We performed a comparison between Microsoft Defender for Endpoint 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: Based on the parameters we compared, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint comes out ahead of Microsoft Defender for Cloud. While both products have comprehensive features, Microsoft Defender for Cloud’s dashboards may not integrate easily with other enterprise dashboards.
"Defender is user-friendly and provides decent visibility into threats."
"The vulnerability reporting is helpful. When we initially deployed Defender, it reported many more threats than we currently see. It gave us insight into areas we had not previously considered, so we knew where we needed to act."
"Provides a very good view of the entire security setup of your organization."
"The dashboard is very good. It gives our clients a lot of information and allows them to have a complete overview of the system. Everything is visible in one glance."
"It's quite a good product. It helps to understand the infections and issues you are facing."
"The solution's robust security posture is the most valuable feature."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the vulnerability assessments and the glossary of compliance."
"It takes very little effort to integrate it. It also gives very good visibility into what exactly is happening."
"We apply the DLP policies across a range of endpoints and it is very accurate when reporting vulnerabilities, including those in email attachments."
"In my opinion, the most valuable aspects are the reporting analytics and integration with Sentinel. Defender does an excellent job of correlating the different entities that comprise threat analysis, analytics data, and log analytics. It helps to piece together investigations into any exploit or malicious activity within a specific tenant. AI and analytics tools are probably the most valuable components."
"It's an enterprise solution that provides a centralized console and it supports all the platforms that we use, including Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, and Android."
"Because it has been integrated with the OS, we get the entire software inventories, and we even get access to the registries. Those are the primary features."
"The endpoint detection of threats is valuable. The initial detection of things like ransomware and viruses and being able to shut down machines immediately and stop a threat is valuable. We can stop a threat at a source versus allow it to propagate it across the network."
"The scalability is good."
"I like that Defender is integrated and doesn't have a third-party payload trying to advertise subscription renewal."
"We like that it has a free version available."
"The overview provides you with good information, but if you want more details, there is a lot more customization to do, which requires knowledge of the other supporting solutions."
"The solution is quite complex. A lot of the different policies that actually get applied don't pertain to every client. If you need to have something open for a client application to work, then you get dinged for having a port open or having an older version of TLS available."
"Microsoft can improve the pricing by offering a plan that is more cost-effective for small and medium organizations."
"If a customer is already using Okta as an SSO in its entire environment, they will want to continue with it. But Security Center doesn't understand that and keeps making recommendations. It would help if it let us resolve a recommendation, even if it is not implemented."
"After getting a recommendation, it takes time for the solution to refresh properly to show that the problem has been eliminated."
"We would like to have better transparency as to how the security score is calculated because as it is now, it is difficult to understand."
"For Kubernetes, I was using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). To see that whatever is getting deployed into AKS goes through the correct checks and balances in terms of affinities and other similar aspects and follows all the policies, we had to use a product called Stackrox. At a granular level, the built-in policies were good for Kubernetes, but to protect our containers from a coding point of view, we had to use a few other products. For example, from a programming point of view, we were using Checkmarx for static code analysis. For CIS compliance, there are no CIS benchmarks for AKS. So, we had to use other plugins to see that the CIS benchmarks are compliant. There are CIS benchmarks for Kubernetes on AWS and GCP, but there are no CIS benchmarks for AKS. So, Azure Security Center fell short from the regulatory compliance point of view, and we had to use one more product. We ended up with two different dashboards. We had Azure Security Center, and we had Stackrox that had its own dashboard. The operations team and the security team had to look at two dashboards, and they couldn't get an integrated piece. That's a drawback of Azure Security Center. Azure Security Center should provide APIs so that we can integrate its dashboard within other enterprise dashboards, such as the PowerBI dashboard. We couldn't get through these aspects, and we ended up giving Reader security permission to too many people, which was okay to some extent, but when we had to administer the users for the Stackrox portal and Azure Security Center, it became painful."
"They could always work to make the pricing a bit lower."
"Right now, the solution provides some recommendations on the dashboard but we don't have any priorities. It's a mix of all the vulnerabilities and all the security recommendations. I would like to see some priority or categorization of high, medium, and low so that we can fix the high ones first."
"Reporting could be improved. I would like to see how many security incidents occurred in the last six months, how many devices were highly exposed to security risks, and how many devices were actually compromised."
"It is inexpensive but could be cheaper like anything else."
"Sometimes the software doesn't work the way we expect it to, and in those cases, we can't communicate with a device because it may be infected."
"The time to generate certain alerts on our dashboard can take between 45 minutes to an hour, and I am unsure of the factors that influence this duration."
"If the solution could be integrated more with Defender for Cloud, to be more unified, that would help. It is good now, but even more integration could be done with Defender for Cloud. We see two different portals. If Defender for Endpoint could be ported to the CSPM, Defender for Cloud, that would make things even easier for us."
"Phishing and Malware detection could be better."
"We would like to see more tools for managing on-premises security... Sometimes, we have the tools, like Defender, to manage security in the cloud, but because we are so focused on the cloud, we forget the fact that we need to be sure about the security of the on-premises environment, specifically Active Directory."
More Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Pricing and Cost Advice →
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 2nd in Microsoft Security Suite with 46 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is ranked 6th in Microsoft Security Suite with 182 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0, while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is rated 8.0. 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 for Endpoint writes "Eliminates the need to look at multiple dashboards by automatically providing one XDR dashboard to show the security score of each subscription". Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with AWS GuardDuty, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Defender XDR, Wiz and Microsoft Sentinel, whereas Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is most compared with Symantec Endpoint Security, Intercept X Endpoint, CrowdStrike Falcon, SentinelOne Singularity Complete and Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business. See our Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint report.
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