Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps vs Morphisec comparison

Microsoft Defender for Clou...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 1, 2024

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps and Morphisec compete in cloud security and endpoint protection. Defender for Cloud Apps holds an advantage in seamless Microsoft integration and comprehensive app visibility, while Morphisec excels in unique attack prevention without performance degradation.

Features: Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps offers extensive threat detection, application visibility, and integration with Azure, ideal for organizations invested in the Microsoft ecosystem. Morphisec provides deterministic attack prevention with in-memory protection and a signatureless design, effectively minimizing endpoint performance impact.

Room for Improvement: Defender for Cloud Apps can improve integration with non-Microsoft platforms and enhance macOS compatibility, along with reducing false positives. Morphisec requires better integration with third-party antivirus solutions and improvements in customer support and dashboard usability to enrich user experience.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Defender for Cloud Apps is optimized for cloud deployments within the Microsoft ecosystem, while Morphisec supports public, private, and on-premises deployments. Microsoft’s support varies by tier and region, often requiring third-party assistance. Morphisec is consistently praised for responsive and knowledgeable support across deployment environments.

Pricing and ROI: Defender for Cloud Apps is often part of broader Microsoft licenses, offering significant value for Microsoft-committed users but expensive standalone. Morphisec is competitively priced compared to advanced solutions like CrowdStrike, offering substantial ROI through reduced downtime and enhanced security posture.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps vs. Morphisec Report (Updated: December 2025).

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps vs. Morphisec

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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

Microsoft Defender for Clou...

Ranking in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)

14th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) (4th), Microsoft Security Suite (12th)

Morphisec

Ranking in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)

34th

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Vulnerability Management (53rd), Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (52nd), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (60th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (34th), Threat Deception Platforms (19th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is 1.8%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Morphisec is 1.3%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps	1.8%
Morphisec	1.3%
Other	96.9%

Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)

Featured Reviews

Frank Van Der Spek

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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Rick Schibler

VP of Information Technology at Kentucky Trailer

Offers in-memory protection at a lower price than competitors

Morphisec's in-memory protection is probably the most valuable feature because it stops malicious activity from occurring. If something tries to install or act as a sleeper agent, Morphisec will detect and stop it. Morphisec's Moving Target Defense is critical to hardening our attack surface. If it detects something, it indicates whether it's valid. That means you've got a breach requiring investigation. It detects anomalies but doesn't necessarily point to what caused them. You still need to do that work. The solution is reasonably easy to administer. They made some changes last year, adding a cloud-based monitoring solution that makes deploying and monitoring our endpoints easy.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"If your business requirements are relatively simple, it can get the job done."

"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."

"On-demand scanning is the most valuable feature. In addition, it's a fairly fluid product. It syncs back to the cloud and provides metrics. It's pretty intelligent."

"It does a great job of monitoring and maintaining a security baseline. For us, that is a key element. The notifications are pretty good."

"Defender for Cloud Apps has given us good visibility regarding what we've allowed into our environment until now."

"The most valuable feature is its policy implementation."

"The ability to sanction unsanctioned apps using Secure Score benchmarking, included in Cloud, is also beneficial."

"The most valuable feature is the alerting system."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps pros

"Morphisec provides full visibility into security events from Microsoft Defender and Morphisec in one dashboard. Defender and Morphisec are integrated. It's important because it lowers the total cost of maintenance on the engineer's time, more or less. So the administrative time is dramatically reduced in maintaining the product. This saves an engineer around four to five hours a week."

"Morphisec Guard enables us to see at a glance whether our users have device control and disk encryption enabled properly. This is important because we are a global company operating with multiple entities. Previously, we didn't have that visibility. Now, we have visibility so we can pinpoint some locations where there are machines that are not really protected, offline, etc. It gives us visibility, which is good."

"We have seen it successfully block attacks that a traditional antivirus did not pick up."

"It provides full visibility into security events and from both solutions in one dashboard. I'm not a big security guy, if I have a threat that looks like there's a problem, I will ask Morphisec to dissect it for me, and tell me what might be happening. Because it tends to be all hash codes, so I can tell what's going on. They've been pretty good with that."

"What's valuable is really the whole kit and caboodle of the Morphisec agent. What it does is genius, in a way, until the bad guys get wise to it. You set it up and then you watch the dashboard. There isn't really much tinkering."

"Morphisec stops attacks without needing to know what type of threat it is, just that it is foreign. It is based on injections, so it would know when a software launches. If a software launches and something else also launches, then it would count that as anomalous and block it. Because the software looks at the code, and if it executes something else that is not related, then Morphisec would block it. That is how it works."

"Morphisec makes use of deterministic attack prevention that doesn’t require investigation of security alerts. It changes the memory locations of where certain applications run. If you think of Excel, opening a PDF, running an Excel macro, or opening a webpage and clicking on a link, all of those actions run in a certain area of memory. Morphisec changes the memory locations of where those run."

"Morphisec's in-memory protection is probably the most valuable feature because it stops malicious activity from occurring. If something tries to install or act as a sleeper agent, Morphisec will detect and stop it."

