Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps vs Morphisec comparison

Microsoft Defender for Clou...

Read 21 Morphisec reviews

1,975 Views
178 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

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: September 2025).

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps vs. Morphisec

Download the complete report

Helped 869,566 peers since 2012

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

7.3

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 (64th), Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (54th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (61st), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (31st), Threat Deception Platforms (15th)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is 1.8%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Morphisec is 1.2%, up from 0.8% 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	1.2%
Other	97.0%

Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)

Featured Reviews

Abdulrahman Muhammadi

information Security and IT Manager at Discover Dollar Technologies Pvt Ltd.

Integration with existing cloud workflows has simplified compliance and threat detection

Licensing cost is a significant concern. With Defender Plan 1, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps comes with a pay-per-use model. Each feature has its own pricing when activated on VMs. For example, the vulnerability assessment has separate pricing, the base model including encryptions has separate pricing, and the compliance features have separate pricing. This applies to each VM and Azure resource individually. It is not straightforward where you can take one license and apply it to everything. Each feature has its own pricing model which can be tedious, as the costs keep accumulating. The only lacking feature currently is XDR (extended detection and response). Apart from that, I have only positive experiences with the whole Microsoft suite, except for the pricing structure.

Read full review

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.

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

"The most valuable features of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps include live, up-to-date information, which provided real-time alerts, and the ability to delve into detailed metadata information."

"I like the alert policies because they are quite robust. It has some built-in templates that we can easily pick up. One of them is the alert for mass downloads, when a particular user is running a massive download on your SharePoint site."

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

"The most valuable feature is the ease of management. It's important."

"The most valuable feature is the alerting system."

"Defender helps us control which applications are being used and gain more security insight into remote and hybrid users based on user identity and log in location. You can also integrate Defender for Cloud Apps with Defender for Endpoint to extend its capabilities."

"The general usability of the solution is very straightforward."

"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is that we are primarily using only the Defender for Cloud on the Azure Cloud."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps pros

"The biggest feature is that it hides everything from your operating system that's running in-memory from anything to try to run against it. That's the most unique thing that's on the market. There's nothing else out there that's quite like that. That's a big selling point and why we went with it. It does exactly what the design does. If you can't find it, you can't execute against it."

"It also provides full visibility into security events from Microsoft Defender and Morphisec in one dashboard. We've always had that capability with Morphisec. The more recent version appears to do that even a little bit more natively and it's given us visibility that we didn't have otherwise."

"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 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."

"Since using Morphisec we have seen a downturn in attacks because Morphisec protects us versus Defenders and whatnot that are signature-based. I know we have not had any issues with ransomware or other zero-day attacks that we've seen with machines that, all of a sudden, have become before we instituted the product. Now the machine had to be re-imaged and there was a loss of data because something was on the machine. You couldn't really determine what was on the machine because nothing was picking it up. The products we were using weren't picking it up."

"The fact that Morphisec uses deterministic attack prevention that does not require human intervention has affected our security team's operations by making things much simpler. We don't have to really track down various alerts anymore, they've just stopped. At that point, we can go in and we can clean up whatever needs to be cleaned up. There are some things that Morphisec detects that we can't really remove, it's parts of Internet Explorer, but it's being blocked anyway. So we're happy 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."

"All the alerts are on the dashboard, which is quite simple and useful for us. You can easily check all the alerts that are being blocked or allowed, or whatever the action is. You can easily see that and you can take the necessary actions. You can add a PowerShell extension or any activities for blocking at your network level or for endpoints."

More Morphisec pros

Cons

"We sometimes get errors when we create policies, which is somewhat annoying because some policies stop working due to misconfigurations. We find this challenging because it limits our options for troubleshooting an issue."

"I would like for it to be available on Mac and for it to support all of the features of Microsoft financing products. It is really for Windows."

"Defender for Cloud apps is primarily useful for Azure apps. It has limited capabilities for applications based on other cloud platforms."

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

"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."

"The response time could be better. It will be helpful if the alerts are even more proactive and we can see more data. Currently, the data is a little bit weak. It is not complete. I can't just see it and completely know which user or which device it is. It takes some effort and time on my part to investigate and isolate a user. It would be great if it is more user-friendly or easy for people to understand."

"The interface needs to be more user-friendly."

"There are some features, such as user navigation content filtering, that are disabled by default, and it probably makes sense to enable them by default."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps cons

"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."

"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."

"The only area that really needs improvement is the reporting functionality. Gathering the detailed information that is in the system for an executive, or for me as a director, could be better. Some of the interface and reporting aspects are a little bit dated. They're working on it."

"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."

"We started in the Linux platform and we deployed to Linux. The licensing of that has been kind of confusing between Linux licensing and Windows licensing. The overall simplicity of licensing or offering an enterprise license to just cover everything and then we don't have to count needs improvement."

"Automating reports needs improvement. I would like to have better reporting capabilities within it or automated reporting to be a little bit more dynamic. That's something I know they're working on. We literally are in the process. We started the process a week and a half ago of going to their latest version, so I've not seen their latest one up and running yet."

"We have only had four attacks in the last year, "attacks" being some benign PDF from a vendor that, for some reason, were triggered. There were no actual attacks. They were just four false positives, or something lowly like adware. There have been false positives with both the on-premises solution and the cloud solution."

More Morphisec cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"It is a little bit expensive. When you want to have the complete package with Office 365, Defender, and everything else, it is expensive."

"We utilize the Microsoft E5 licensing, which encompasses the entire Microsoft suite; however, it is costly."

"This product is not expensive."

"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."

"Microsoft offers bundle discounts and a pay-as-you-go option."

"The product's pricing seems fair."

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

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps pricing and cost advice

"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."

"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."

"It is priced correctly for what it does. They end up doing a good deal of discounting, but I think it is priced appropriately."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

More Morphisec pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Outsourcing Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	13
Midsize Enterprise	10
Large Enterprise	18

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...

See all answers

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

Comparisons

Zscaler Internet Access vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

Compared 18% of the time

Cisco Umbrella vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

Compared 16% of the time

Netskope vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

Compared 12% of the time

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

Compared 6% of the time

Skyhigh Security vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

Compared 5% of the time

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Competitors

CrowdStrike Falcon vs Morphisec

Compared 22% of the time

Halcyon vs Morphisec

Compared 19% of the time

SentinelOne Singularity Complete vs Morphisec

Compared 11% of the time

Hyver vs Morphisec

Compared 11% of the time

Deep Instinct Prevention Platform vs Morphisec

Compared 11% 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