Checkmarx One vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud comparison

Checkmarx and Microsoft are both solutions in the Vulnerability Management category. Checkmarx is ranked #21 with an average rating of 7.8, while Microsoft is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.1. Checkmarx holds a 0.7% mindshare in VM, compared to Microsoft’s 5.6% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of Checkmarx 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

Checkmarx One and Microsoft Defender for Cloud are two leading products in the category of application and cloud security respectively. Checkmarx appears to have the upper hand for developers due to its focus on code vulnerability scanning, whereas Microsoft Defender shines with its comprehensive cloud security features.

Features: Checkmarx One excels in its code vulnerability scanning capabilities without needing to compile code. It supports a wide range of programming languages and is effective in providing remediation guidance. Microsoft Defender for Cloud offers in-depth insights into cloud workload security, supports multi-cloud environments, and provides regulatory compliance recommendations.

Room for Improvement: Checkmarx One could improve in handling false positives, licensing model, and integrations with other tools. Microsoft Defender for Cloud needs better management of false positives, clearer security recommendations, and more straightforward licensing.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Checkmarx One offers flexibility in deployment across private, hybrid, and public cloud environments, although its setup can be complex. Microsoft Defender integrates smoothly with the Azure ecosystem, benefiting from extensive cloud deployment capabilities. Checkmarx has mixed reviews regarding customer service, while Microsoft Defender is generally reliable but costly.

Pricing and ROI: Checkmarx One is perceived as expensive, yet users consider it worth the investment for its strong application security features, despite licensing complexities. Microsoft Defender for Cloud, while initially cost-effective, can become expensive as additional features are required, though both solutions are crucial for preventing breaches, ensuring a good ROI.

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

Buyer's Guide

Checkmarx One 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

Zafran Security

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Vulnerability Management category, the mindshare of Zafran Security is 0.6%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Checkmarx One is 0.7%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is 5.6%, up from 4.8% 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 Novartis

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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Rohit Kesharwani

Manager, Engineering at 7-Eleven.

Provides good security analysis and security identification within the source code

We integrate Checkmarx into our software development cycle using GitLab's CI/CD pipeline. Checkmark has been the most helpful for us in the development stage. The solution's incremental scanning feature has impacted our development speed. The solution's vulnerability detection is around 80% to 90% accurate. I would recommend Checkmarx to other users because it is one of the good tools for doing security analysis and security identification within the source code. Overall, I rate Checkmarx a nine out of ten.

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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

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

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

"Zafran is an excellent tool."

"The most valuable features of Checkmarx are the Best Fix Location and the Payments option because you can save a lot of time trying to mitigate the configuration. Using these tools can save you a lot of time."

"The UI is very intuitive and simple to use."

"The ability to track the vulnerabilities inside the code (origin and destination of weak variables or functions)."

"The tool's valuable features include integrating GPT and Copilot. Additionally, the UI web representation is very user-friendly, making navigation easy. GPT has made several improvements to my security code."

"It can integrate very well with DAST solutions. So both of them are combined into an integrated solution for customers running application security."

"The features and technologies are very good. The flexibility and the roadmap have also been very good. They're at the forefront of delivering the additional capabilities that are required with cloud delivery, etc. Their ability to deliver what customers require and when they require is very important."

"The most valuable features of Checkmarx are the automation and information that it provides in the reports."

"Both automatic and manual code review (CxQL) are valuable."

More Checkmarx One pros

"I would rate Microsoft Defender for Cloud a ten."

"My favorite part of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is the compliance features. Defender covers a wide range of workloads, on par with competing products on the market."

"I've seen benefits since implementing Microsoft Defender for Cloud. It's easy to manage for our large organization as an endpoint security solution. It integrates well with Office 365 and Windows 11, which is better than before. Patching, updates, and threat protection are all handled together now. Its AI features help predict threats."

"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."

"It's got a lot of great features."

"The integration with Logic Apps allows for automated responses to incidents."

"The product has given us more insight into potential avenues for attack paths."

"Microsoft Defender for Cloud has made our environment more secure."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pros

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."

"One area for improvement in Checkmarx is pricing, as it's more expensive than other products."

"The Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) feature should be better."

"We are trying to find out if there is a way to identify the run-time null values. I am analyzing different tools to check if there is any tool that supports run-time null value identification, but I don't think any of the tools in the market currently supports this feature. It would be helpful if Checkmarx can identify and throw an exception for a null value at the run time. It would make things a lot easier if there is a way for Checkmarx to identify nullable fields or hard-coded values in the code. The accessibility for customized Checkmarx rules is currently limited and should be improved. In addition, it would be great if Checkmarx can do static code and dynamic code validation. It does a lot of security-related scanning, and it should also do static code and dynamic code validation. Currently, for security-related validation, we are using Checkmarx, and for static code and dynamic code validation, we are using some other tools. We are spending money on different tools. We can pay a little extra money and use Checkmarx for everything."