More Morphisec pros

Cons

"In the future, I would like to see more plug-and-play capabilities that use AI to tell you what needs to be done. It would be helpful if it scanned our devices and made security suggestions, on a configuration basis."

"Defender could integrate better with multi-cloud and hybrid environments. It requires some additional configuration to ingest data from non-Azure environments and integrate it with Sentinel."

"Licensing cost is a significant concern. With Defender Plan 1, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps comes with a pay-per-use model."

"I would like to see them include more features in the older licenses. There are some features that are not available, such as preventing or analyzing cloud attacks."

"There are challenges with detection and there are challenges with false-positive rates."

"Currently, reporting is not very straightforward and it needs to be enhanced. Specific reports are not included and you need to run a query, drill down, and then export it and share it. I would love to have reports with more fine-tuning or granularity, and more predefined reports."

"I want them to enhance in-session policy."

"Defender for Cloud Apps could come with more configured policies out of the box. Also, integration could be easier. Integration is moderately difficult because Microsoft hasn't developed a solution that unifies device onboarding and management. You have to use Intune to manage devices and Defender for Endpoint to enforce policies. They need to fix their integration, but I believe they will straighten it out by the end of the year."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps cons

"Right now, it's just their auto-update feature. I know they are currently working on that. When they release a new version of the threat prevention platform, I do have to update that, rolling out to every computer. They have said, "From version 5, you would be able to do an auto-update." While this is very minor, that is the only thing that I would say needs to be upgraded. It would just make life a lot easier for other IT teams. However, I have simplified the process, so all I need to do is just download one file."

"Sometimes it generates false positive alerts. They need to continue working on that. They have provided solutions for it and have fixed issues with updated versions. The service is quite good but they need to work on it more so that there are no false positive alerts."

"The weakest point of this product is how difficult it is to understand the reasons for an alert. This is a problem because it is hard to determine whether an attack is real or not."

"If anything, tech support might be their weakest link. The process of getting someone involved sometimes takes a little time. It seems to me that they should have all the data they need to let me know whether an alert is legitimate or not, but they tend to need a lot of information from me to get to the bottom of something. It usually takes a little longer than I would expect."

"It would be nice if they could integrate Morphisec with other traditional antivirus solutions beyond Microsoft Defender. That is probably my biggest gripe."

"The dashboard is the area that requires the most improvement. We have about, I would say 5,500 computers currently, and searching through all of those takes some time to filter. So as soon as you apply the filter, it takes a few seconds. It crunches, it thinks, and then it brings up the clients that match."

"Some of the filters for the console need improvement. There are alerts that show up and just being able to acknowledge that we've seen those and not turn them off, but dismiss them, would be a huge benefit."

"From a company standpoint, a little more interaction with the customers throughout the year might be beneficial. I would like check-ins from the Morphisec account executives about any type of Morphisec news as well as a bit more interaction with customers throughout the year to know if anything new is coming out with Morphisec, e.g., what they are working on in regards to their development roadmap. We tend not to get that up until the time that we go for a yearly renewal. So, we end up talking to people from Morphisec once a year, but it is usually at renewal time."

More Morphisec cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have an educational licensing agreement. It's a customer agreement for multiple years."

"We are an MST and we do not pay for the solution. However, the price of the solution could be better."

"The pricing is a little bit high but right now, we are okay with it because of the compatibility with Office 365, Teams, and Azure AD."

"The pricing is in the middle. It isn't too cheap or expensive compared to other antivirus or security products. It is priced according to industry standards."

"The E5 license offers everything bundled. People are moving to Microsoft because you buy one license and it gives you everything."

"I'm not totally involved in the pricing part, but I think its pricing is quite aggressive, and its price is quite similar to Netskope. Netskope has separate licensing fees or additional charges if you want to monitor certain SaaS services, whereas, with MCAS, you get 5,000 applications with their Office 365. It is all bundled, and there's no cost for using that. You only have the operational costs. In the country I am in, it is a bit difficult to get people with the required skill sets."

"The product's pricing seems fair."

"Its pricing is on the higher side. Its price is definitely very high for a small-scale company. As an enterprise client, we do get benefits from Microsoft. We get a discounted price because of the number of users we have in our company. We have a premier package, and with that, we do get a lot of discounts. There are no additional costs. It only comes in the top-tier packages. Generally, the top-tier license is the best license that you can get for your organization. If you want, you can buy it separately, but that's not a good idea."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps pricing and cost advice

"Licenses are per endpoint, and that's true for the cloud version as well. The only difference is that there is a little extra charge for the cloud version."

"Our licensing is tied into our contract. Because we have a long-term contract, our pricing is a little bit lower. It is per year, so we don't get charged per endpoint, but we do have a cap. Our cap is 80 endpoints. If we were to go over 80, when we renewed our contract, which is not until three years are over. Then, they would reevaluate, and say, "Well, you have more than 80 devices active right now. This is going to be the price change." They know that we are installing and replacing computers, so the numbers will be all over the place depending on whether you archive or don't archive, which is the reason why we just have to keep up on that stuff."

