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Check Point Security Management vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 1, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.2
Check Point Security Management boosts ROI up to 65% through enhanced security, cost efficiency, and reduced security incidents.
Sentiment score
7.0
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps enhances security and efficiency, offering significant ROI with up to 60% savings and streamlined operations.
I have seen a strong ROI from using Check Point Security Management through unified policy management, reduced misconfigurations, and faster incident response.
Senior Network Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
The time to resolve issues is very much better now with Check Point Security Management.
Network Cyber Security Specialist at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
I have seen a hundred percent return on investment with Check Point Security Management.
IT admin at Tonboimaging india pvt ltd
The biggest return on investment so far has been visibility, knowing what we have in our environment.
Cloud and data protection engineer at a university with 10,001+ employees
As a small team, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps allowed us to manage systems with just one or two people.
Manager, Information Technology Security Compliance at a manufacturing company with 201-500 employees
We have at least saved the costs we had from the Netskope solution this year.
Security and Continuity Manager at Rolinco NV
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.9
Check Point Security Management's customer support is generally praised, despite some variability and occasional delays in resolutions.
Sentiment score
6.4
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps support is praised for its responsiveness, though some users experience delays and resource access challenges.
When we face technical issues, they are ready to help us.
Inside Sales Manager at Digitaltrack Solutions Pvt Ltd
They are very helpful in each and every technical aspect and able to resolve complex issues within the timeline.
Server Security Analyst and Solution at Digitaltrack Solutions Pvt Ltd
Customer support for Check Point Security Management is excellent
Senior Network Engineer at Anthology
Their customer service is pretty good, but it's frustrating to go through three or four channels before reaching the right person.
Cloud and data protection engineer at a university with 10,001+ employees
The support is excellent, and the speed of response is commendable.
Solutions Architect at a university with 51-200 employees
There were instances where the engineers were knowledgeable and helpful, but at other times it felt like a ping pong game, with unnecessary transfers until the right person was found.
Manager, Information Technology Security Compliance at a manufacturing company with 201-500 employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Check Point Security Management excels in scalable, centralized management, effectively handling growth and adapting to organizational changes.
Sentiment score
7.4
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps offers scalable, seamless integration, and reliable management for organizations of all sizes and environments.
It can be a multi-domain Security Management server and can manage large or segmented environments with multiple domains or customers.
Cybersecurity Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
When you upgrade multiple times, you leave many files that are useless. They are dated, so it's always better to create a new machine every few versions, for example, three or four major versions.
Security Support Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
The scalability of Check Point Security Management is excellent.
Network Security Engineer at Digitaltrack
For what I know about the log collector and how much data it can take in, it is super scalable and capable of handling high workloads.
Cloud and data protection engineer at a university with 10,001+ employees
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is very scalable, provided you have the right subscription.
Solutions Architect at a university with 51-200 employees
In my experience, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is good enough for small to medium businesses.
Manager, Information Technology Security Compliance at a manufacturing company with 201-500 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Check Point Security Management is stable, with performance affected by configurations; issues improve with updates and maintenance.
Sentiment score
8.0
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is highly stable, reliable, and maintains performance with minor, swiftly resolved incidents.
Check Point Security Management is really stable, and I have not experienced any downtime or issues with reliability except for when we do upgrades.
Network Engineering and IS Access at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees
The SmartConsole used to administrate the security management is somewhat unstable.
Network Cyber Security Specialist at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Check Point Security Management is stable and I have not experienced any downtime or reliability issues.
Network Security Engineer at Digitaltrack
I would rate it a ten because I have not experienced any stability issues so far with Defender for Cloud Apps.
Head of Security Operations at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
I would assess the stability and reliability of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps as stable
Network Engineer at Apexon
My impression on the stability and reliability of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is that it is very stable.
Security and Continuity Manager at Rolinco NV
 

Room For Improvement

Check Point Security Management requires better integration, usability, performance, support, documentation, compatibility, upgrades, and interface simplification for users.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps seeks enhanced pricing, integration, user interface, automation, and multi-cloud support, while improving insights and management.
When the logs are too heavy for the security management server, the CPU spike will be high, causing our management day-to-day activity to lag or become difficult.
Cybersecurity Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Refining reports and automation capabilities to make it more intuitive and scalable for diverse enterprise environments could improve Check Point Security Management.
IT Support at a security firm with 51-200 employees
Engaging role-based access control is essential; granular permissions for more flexible RBAC will allow the organization to delegate tasks.
Support at a security firm with 51-200 employees
For data loss prevention, it would be useful to be able to drill down into the kind of data being transferred over CloudApp.
Head of Security Operations at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Defender typically connects to Entra ID, but we have local users on the cloud for database access, SSH, or RDS, and there is nothing produced by Defender regarding those local IAM users.
Network Engineer at Apexon
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps would benefit if Microsoft allows users to fine-tune false positives, enabling us to dismiss alerts or make adjustments so that such things don't trigger multiple times in the future.
Security delivery analyst at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Setup Cost

Check Point Security Management is costly but valuable with complex licensing, offering comprehensive features that justify its price.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is seen as cost-effective for enterprises within Microsoft ecosystems, despite standalone pricing concerns.
Since we are using it extensively, we get significant discounts during procurement.
Information Security at Synechron
Licensing is quite expensive.
Security Support Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
We pay on a three-year base.
Network Cyber Security Specialist at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
The pricing for Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is acceptable.
Solutions Architect at a university with 51-200 employees
My organization is currently revisiting pricing, but previously, the cost was a bit expensive, yet comparable to other solutions with similar functionalities and features.
Manager, Information Technology Security Compliance at a manufacturing company with 201-500 employees
It's not the cheapest, but also not the most expensive, placing it in the mid-level range.
IT Architect at a logistics company with 10,001+ employees
 