"The validation process needs to be sped up."

"Checkmarx could improve the REST APIs by including automation."

"If it is a very large code base then we have a problem where we cannot scan it."

"The pricing can get a bit expensive, depending on the company's size."

"I really would like to integrate it as a service along with the SAP HANA Cloud Platform. It will then be easy to use it directly as a service."

More Checkmarx One cons

"From my own perspective, they just need a product that is tailored to micro-segmentation so I can configure rules for multiple systems at once and manage it."

"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."

"Azure is a complex solution. You have so many moving parts."

"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."

"I've heard there might be issues with scalability for larger enterprises."

"The solution could improve by being more intuitive and easier to use requiring less technical knowledge."

"Microsoft Defender could be more centralized. For example, I still need to go to another console to do policy management."

"The vulnerabilities are duplicated many times."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"The interface used to create custom rules comes at an additional cost."

"The average deal size was usually anywhere between $120K to $175K on an annual basis, which could be divided across 12 months."

"We have a subscription license that is on a yearly basis, and it's a pretty competitive solution."

"It is an expensive solution."

"I believe pricing is better compared to other commercial tools."

"The license has a vague language around P1 issues and the associated support. Make sure to review these in order to align them with your organizational policies."

"Most of my customers opted for a perpetual license. They prefer to pay the highest amount up front for the perpetual license and then pay for additional support annually."

"We have purchased an annual license to use this solution. The price is reasonable."

More Checkmarx One pricing and cost advice

"Security Center charges $15 per resource for any workload that you onboard into it. They charge per VM or per data-base server or per application. It's not like Microsoft 365 licensing, where there are levels like E3 and E5. Security Center is pretty straightforward."

"Currently, Microsoft offers only one plan at the enterprise level which is $15 per machine."

"We are using the free version of the Azure Security Center."

"The cost of the license is based on the subscriptions that you have."

"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 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."

"I am not involved much with the pricing but the bundle offering is good."

"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

13%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

14%

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?

I find that the pricing for Zafran aligns well with the comprehensive features it offers. The asset and user-based li...

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What needs improvement with Zafran Security?

Zafran is a new startup. Features are continuously being added or improved. 1) Continued integrations with existing (...

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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...

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What alternatives are there for Fortify WebInspect and Fortify SCA?

I would like to recommend Checkmarx. With Checkmarx, you are able to have an all in one solution for SAST and SCA as ...

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What do you like most about Checkmarx?

Compared to the solutions we used previously, Checkmarx has reduced our workload by almost 75%.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Checkmarx?

The pricing is relatively expensive due to the product's quality and performance, but it is worth it.

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

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Comparisons

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Compared 55% of the time

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Compared 22% of the time

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Compared 9% of the time

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SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) vs Checkmarx One

Compared 40% of the time

Veracode vs Checkmarx One

Compared 12% of the time

Fortify on Demand vs Checkmarx One

Compared 6% of the time

Checkmarx SAST vs Checkmarx One

Compared 5% of the time

OWASP Zap vs Checkmarx One

Compared 5% of the time

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AWS GuardDuty vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 20% of the time

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

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)

May 2025

Download Zafran Security product report

Buyer's Guide

Checkmarx One

May 2025

Download Checkmarx One product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

April 2025

Download Microsoft Defender for Cloud product report

Also Known As

No data available

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

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

Zafran Security

Demo not available

Checkmarx

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

Checkmarx One is an enterprise cloud-native application security platform focused on providing cross-tool, correlated results to help AppSec and developer teams prioritize where to focus time and resources.

Checkmarx One offers comprehensive application scanning across the SDLC:

Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
API security
Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST)
Container security
IaC security
Correlation, prioritization, and risk management
Codebashing secure code training
AI security
Tech partnerships extending AppSec into runtime analysis
Developer tool integrations including: CI/CD tools, development frameworks, feedback tools, IDEs, programming languages and SCMs

Checkmarx One provides everything you need to secure application development from the first line of code through deployment and runtime in the cloud. With an ever-evolving set of AppSec engines, correlation and prioritization features, and AI capabilities, Checkmarx One helps consolidate expanding lists of AppSec tools and make better sense of results. Its capabilities are designed to provide an improved developer experience to build trust with development teams and ensure the success of your AppSec program investment.

Checkmarx

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

YIT, Salesforce, Coca-Cola, SAP, U.S. Army, Liveperson, Playtech Case Study: Liveperson Implements Innovative Secure SDLC

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

Buyer's Guide

Checkmarx One vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud

April 2025

Free Report: Checkmarx One vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud

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

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