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Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps vs Netskope comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

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

iboss
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB)
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Secure Web Gateways (SWG) (6th), Internet Security (3rd), Web Content Filtering (1st), ZTNA as a Service (10th), Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) (9th)
Microsoft Defender for Clou...
Ranking in Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB)
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (14th), Microsoft Security Suite (12th)
Netskope
Ranking in Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB)
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) category, the mindshare of iboss is 2.0%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is 9.8%, down from 12.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Netskope is 14.6%, up from 13.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB)
 

Featured Reviews

Matt Crockford - PeerSpot reviewer
It's easy to roll out, and their understanding of our business made it seamless
One aspect we value about iboss is its simplicity. Their customer service is brilliant, and they are super responsive and knowledgeable. It's easy to roll out, and their understanding of our business made it seamless. We were impressed by the solution's mental health function, which can detect if someone needs help. It scans what users are browsing and flags warning signs so we can check to see if they are okay. We've had to use it a couple of times. The user interface is highly intuitive. Our IT team picked it up with minimal training. It's arranged so that it's easy to find where things are. Another advantage is the single pane of glass console, which gives you visibility into what's happening. We're not fully there yet because we haven't implemented zero trust, but we're excited about the possibilities from the demos we've seen. We launched a POC of iboss' ChatGPT Risk Protection feature two weeks ago. AI is a great tool, but you need to be careful what you put into it. My biggest fear is employees inputting sensitive corporate information or customer PII data into one of these chatbots. I was impressed by our trial of the feature. It's exactly what we wanted. Now, when a user goes to ChatGPT, there's a banner warning them not to share information, and we can block conversations containing customer data like bank details and email addresses. I don't want to stop people from using it, but we need visibility. We've only tried it on a test group of 15 people. You can configure it to look for specific keywords or integrate it with your DLP policy if you have that configured
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.
Benjamin Naranjo - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides secure remote access and web navigation protection with highly customizable features
The most helpful features in Netskope are the data loss prevention module, the anti-malware module, and the integration that it has with Information Rights Management from Microsoft. It has better categorization and more granular features regarding web protection, as it allows me to control HTTP methods. I can publish WhatsApp web for my users as read-only, for example. Other providers cannot; they are only on and off, and do not have the granularity for a website to be read-only. That comes with a downside, which is that they need to regularly update their controls to support those features in those websites.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"iboss is pretty scalable. They provide good support. The case managers you work with to coordinate what you need are pretty good."
"iboss is easy to use despite its complexity. Multiple engineers manage it, but it's significantly more straightforward to administer than traditional VPNs and web proxies."
"We were impressed by the solution's mental health function, which can detect if someone needs help. It scans what users are browsing and flags warning signs so we can check to see if they are okay. We've had to use it a couple of times."
"First of all, the security policies are essential. I do not have to rely solely on Active Directory for our users."
"Our primary use case for this product is DLP,"
"We chose iboss for both zero trust and proxy (SWG) because their SWG was superior."
"The iboss system is highly reliable. The false positive rates are small compared to some other systems we've experienced through other partner agencies who use competing solutions."
"Content filtering is the most useful feature of iboss."
"One of the most valuable features is auditing. Some of the other protection services have issues with auditing. Microsoft Defender for Cloud has an excellent auditing technique that helps us avoid the risk of filtering or information loss. You can use different tools to guarantee these things. It allows you to conduct an in-depth exploration of applications, users, and files that are harmful or suspicious. You can also enhance your security setup by creating personalized rules or policies that help you better control traffic in the cloud."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of management. It's important."
"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."
"I like the web GUI/the management interface. I also like the security of Microsoft. As compared to other manufacturers, it's less complex and easy to understand and work with."
"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."
"Shadow IT discovery is the feature I like the most."
"Everything from Microsoft is integrated. You receive regular reports on them all. You can push your reports, logs, and security alerts, which are all integrated. It is crucial that these solutions work natively together to deliver coordinated detection and response across our environment."
"Defender for Cloud Apps has given us good visibility regarding what we've allowed into our environment until now."
"In Azure, we have multiple subscriptions and with every subscription, we add some kind of instance ID. We can work with the instance ID so that we allow all of the instances containing nodules. Everything else, we block. This way, if you go to outlook.com and check your email, if you log in with your company account, the instance ID will show. The network will take action according to the instance ID and say, "You are using the enterprise email. I'll let you surf. I'll let you see your email." But when you try to log in with your own email address, like Hotmail or Gmail, the instance ID will be different. This way we are not completely blocking Outlook, but we are blocking people from accessing their Outlook. We are only allowing the enterprise-level emails, and we are not allowing user-based emails."
"The most valuable feature of Netskope is that it is a SaaS-delivered solution."
"Netskope's control is user-friendly and comprehensible. It also helps in conveying information effectively as a company, making it crucial for customer satisfaction."
"The solution offers a better understanding of the real scenario and identifies the cloud apps that are being utilized."
"The cloud enablement feature helps eliminate on-premises infrastructure by adopting Netskope."
"We use Cisco VPN for remote access. Additionally, we have started implementing Netskope with a strong focus on security. Our primary goal is to protect users from accessing malicious sites. We also plan to implement DLP based on our data, as data security is our main concern."
"It's one of the top-ranking solutions in the market, and it's very responsive. We are using Netskope, and Netskope provides a load of features for SQL, STP, and traffic control."
"The most helpful features in Netskope are the data loss prevention module, the anti-malware module, and the integration that it has with Information Rights Management from Microsoft."
 