Valuable Features

Check Point Security Management centralizes control with real-time monitoring, robust firewall policies, and comprehensive protection for complex infrastructures.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps integrates well, offering threat detection, management ease, shadow IT discovery, and robust security enhancements.
Check Point Security Management has positively impacted my organization by providing centralized control, allowing us to manage all security policies and gateways from a single console, reducing complexity and saving time.
Senior Network Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
After deploying Check Point Security Management, we improved our productivity by integrating all devices into a single console instead of managing separate log-ins for each branch's gateways, making our admin team's tasks easier.
Technique at Digitaltrack
The monitoring is exceptional as it provides consolidated logs, signals, and any alerts that come from the security gateway in real time.
Technical Specialist at VDA Infosolutions Pvt. Ltd.
It provides excellent suggestions and options for configuration; for example, it can track suspicious files getting uploaded to cloud resources on Azure based on their signatures, generating alerts for those files.
Security delivery analyst at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The product recommends things that need to be blocked and allows for dynamic configuration, which cuts down on potential issues that might arise from going through lists and understanding what needs to be blocked.
Partner & Chief Executive Officer at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
The ability to sanction unsanctioned apps using Secure Score benchmarking, included in Cloud, is also beneficial.
Head of Security Operations at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Check Point Security Manage...
Ranking in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)
10th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
89
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (11th), Threat Intelligence Platforms (TIP) (4th)
Microsoft Defender for Clou...
Ranking in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)
14th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) (4th), Microsoft Security Suite (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) category, the mindshare of Check Point Security Management is 0.5%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is 1.8%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Check Point Security Management0.5%
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps1.8%
Other97.7%
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)
 

Featured Reviews

RL
TI at a security firm with 51-200 employees
Simplified threat detection and reduced policy deployment time
The standout features of Check Point Security Management are unified policy management, real-time visibility, and automation capabilities, making it a powerful tool for security management. Consistency across environments with Check Point Security Management helps me ensure that instead of maintaining separate rules for firewalls, cloud workloads, and data centers, we apply one unified policy that covers them all. This reduces misconfigurations and ensures compliance, proving to be a time-saver because rolling out a new rule or updating an existing one takes minutes, not hours, because it is propagated everywhere automatically. Automation is one of the most valuable aspects of Check Point Security Management, and it often does not get enough attention compared to headline features like unified policies or visibility. With policy automation, routine tasks such as rule creation, compliance checks, or policy updates can be automated, reducing human error and saving hours of manual work. Check Point Security Management has simplified administration in my organization because instead of juggling multiple consoles, everything is managed from a single pane of glass. This has reduced complexity and saved significant time for our IT team, improving our operational efficiency. For a policy update, I used to spend two or three hours across multiple consoles. Now, with unified management in Check Point Security Management, it takes thirty to forty minutes, resulting in about a seventy percent reduction in effort, greatly boosting productivity.
FV
Security and Continuity Manager at Rolinco NV
Deployment has been seamless with insightful data categorization and enhanced control
The features of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps that I have found most valuable include the overall portal view, with bubble graphs which give us insight into what goes where in the categorization, nowadays with Generative AI but all kinds of categorization, collaboration, etc. That central view of the portal is very useful for us. The impact of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps on our organization's ability to assess and manage app related risks has been significant because we have more visibility. Therefore, we can add more control, and we have already done so. This was not possible in the old solution, in the old CASB solution with Netskope. We now can see on the spot, and we do that almost weekly, what the end users are utilizing, which cloud providers or cloud apps they're using. The visibility into OAuth apps provided by Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is very good. The visibility into risk and risk management of our organization's Generative AI apps is very nice, as you can choose the category Generative AI and then see exactly what traffic has been going to and from Generative AI in the cloud. This makes us very insightful on what is used within the company. We have some policies on blocking specific Generative AI, and we use within our company one particular AI part, which is CoPilot of Microsoft. In this way, we can see what the end users are using other than CoPilot, and that makes us more in control. The effectiveness of the integration of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps with Defender XDR and defending against SaaS attacks is very intuitive. It works immediately if we create a new policy or in Purview or in Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, or when we make an app unsanctioned by blocking it, then it is almost immediately, or at least within a couple of hours, effective on all the endpoints where the EDR is running. This gives us much better control over things than before.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
18%
Security Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business55
Midsize Enterprise32
Large Enterprise43
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise19
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Check Point Security Management?
The most beneficial features for us are the alert classifications, which help us prioritize critical issues, and the detailed reports that provide insights into attack origins and purposes, such as...
What needs improvement with Check Point Security Management?
Based on my experience with Check Point Security Management, I do not see anything lacking. It is currently managing all the gateways, and we are able to achieve what we want from our perspective. ...
What is your primary use case for Check Point Security Management?
I am using Check Point Security Management in our day-to-day operations to centrally manage all Check Point Security Gateways within my organization. All of these Check Point Security Gateways are ...
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-native solution, unifying multiple features like DNS-layer security, threat intelli...
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 notifications are pretty good.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Cloud App Security?
At the time of implementation, when the size of our organization was small, it was a more affordable product. Since all our productivity applications were on O365, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps...
 

Also Known As

R80.10, R80, R77.30, R77, Check Point R80.10 Security Management, R80 Security Management
MS Cloud App Security, Microsoft Cloud App Security
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Hedgetec, Geiger
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 Check Point Security Management vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,422 professionals have used our research since 2012.