on my workload protection without needing to install agents with Microsoft Defender for Cloud makes it a lot easier, but it also identifies a lot more, which puts more load on me sometimes. I would advise another organization considering Microsoft Defender for Cloud that it is the most logical route to follow if their whole ecosystem is Microsoft. It is easy to implement and it is very self-explanatory when doing it, making sense to just follow the steps as it is too simple, really. I would rate this review a 7.5 out of 10.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Qualys TotalCloud is an excellent platform, and the beauty of the platform is that we can get all the vulnerabilities, see all the reports in a single dashboard, view them segregated, and easily learn about critical, high, and medium findings with appropriately provided remediation steps."
"I depend heavily on the reports that I have from this tool."
"Generally, Qualys is very good at detections, whether on cloud or on-prem, and the agent allows deployment on both infrastructures, providing continuous monitoring of your assets, which is a key selling point for us."
"The best part I like is the on-demand scans."
"The best feature would be the ability to create policies. It is easy to control and update policies as required."
"I found the initial setup user-friendly."
"TruRisk Insights is the most important innovation they've released this year."
"The platform's unified view of the organization proves particularly valuable for leadership team meetings."
"I find all of the features to be highly valuable."
"The most beneficial aspect of Security Hub is its proactive capability, allowing us to identify potential security issues before they escalate."
"I rate Security Hub ten out of ten for stability."
"Easily integrates with third-party tools"
"AWS Security Hub can check your infrastructure against multiple compliance frameworks. You can turn on or off specific frameworks based on your needs."
"It's a security posture management tool from AWS. Basically, it identifies misconfigurations, similar to Trusted Advisor but on a larger scale."
"AWS Security Hub has very good integration features. It allows for AWS native services integration, and it helps us to integrate some of the services outside of AWS. They have partners, such as Amazon Preferred Network Partners (APN). If you have different security tools around APN, we can integrate those findings with AWS Security Hub reducing the need to refer to different portals or different UIs. You can have AWS Security Hub act as a single common go-to dashboard."
"Finding out if your infrastructure is secure is a valuable feature."
"Microsoft Defender has a lot of features including regulatory compliance and attaching workbooks but the most valuable is the recommendations it provides for each and every resource when we open Microsoft Defender."
"It is very scalable, the product has been very easy to use and simple to set up, the maintenance and updating are part of the service so that brings great value, it's a stable product, technical support is helpful, and it's got a lot of great features."
"Most importantly, it's an integrated solution."
"The most valuable feature for me is the variety of APIs available."
"The entire Defender Suite is tightly coupled, integrated, and collaborative."
"The most valuable features are the security recommendations provided by Defender for Cloud."
"We can create alerts that trigger if there is any malicious activity happening in the workflow and these alerts can be retrieved using the query language."
"Provides a very good view of the entire security setup of your organization."
 

