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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
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
8.1
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (27th), Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) (3rd)
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 (7th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (5th), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (4th), Compliance Management (6th)
Microsoft Defender for Clou...
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) (5th), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (12th), Microsoft Security Suite (13th)
 

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

"Zafran has become an indispensable tool in our cybersecurity arsenal."
"We are able to see the real risk of a vulnerability on our environment with our security tools."
"Zafran is an excellent tool."
"Its monitoring and alerts are triggered by a failure or non-compliance with policies. It helps us to be able to act effectively and quickly."
"Good interface and visibility."
"It provides complete visibility of workload hosted on different cloud platforms including AWS and Azure, along with multiple tenants."
"It presents great visibility of the traffic flow of our cloud, providing information on what data and users are circulating and in the event of a threat, it immediately identifies them by providing detailed and granular information from our entire environment."
"The posture management and remediation features are the most valuable. We use GSL Builder to build custom rules in alignment with our organization's policies. CloudGuard has canned rules using multiple standard frameworks, but we also have additional rules."
"The CloudGuard for Cloud Intelligence tool has several significant features that provide security to our company."
"The most valuable features of CloudGuard CNAPP are its compliance engine and auto-remediation features."
"The solution offers an excellent price, benefit, and installation relationship."
"I like the web GUI/the management interface. I also like the security of Microsoft. As compared to other manufacturers, it's less complex and easy to understand and work with."
"If your business requirements are relatively simple, it can get the job done."
"Shadow IT discovery is the feature I like the most."
"Defender helps us control which applications are being used and gain more security insight into remote and hybrid users based on user identity and log in location. You can also integrate Defender for Cloud Apps with Defender for Endpoint to extend its capabilities."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its monitoring."
"On-demand scanning is the most valuable feature. In addition, it's a fairly fluid product. It syncs back to the cloud and provides metrics. It's pretty intelligent."
"Threat detection is its key feature, and that's why we use this tool. It gives an alert if a PC is attacked or there is any kind of anomaly, such as there is a spike in sending emails or we see an unauthorized website being accessed. So, it keeps us on our toes. We get to know that there is something wrong, and we can isolate the user and find any issues with it. So, threat detection is very robust in this tool."
"The product’s most valuable feature is SQL database."
 

Cons

"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 would like to see tighter integration with other compliance tools, like Chef Compliance, in addition to Inspector."
"It feels somewhat fractured to me. I haven't grasped all the parts yet, and better integration would make CNAPP most valuable."
"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."
"Currently, this solution is somewhat expensive."
"We have concerns regarding the pricing and would appreciate seeing some improvements."
"The user interface could be improved. Sometimes, the visibility is not immediately available for the environment. We have the native servers that come with the solutions, but we cannot see them in the Check Point log. Another issue is with the integrated file monitoring. It would make sense to have stuff like file integrity monitoring and malware scanning available within this module because we don't want to integrate another product."
"No improvements are needed."
"They should continue integration with all other Microsoft security-related products. The integration with all the other products is still ongoing."
"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."
"There could be more granular roles that are out of the box included in the product."
"The product is very good so far, however, it would be better if it could include more up-to-date threat protection."
"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."
"The insights could be improved, especially in reporting."
"I want them to enhance in-session policy."
"The technical support team has room for improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The solution’s pricing is a little bit high."
"It is difficult to contextualize the pricing because we are used to Indian pricing and licensing."
"I suggest that you pay attention to the product pricing because while there are no tricks, and the licensing model is transparent, the final numbers may surprise you."
"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 license fee is high."
"In the beginning, the price of Dome9 was cheap, whereas now it is not."
"We have the enterprise-level license and we renew it annually because it is worth the cost."
"​They support either annual licensing or hourly. At the time of our last negotiation, it was either one or the other, you could not mix or match. I would have liked to mix/match. ​"
"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."
"It is a little bit expensive. When you want to have the complete package with Office 365, Defender, and everything else, it is expensive."
"The product's pricing seems fair."
"Microsoft offers bundle discounts and a pay-as-you-go option."
"The pricing is fair."
"We have an educational licensing agreement. It's a customer agreement for multiple years."
"This product is not expensive."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Educational Organization
5%
Computer Software Company
16%
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?
I find that the pricing for Zafran aligns well with the comprehensive features it offers. The asset and user-based li...
What needs improvement with Zafran Security?
Zafran is a new startup. Features are continuously being added or improved. 1) Continued integrations with existing (...
What is your primary use case for Zafran Security?
We connect this to our vulnerability scanner as input, our security tools to better determine risk, and our change ma...
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?
The pricing for Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is acceptable. If a product is of high quality, it justifies the ex...
 

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 Wiz, Qualys, Tenable and others in Vulnerability Management. Updated: May 2025.
850,900 professionals have used our research since 2012.