Cons

"I'd like to see them accelerate development on the security side, particularly around data loss prevention."
"Regarding pricing, setup costs, and licensing, iboss is not cheap, and that's my only concern."
"File integrity monitoring would be very advantageous as an additional feature."
"Iboss is growing so fast that it is often hard for them to keep up with the challenges."
"For zero trust implementation, we encountered complexity issues, especially with a large infrastructure company ExxonMobil."
"If they could implement an extra security layer preventing access to iboss from the open internet, it would be great."
"Our biggest problem with their service was it did not recognize the device and filtering did not always work correctly."
"Its pricing could be better."
"Defender for Cloud apps is primarily useful for Azure apps. It has limited capabilities for applications based on other cloud platforms."
"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."
"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."
"The interface needs to be more user-friendly."
"The technical support team has room for improvement."
"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."
"Generally, the pricing can always be improved along with the management system."
"I believe it's only set to be integrated with Microsoft Defender for identity and identity protection. I would like to see it available for use with something like Office 365 Defender. I don't think it's integrated with that yet."
"There could be room for improvement in the subscription process."
"A bit of latency is observed in some of the applications."
"It needed some fine-tuning on core business sites that we used, which were sensitive to what we term a man-in-the-middle certificate by design. Some sites were not tolerant because they presented as potentially malicious. So, we just had to make some tweaks so that it would bypass or interpret it."
"The threat protection features must be improved."
"They could add endpoint security features."
"Netskope needs to improve its stability."
"The initial setup is complex and should be simplified."
"Accuracy could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The overall pricing for iboss is very competitive and transparent."
"It is expensive compared to one of its competitors."
"We had the cost of purchasing a new appliance along with the implementation and licensing costs. However, the following year, the cost of just licensing was similar to what was paid the previous year for a new appliance along with the implementation and licensing costs."
"We have not priced the solution recently, but they were competitive with other vendors in the past."
"It is probably in line with other solutions, but I do not deal with the financial side."
"It is not expensive, and it is also not cheap. iboss is priced right in the sweet spot for the number of features it offers."
"The price could be better and should be reconsidered."
"This product is not expensive."
"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."
"We utilize the Microsoft E5 licensing, which encompasses the entire Microsoft suite; however, it is costly."
"Where we are right now, this is an acceptable pricing. I would like to see more transparency given to the end user. The end user given to us is via the cloud service provider. There are different programs and license models. Some include this, and some include that. It is all over the place. There can be a little more consistency or simplification in the pricing so that your parts list is not ten pages long, and you are not trying to determine, "If I have an E3, does this cover that?", or "Do I need to pay separately for the license?" Simplification would probably be better."
"The product's pricing seems fair."
"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."
"They should work on licensing costs."
"It is an expensive solution."
"Licensing is on a yearly basis."
"I recall that the price was considerably cheaper than that of Zscaler. It was around 60,000 AUD for 1,000 users per year and included some training and some premier support offerings. If we wanted to take advantage of the CASB capabilities, then there was an additional subscription fee, for which we didn't have the budget. On price, I would give Netskope a three or four out of five because it's quite expensive, but it offers a lot of value."
"The price of the solution is fair but it depends on your use case."
"I would rate the pricing nine out of ten."
"Licensing fees are paid annually."
"There is a license required for this solution and there are many licensing models available. For example, what applications are covered as part of the license."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about iboss?
Content filtering is the most useful feature of iboss.
What needs improvement with iboss?
For zero trust implementation, we encountered complexity issues, especially with a large infrastructure company Exxon...
What is your primary use case for iboss?
Previously when I used iboss, we did the POC for iboss for ExxonMobil. Four or five people wanted to move from our ol...
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-nat...
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 notificatio...
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 do...
Which is better, Zscaler internet access or Netsckope CASB?
We researched Netskope but ultimately chose Zscaler. Netskope is a cloud access security broker that helps identify ...
What do you like most about Netskope CASB?
The product's analytics part is pretty fine.
 

Also Known As

iBoss Cloud Platform
MS Cloud App Security, Microsoft Cloud App Security
Netskope CASB
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

More than 4,000 global enterprises trust the iboss Cloud Platform to support their modern workforces, including a large number of Fortune 50 companies.
Customers for Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps include Accenture, St. Luke’s University Health Network, Ansell, and Nakilat.
NetApp, Genomic Health, Caterpillar, Apollo, Pandora, Continental Resources, Fractal, infinera, Tesla
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps vs. Netskope and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
862,452 professionals have used our research since 2012.