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Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps vs Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
7.6
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps enhances security, reduces costs by 35-45%, and improves uptime with efficient cloud application management.
Sentiment score
6.7
Microsoft Purview DLP offers cost savings, security enhancements, and reduced onboarding time, though ROI varies among users.
The biggest return on investment so far has been visibility, knowing what we have in our environment.
As a small team, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps allowed us to manage systems with just one or two people.
We have at least saved the costs we had from the Netskope solution this year.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.3
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps support is generally good, but users suggest faster responses and improved communication.
Sentiment score
5.1
Microsoft Purview DLP support is inconsistent, with quick responses and clear resources but also delays and monopolistic concerns.
Their customer service is pretty good, but it's frustrating to go through three or four channels before reaching the right person.
The support is excellent, and the speed of response is commendable.
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.
Once we got to the Microsoft engineers, the experience was great.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps offers scalable security, efficiently managing large user bases and app integrations with centralized management.
Sentiment score
7.6
Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention offers scalable, flexible cloud solutions, but needs improvements in user-friendliness and device-level scalability.
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.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is very scalable, provided you have the right subscription.
In my experience, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is good enough for small to medium businesses.
The policy working and detection technology need enhancements.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is praised for high reliability, minimal downtime, consistent performance, and swift issue resolution.
Sentiment score
7.8
Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention is highly stable, reliable, and responsive, though minor real-time issues and internal connection challenges exist.
I would rate it a ten because I have not experienced any stability issues so far with Defender for Cloud Apps.
I would assess the stability and reliability of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps as stable
My impression on the stability and reliability of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is that it is very stable.
Sometimes the solution is not stable when the internal connection is not reliable, so this aspect needs improvement.
 

Room For Improvement

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps could improve integration, pricing, support, reporting, automation, alerts, and overall user experience across multi-cloud environments.
Microsoft Purview DLP needs better integration, improved UI, enhanced AI features, cost-effective licensing, and better language support.
For data loss prevention, it would be useful to be able to drill down into the kind of data being transferred over CloudApp.
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.
A significant improvement I would like to see is the integration into a single pane of glass.
Implementing a degree of severity ranking is essential.
Endpoint Data Loss Prevention needs to be improved as it is not up to expectations.
 

Setup Cost

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is cost-effective within Microsoft 365 bundles, especially for large organizations with discounts available.
Microsoft Purview DLP in E5 licenses offers competitive pricing and flexible payment, valued for security features and added services.
The pricing for Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is acceptable.
My organization is currently revisiting pricing, but previously, the cost was a bit expensive, yet comparable to other solutions with similar functionalities and features.
It's not the cheapest, but also not the most expensive, placing it in the mid-level range.
 

Valuable Features

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps offers integration, threat detection, and management, enhancing security with comprehensive visibility and proactive assessment.
Microsoft Purview DLP enhances data security with auto-labeling, multi-cloud support, cross-platform protection, and strong compliance features.
The ability to sanction unsanctioned apps using Secure Score benchmarking, included in Cloud, is also beneficial.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is very comprehensive, providing a complete 360-degree view of applications within an organization.
The most valuable features of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps include live, up-to-date information, which provided real-time alerts.
Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention usually performs well, except for endpoint Data Loss Prevention, which may need improvements.
The feature I find most valuable that I'm currently using is the quickness of the emails that the Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention solution sends to us, where we get notifications that say a user has potentially breached our data guideline rules, and we get those alerts continuously, allowing us to enforce them manually.
 

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Defender for Clou...
Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite
12th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) (3rd), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (14th)
Microsoft Purview Data Loss...
Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite
17th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Microsoft Security Suite category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is 2.9%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention is 2.7%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Microsoft Security Suite
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Roby Skariah - PeerSpot reviewer
Automation has given us consistent analytics and improved quality of insights into user activity
One of the valuable features of Purview is the ability to create a legal hold on a user's account within the compliance portal. That's pretty useful when it comes to any litigation or if you want to redeem the content within a mailbox, OneDrive, or a generic public SharePoint site. If you want to retain the user's data until the case is resolved, you can use the legal hold feature. Also, it's important that Purview can connect to iOS, Mac, and Android devices. With smartphone involvement, so many applications can now be accessed through them and it is important to apply Purview across operating systems and platforms. Purview's natively integrated compliance across Azure Dynamics and Office 365 is also significant because within Microsoft 365 there are multiple applications. Irrespective of whether it's Dynamics or Azure, it's very important that it has native support. The data connectivity should be efficient enough to support and secure their own platform's data. In addition, with varying regulations in different industries and matters, Purview lets you create rules and conditions based on industry standards around the world. That is important. Our company is in pharmaceuticals and the rules and conditions are different from other industries. It is important to be able to keep track of all these regulations and have a tool that is flexible enough to create the regulatory rules and conditions we need. And when it comes to data loss protection, Purview has features that can recognize patterns and detect any sort of data loss, where the data is being transferred from its platform to a different one. The default settings that come with it are pretty nice for identifying data transfer or data loss across the platform. It also comes with a lot of training materials, with use cases and examples, to help educate users and make them familiar with the tool.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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?
My impression on the pricing, setup costs, and licensing of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is that it's fair. I don't know by heart the exact pricing, but it's part of the E5 license which we al...
What do you like most about Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention?
The most valuable features are identifying sensitive data and issuing alerts.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention?
My experience with the pricing, setup costs, and licensing is not something I manage directly since I'm the owner operator; my colleagues might be more involved with that aspect as we have other te...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention?
Improving Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention would involve recognizing that the whole AI path we are all on is going to help, given the massive amount of data we handle; even if there are true ...
 

Also Known As

MS Cloud App Security, Microsoft Cloud App Security
Microsoft Endpoint Data Loss Prevention, MS Endpoint DLP, Microsoft Endpoint DLP
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Customers for Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps include Accenture, St. Luke’s University Health Network, Ansell, and Nakilat.
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Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps vs. Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.