"It is a little bit more expensive than other security products that we use, but it does provide us good protection. So, it is a trade-off."

"We are still using a separate tool. I know for our 600 or I think we're actually licensed for up to 700 users, it runs me 23 or $24,000 a year. When you're talking to that many users plus servers being protected, that's well worth the investment for that dollar amount."

"Morphisec is reasonably priced because our parent company's other subsidiaries use different products like CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike is four or five times more expensive than Morphisec. The competitive pricing saves us money in our overall security stack."

"The pricing is definitely fair for what it does."

"Compared to their competitors, the price of Morphisec is not that high. You can easily deploy it on a large-scale or small-scale network."

"It is an annual subscription basis per device. For the devices that we have in scope right now, it is about $25,000 a year."

More Morphisec pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Outsourcing Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	15
Midsize Enterprise	10
Large Enterprise	19

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	8

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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...

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Comparisons

Zscaler Internet Access vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

Compared 15% of the time

Cisco Umbrella vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

Compared 15% of the time

Netskope vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

Compared 11% of the time

Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

Compared 6% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

Compared 5% of the time

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Competitors

Halcyon vs Morphisec

Compared 18% of the time

CrowdStrike Falcon vs Morphisec

Compared 14% of the time

Deep Instinct Prevention Platform vs Morphisec

Compared 11% of the time

SentinelOne Singularity Complete vs Morphisec

Compared 8% of the time

Hyver vs Morphisec

Compared 8% of the time

More Morphisec Competitors

Product Reports

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

Download Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps product report

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps report

Download Morphisec product report

Also Known As

MS Cloud App Security, Microsoft Cloud App Security

Morphisec, Morphisec Moving Target Defense

Overview

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is a comprehensive security solution that provides protection for cloud-based applications and services. It offers real-time threat detection and response, as well as advanced analytics and reporting capabilities. With Defender for Cloud Apps, organizations can ensure the security of their cloud environments and safeguard against cyber threats. Whether you're running SaaS applications, IaaS workloads, or PaaS services, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps can help you secure your cloud environment and protect your business from cyber threats.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Benefits:

Provides comprehensive security for cloud applications
Integrates with other Microsoft security tools
Easy to use and deploy
Provides real-time threat detection and response
Strong protection against phishing attacks and other common threats
Highly customizable to meet specific needs of different organizations

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Use Cases:

Governance, authentication, security, and compliance.
Detects shadow IT and anomalous user behavior
Controls access to applications
Provides auditing and filtering setups
Used for end-user compute devices, file monitoring, user investigation, and activity
Used for data governance, threat detection, and getting visibility over cloud applications
Used to identify information about applications beyond organizational boundaries
Prevent exfiltration and data filtration of corporate data
Used to deal with spam emails and detect shadow IT

Reviews from Real Users

Ram-Krish, Cloud Security & Governance at a financial services firm, says that Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps "Integrates well and helps us in protecting sensitive information, but takes time to scan and apply the policies and cannot detect everything we need".

PeerSpot user, Senior Cloud & Security Consultant at a tech services, writes that Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps "Great for monitoring user activity and protecting data while integrating well with other applications".

Simon Burgess,Infrastructure Engineer at SBITSC, states that Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is "A fluid, intelligent product for great visibility, centralized management, and increased uptime".

Microsoft

Morphisec integrates seamlessly with platforms like Microsoft Defender, offering signatureless protection against zero-day threats and ransomware. It enhances existing endpoint solutions with minimal maintenance through its set-and-forget deployment, providing heightened security and reduced false positives.

Morphisec strengthens defense strategies by merging memory morphing and signatureless protection to effectively block zero-day attacks and ransomware. It operates efficiently within existing infrastructure, reducing system impact and maintenance needs. Users find its full visibility dashboard invaluable. Despite its strengths, cloud deployment and reporting features can be improved. Stability, alerts, and integration with other systems pose challenges for users, impacting usability and support quality.

What are Morphisec's key features?

Seamless Integration: Works with Microsoft Defender for comprehensive dashboard visibility
Memory Morphing: Hides processes to reduce attack surfaces
Signatureless Protection: Prevents threats without impacting performance
Automatic Threat Blocking: Uses inbuilt intelligence to detect risks
Set-and-Forget Deployment: Simplifies management and reduces maintenance

What benefits should users consider in reviews?

Quick Deployment: Fast setup without disrupting operations
Enhanced Protection: Provides an additional defense layer against advanced threats
Cost-Effectiveness: Works with existing licenses, minimizing extra investments
Improved Compatibility: Integrates smoothly with current antivirus systems
Minimal System Impact: Operates efficiently without overloading resources

In security-focused industries, Morphisec is crucial for protecting workstations and servers against sophisticated attacks like ransomware. Its signatureless technology offers early threat detection, while compatibility with existing systems ensures seamless integration, providing advanced protection without additional licensing costs.

Sample Customers

Customers for Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps include Accenture, St. Luke’s University Health Network, Ansell, and Nakilat.

Lenovo/Motorola, TruGreen, Covenant Health, Citizens Medical Center

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps vs. Morphisec