Cons

"There should be improvement from a dashboard perspective when collecting and showcasing data to lead management."
"Enhancing clarity regarding its compliance capabilities would be beneficial, as the current scope is limited in geographic coverage."
"One of the things that could be improved is the alerts. Qualys is a fantastic tool, especially with the TruRisk feature, but one challenge that most leaders face involves alert fatigue."
"I sometimes have difficulty detecting or uninstalling certain versions of applications, which I have to do manually."
"The downside is only in container security, but it has not been a long time since they introduced these models."
"Two areas for improvement in Qualys TotalCloud are the speed of the public cloud platform and vulnerability detection."
"The support process is inefficient due to the excessive number of replies required when submitting tickets."
"I would like the ability to disable certain default built-in policies as they can be misleading when creating dashboards. That is the top one."
"Security needs to be measured based on their own criteria. We can't add custom criteria specific to our organization. For example, having an S3 bucket publicly available might be flagged as a critical alert, but it might not be critical in a sandbox environment. So, it gets flagged as critical, which becomes a false positive. So, customization options and creating custom dashboards would be areas for improvement."
"Whenever my team gets some alarms from the central team, my team needs to initiate whether it's a real or false trigger. The central team needs to keep adjusting to the parameters or at least the concerned IPs, whether it's really from the company's pool of IPs, so the trigger process can be improved. In the next release of AWS Security Hub, I'd like a better dashboard that could result in better alert visibility."
"I would like a more fine-grained capability for creating custom rules and a more user-friendly experience programmatically in writing queries and configuring custom security rules, making it quicker and easier."
"The telemetry doesn't always go into the control center. When you have multiple instances running in AWS, you need a control tower to take feeds from Security Hub and analyze your results. Sometimes exemptions aren't passed between the control tower and Security Hub. The configuration gets mixed up or you don't get the desired results."
"From an improvement perspective, there is a need to add more compliance since, right now, AWS Security Hub only provides four to five compliances to control the tool."
"However, the sheer number of services can be overwhelming when implementing something new."
"It's not user-friendly. Too much going on, too many unnecessary findings, not very visual. You can't do much compared to other similar tools that are cheaper and better."
"Although AWS Security Hub does a periodic scan of your overall infrastructure, it doesn't do it in real time."
"Integration into other third-party products, particularly those from tier three vendors like ManageEngine and Hexcode, has proven difficult."
"I think that the documentation and implementation guides could be improved."
"Customer service and support from Microsoft are very poor. Even for high-severity cases, response or resolution time can extend to three or four weeks."
"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."
"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."
"Microsoft Defender could be more centralized. For example, I still need to go to another console to do policy management."
"We haven't experienced issues with Microsoft Defender for Cloud for our company size of about five hundred people. However, I've heard there might be issues with scalability for larger enterprises."
"It's hard to reach someone who understands my problems. I haven't had many issues, so I haven't called them."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Qualys TotalCloud is cost-efficient and was selected for its value compared to other products."
"While Qualys TotalCloud's pricing is currently acceptable, it is becoming increasingly expensive and may soon be considered overpriced."
"Qualys TotalCloud is expensive, but it offers a premier solution with no headaches."
"As a middle management member, I do not have direct pricing knowledge, but based on the knowledge from our meetings, its pricing is competitive."
"TotalCloud's price is about right where I would expect it to be."
"The pricing is comparable. It is built into our other product, so I cannot piecemeal it. It is a part of our subscription."
"The pricing for TotalCloud is attractive and competitive in the market. Given the features, especially the dashboard, I have no concerns regarding pricing."
"Its price seems higher compared to other tools, but it is worth it. If they could adjust the pricing and make it comparable with other tools, that would be great."
"AWS Security Hub is not an expensive tool. I would consider it to be a cheap solution. AWS Security Hub follows the PAYG pricing model, meaning you will have to pay for whatever you use."
"The price of the solution is not very competitive but it is reasonable."
"The cost is based on the number of compliances, core checks, and services required, and for more than 10,000 recommendations, the charge is just one dollar."
"The pricing is fine. It is not an expensive tool."
"Security Hub is not an expensive solution."
"AWS Security Hub's pricing is pretty reasonable."
"There are multiple subscription models, like yearly, monthly, and packaged."
"The price of AWS Security Hub is average compared to other solutions."
"The cost is fair. There aren't any costs in addition to the standard licensing fee."
"Defender's basic version is free, which is good. Many of our teams are evaluating the paid version against third-party products."
"There are two different plans. We're using the secure basic plan, but we have used the end security plan as well. There are additional costs, but it gives us more functionalities compared to the basic plan."
"The licensing is straightforward but can become expensive if you cover everything. You must balance the cost against the importance of what needs covering."
"I'm not privy to that information, but I know it's probably close to a million dollars a year."
"Microsoft Defender for Cloud is pricey, especially for Kubernetes clusters."
"Its pricing is a little bit high in terms of Azure Security Center, but the good thing is that we don't need to maintain and deploy it. So, while the pricing is high, it is native to Azure which is why we prefer using this tool."
"We are using the free version of the Azure Security Center."
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Comparison Review

it_user186927 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Operations at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
Feb 16, 2015
Cybereason vs. Interset vs. SQRRL
Capture DB - they all use NoSQL db and hence solve the ad hoc query and 'go back in time' problem with current best of breed SIEM and DLP solutions that rely on real time analysis of incoming logs (and don't store them). This means deeper and quicker iterative threat analysis and assessment…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise32
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise14
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise49
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Qualys TotalCloud?
To be totally honest, I do not have any best features because I have had a bad experience using this tool, especially...
What is your primary use case for Qualys TotalCloud?
My main use case for Qualys TotalCloud is vulnerability management and exposure management. I use this tool to evalua...
Which is better - Azure Sentinel or AWS Security Hub?
We like that Azure Sentinel does not require as much maintenance as legacy SIEMs that are on-premises. Azure Sentinel...
What needs improvement with AWS Security Hub?
I do not see any areas for improvement in AWS Security Hub itself, but the cost factor is something that is the main ...
What is your primary use case for AWS Security Hub?
AWS Security Hub is something I have used daily as it is a part of my job for cloud security purposes. If you are dea...
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Defender for Cloud?
My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing was that the license cost was the only consideration. Setup an...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Defender for Cloud?
To improve Microsoft Defender for Cloud, I think pricing-wise, the license price is a little bit higher from an inges...
 

Also Known As

Qualys TotalCloud with FlexScan
SQRRL
Microsoft Azure Security Center, Azure Security Center, Microsoft ASC, Azure Defender
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Edmunds, Frame.io, GoDaddy, Realtor.com
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is trusted by companies such as ASOS, Vatenfall, SWC Technology Partners, and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Security Hub vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
910,956 professionals have used our research since 2012.