We performed a comparison between CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security and Microsoft Defender for Cloud based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security was lauded for its strong adherence to security best practices. It particularly excels in endpoint protection and its ability to leverage machine learning and AI. Microsoft Defender for Cloud stands out for its automation, threat analysis, and security coverage. CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security could improve its Kubernetes and GCP support. Microsoft Defender for Cloud could be better integrated with non-Microsoft solutions.
Service and Support: CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security users are generally content with the support team's assistance and promptness. Microsoft Defender users generally found the support team responsive and knowledgeable, but others said outsourced support lacked technical expertise and reported longer response times in certain regions.
Ease of Deployment: The setup for CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security was deemed easy, but some users struggled with the Kubernetes implementation. Setting up Microsoft Defender for Cloud is straightforward. The solution requires minimal maintenance and seamlessly integrates with other Microsoft services.
Pricing: Users consider the pricing of CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security to be fair, but it may be pricier than on-premises alternatives. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is seen as a good deal by some users, who consider it to be cost-effective, especially when bundled with other Microsoft products.
ROI: Users have provided limited feedback about the return on investment for CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security. Microsoft Defender for Cloud has demonstrated a potentially high ROI by automating tasks and improving security posture.
"The CSPM module has been the most effective. It was easy to deploy and covered all our accounts through APIs, requiring no agents. Wiz provides instant visibility into high-level risks that we need to address."
"Our most important features are those around entitlement, external exposure, vulnerabilities, and container security."
"The security baseline and vulnerability assessments is the valuable feature."
"I like Wiz's reporting, and it's easy to do queries. For example, it's pretty simple to find out how many servers we have and the applications installed on each. I like Wiz's security graph because you can use it to see the whole organization even if you have multiple accounts."
"The product supports out-of-the-box reporting with context about the asset and allows us to perform complex custom queries on UI."
"The automation roles are essential because we ultimately want to do less work and automate more. The dashboards are easy to read and visually pleasing. You can understand things quickly, which makes it easy for our other teams. The network and infrastructure teams don't know as much about security as we do, so it helps to have a tool that's accessible and nice to look at."
"With Wiz, we get timely alerts for leaked data or any vulnerabilities already existing in our environment."
"The first thing that stood out was the ease of installation and the quick value we got out of the solution."
"There is a lot that it can do, but endpoint protection is the main thing about it. The fact that it uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to monitor and remediate the issues in real-time is probably the bread and butter of the product."
"Cloud security posture management (CSPM) is most valuable."
"The most valuable feature of CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security is its lightweight sensor, taking minimal space and not impacting server performance."
"Technical support is helpful."
"It's easy to gather insights and conduct analysis about existing threats."
"It is fully cloud-based, so we don't need to invest in third-party agents repeatedly."
"Cloud security is one valuable feature. Spotlight is the other one. There is also vulnerability management and a couple of more features."
"The most valuable feature of Falcon Cloud Security is its comprehensive threat-hunting ability."
"Provides a very good view of the entire security setup of your organization."
"Defender lets you orchestrate the roll-out from a single pane. Using the Azure portal, you can roll it out over all the servers covered by the entire subscription."
"It helps you to identify the gaps in your solution and remediate them. It produces a compliance checklist against known standards such as ISO 27001, HIPAA, iTrust, etc."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the remote workforce capabilities and the general experience of the remote workforce."
"Good compliance policies."
"It takes very little effort to integrate it. It also gives very good visibility into what exactly is happening."
"Most importantly, it's an integrated solution. We not only have Defender for Cloud, but we also have Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Office 365, and Defender for Identity. It's an integrated, holistic solution."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the insights, meaning the remediation suggestions, as well as the incident alerts."
"The reporting isn't that great. They have executive summaries, but it's only a compliance report that maps all current issues to specific controls. Whether you look at one subscription or project, regardless of the size, you will get a multipage report on how the issues in that account map to that control. Our CSO isn't going to read through that. He won't filter that out or show that to his leadership and say, "Here's what we're doing." It isn't a helpful report. They're working on it, but it's a poor executive summary."
"We're looking at some of the data compliance stuff that they've got Jon offer. I know they're looking at container security, which we gonna be looking at next."
"The only thing that needs to be improved is the number of scans per day."
"Wiz's reporting capabilities could be refined a bit. They are making headway on that, but more executive-style dashboards would be nice. They just implemented a community aspect where you can share documents and feedback. This was something users had been requesting for a while. They are listening to customer feedback and making changes."
"We wish there were a way, beyond providing visibility and automated remediation, to wait on a given remediation, due to a critical aspect, such as the cost associated with a particular upgrade... We would like to see preventive controls that can be applied through Wiz to protect against vulnerabilities that we're not going to be able to remediate immediately."
"The only small pain point has been around some of the logging integrations. Some of the complexities of the script integrations aren't supported with some of the more automated infrastructure components. So, it's not as universal. For example, they have great support for cloud formation and other services, but if you're using another type of management utility or governance language for your infrastructure-as-code automation components, it becomes a little bit trickier to navigate that."
"The solution's container security could be improved."
"The remediation workflow within the Wiz could be improved."
"There should be cloud storage scanning. We would like to have cloud storage vulnerability and threat management on any cloud storage."
"The UI part needs to be improved."
"The CrowdStrike dashboard currently lacks a username field."
"One area for improvement in Falcon Cloud Security is the support portal."
"The only suggestion for improvement would be the pricing."
"It would be more convenient if there was an easier way to install CrowdStrike, perhaps through better integration with Active Directory."
"It gets the work done, but the main problem with the solution is that if you remediate anything, it takes 45 days for you to get any of the features displayed on the dashboard. This is the real weakness of CrowdStrike. Their customer support is also not ready to help with it. If you remediate any cloud vulnerability that they are giving you, such as removing a host from your organization, it takes around 45 days for them to remove it from their console."
"Incorporating threat intelligence into the system would be a valuable addition."
"Microsoft can improve the pricing by offering a plan that is more cost-effective for small and medium organizations."
"The documentation and implementation guides could be improved."
"Microsoft sources most of their threat intelligence internally, but I think they should open themselves up to bodies that provide feel intelligence to build a better engine. There may be threats out there that they don't report because their team is not doing anything on that and they don't have arrangements with another party that is involved in that research."
"The product must improve its UI."
"The product was a bit complex to set up earlier, however, it is a bit streamlined now."
"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."
"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."
"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."
More CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security Pricing and Cost Advice →
CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security is ranked 9th in Container Security with 13 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 3rd in Container Security with 46 reviews. CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security is rated 8.8, while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security writes "Enhances the overall safety of our company's environment from cyber threats". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Cloud writes "Provides multi-cloud capability, is plug-and-play, and improves our security posture". CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security is most compared with Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, AWS GuardDuty, Qualys VMDR, Sysdig Falco and Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, whereas Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with AWS GuardDuty, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Microsoft Sentinel. See our CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud report.
See our list of best Container Security vendors, best Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) vendors, and best Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) vendors.
We monitor all Container Security reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
