We performed a comparison between Microsoft 365 Defender 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.
Comparison Results: 365 Defender has a slight edge over Defender for Cloud in this comparison since it is the more user-friendly solution. Defender for Cloud does come out on top in the pricing and ROI categories, however.
"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."
"When we started out, our secure score was pretty low. We adopted some of the recommendations that Security Center set out and we were able to make good progress on improving it. It had been in the low thirties and is now in the upper eighties."
"One important security feature is the incident alerts. Now, with all these cyberattacks, there are a lot of incident alerts that get triggered. It is very difficult to keep monitoring everything automatically, instead our organization is utilizing the automated use case that we get from Microsoft. That has helped bring down the manual work for a lot of things."
"Defender for Cloud is a plug-and-play solution that provides continuous posture management once enabled."
"When you have commissioned Defender, you have these things visible already on your dashboard. This gives the efficiency to the people to do their actual work rather than bothering about the email, sorting out the email, or looking at it through an ITSM solution, whey they have to look at the description and use cases. Efficiency increases with this optimized, ready-made solution since you don't need to invest in something externally. You can start using the dashboard and auditing capability provided from day one. Thus, you have fewer costs with a more optimized, easier-to-use solution, providing operational efficiency for your team."
"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."
"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 incident threat response and its ability to facilitate effective remediation against threats are the standout features."
"The integration with other Microsoft solutions is the most valuable feature."
"Advanced hunting is good. I like that. We can drill down to lots of details."
"A crucial aspect for our team is the inclusion of identity and access management tools from the vendor."
"Microsoft Defender XDR is scalable."
"My clients like Defender's file integrity monitoring. They're monitoring Windows and Linux system files."
"I like that it's stable. It's been stable for a long time, and Microsoft Defender has done a good job there."
"All of the security components are valuable including, antiphishing, antispam, and stage three antivirus."
"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."
"Sometimes it's very difficult to determine when I need Microsoft Defender for Cloud for a special resource group or a special kind of product."
"It needs to be simplified and made more user-friendly for a non-technical person."
"After getting a recommendation, it takes time for the solution to refresh properly to show that the problem has been eliminated."
"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 suggest building a single product that addresses endpoint server protection, attack surface, and everything else in one solution. That is the main disadvantage with the product. If we are incorporating some features, we end up in a situation where this solution is for the server, and that one is for the client, or this is for identity, and that is for our application. They're not bundling it. Commercially, we can charge for different licenses, but on the implementation side, it's tough to help our end-customer understand which product they're getting."
"Azure's system could be more on point like AWS support. For example, if I have an issue with AWS, I create a support ticket, then I get a call or a message. With Azure support, you raise a ticket, and somebody calls back depending on their availability and the priority, which might not align with your business priority."
"The documentation could be much clearer."
"The console is missing some features that would be helpful for a managed services provider, like device and user management."
"In the future, it would be beneficial for Microsoft to consider making the product more user-friendly or simplified for those who are interested in using it. Currently, it requires a high level of technical expertise, making it challenging for beginners or less experienced individuals."
"The documentation on their website is somewhat outdated and doesn't show properly. I wanted to try a query in Microsoft Defender 365. When I opened the related documentation from the security blog on the Microsoft website, the figures were not showing. It was difficult to understand the article without having the figures. The figures were there in the article, but they were not getting loaded, which made the article obsolete."
"When we do investigations, it would be better if Microsoft could populate the host dashboard more. When we open any host for investigation, we want the entire timeline of what is happening on the host, including all the users logging in, their hardware, Windows version, etc."
"It would be highly beneficial if CoPilot could identify anomalies within the network and notify the IT team."
"I personally have not seen much evidence of how Defender can enhance the story of zero trust for enterprises."
"A simple dashboard without having to use MS Sentinel would be a welcome improvement."
"Generally, antivirus products provide a central control to manage every device in terms of who is installing it or who is trying to disable it, but Microsoft doesn't have such a control center for the antivirus product it provides."
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 2nd in Microsoft Security Suite with 46 reviews while Microsoft Defender XDR is ranked 1st in Microsoft Security Suite with 75 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0, while Microsoft Defender XDR is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Cloud writes "Provides multi-cloud capability, is plug-and-play, and improves our security posture". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Defender XDR writes "Includes four services and four products, which can help organizations a lot". Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with AWS GuardDuty, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Wiz, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Microsoft Sentinel, whereas Microsoft Defender XDR is most compared with CrowdStrike Falcon, Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager, Wazuh, Trend Vision One and Microsoft Sentinel. See our Microsoft Defender XDR vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud report.
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We monitor all Microsoft Security Suite 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.
