We performed a comparison between Microsoft Defender Cloud and Prisma Cloud according to four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Microsoft Defender came ahead of Prisma Cloud because our reviewers found Prisma Cloud to be more difficult in terms of licensing.
"Out of all the features, the one item that has been most valuable is the fact that Wiz puts into context all the pieces that create an issue, and applies a particular risk evaluation that helps us prioritize when we need to address a misconfiguration, vulnerability, or any issue that would put our environment into risk."
"Technical support is helpful."
"With respect to improving our security posture, it helps us to understand where we are in terms of compliance. We can easily know when we are below the standard because of the scores it calculates."
"Using Security Center, you have a full view, at any given time, of what's deployed, and that is something that is very useful."
"The integration with Logic Apps allows for automated responses to incidents."
"The security alerts and correlated alerts are most valuable. It correlates the logs and gives us correlated alerts, which can be fed into any security information and event management (SIEM) tool. It is an analyzed correlation tool for monitoring security. It gives us alerts when there is any kind of unauthorized access, or when there is any malfunctioning in multifactor authentication (MFA). If our Azure is connected with Azure Security Center, we get to know what types of authentication are happening in our infra."
"When you have commissioned Defender, you have these things visible already on your dashboard. This gives the efficiency to the people to do their actual work rather than bothering about the email, sorting out the email, or looking at it through an ITSM solution, whey they have to look at the description and use cases. Efficiency increases with this optimized, ready-made solution since you don't need to invest in something externally. You can start using the dashboard and auditing capability provided from day one. Thus, you have fewer costs with a more optimized, easier-to-use solution, providing operational efficiency for your team."
"We can create alerts that trigger if there is any malicious activity happening in the workflow and these alerts can be retrieved using the query language."
"Everything is built into Azure, and if we go for cross-cloud development with Azure Arc, we can use most of the features. While it's possible to deploy and convert third-party applications, it is difficult to maintain, whereas Azure deployments to the cloud are always easier. Also, Microsoft is a big company, so they always provide enough support, and we trust the Microsoft brand."
"It also provides us with a single tool to manage our entire cloud architecture. In fact, we are using a multi-account strategy with our AWS organization. We use Prisma as a single source of truth to identify high- or medium-severity threats inside our organization."
"The CSPM and CWPP functionalities are pretty good."
"We were pleased with Prisma's custom and built-in reports. We could go into the dashboard and see all these notifications telling us which subscriptions didn't have TLS 1.2 enabled. The security controls were the most valuable features."
"The most valuable feature is the continuous cloud compliance monitoring and alerting."
"Prisma Cloud has enabled us to take a very strong preventive approach to cloud security. One of the hardest things with cloud is getting visibility into workloads. With Prisma Cloud, you can go in and get that visibility, then set up policies to alert on risky behavior, e.g., if there are security groups or firewall ports open up. So, it is very helpful in preventing configuration errors in the cloud by having visibility. If there are issues, then you can find them and fix them."
"The most valuable feature is the option to add custom queries using the RQL language that they supply so that we can customize the compliance frameworks to what we need to look for."
"Prisma Cloud is quite simple to use. The web GUI is powerful. Prisma Cloud scans the overall architecture of the AWS network to identify open ports and other vulnerabilities, then highlights them."
"The application visibility is amazing. For example, sometimes we don't know what a particular custom port is for and what is running on it. The visibility enables us to identify applications, what the protocol is, and what service is behind it. Within Azure, it is doing a great job of providing visibility. We know exactly what is passing through our network. If there is an issue of any sort we are able to quickly detect it and fix the problem."
"We wish there were a way, beyond providing visibility and automated remediation, to wait on a given remediation, due to a critical aspect, such as the cost associated with a particular upgrade... We would like to see preventive controls that can be applied through Wiz to protect against vulnerabilities that we're not going to be able to remediate immediately."
"Consistency is the area where the most improvement is needed. For example, there are some areas where the UI is not uniform across the board."
"Azure Security Center takes a long time to update, compared to the on-premises version of Microsoft Defender."
"The solution could extend its capabilities to other cloud providers. Right now, if you want to monitor a virtual machine on another cloud, you can do that. However, this cannot be done with other cloud platform services. I hope once that is available then Defender for Cloud will be a unified solution for all cloud platform services."
"Defender is occasionally unreliable. It isn't 100% efficient in terms of antivirus detection, but it isn't an issue most of the time. It's also somewhat difficult to train new security analysts to use Defender."
"The most significant areas for improvement are in the security of our identity and endpoints and the posture of the cloud environment. Better protection for our cloud users and cloud apps is always welcome."
"I felt that there was disconnection in terms of understanding the UI. The communication for moving from the old UI to the new UI could be improved. It was a bit awkward."
"Azure is a complex solution. You have so many moving parts."
"Sometimes, it's very difficult to determine when I need Microsoft Defender for Cloud for a special resource group or certain kinds of products. That's not an issue directly with the product, though."
"A better correlation between the multiple products Prisma Cloud contains would be crucial. It would reduce the time spent looking at reports and enable you to get all the actionable insights across products. I think that Palo Alto is working on it, but they need to work faster because it doesn't make sense to have all these products in a single pane of glass without any correlation between them."
"They need to make the settings more flexible to fit our internal policies about data. We didn't want developers to see some data, but we wanted them to have access to the console because it was going to help them... It was a pain to have to set up the access to some languages and some data."
"In terms of securing cloud-native development at build time, a lot of improvement is needed. Currently, it's more a runtime solution than a build-time solution. For runtime, I would rate it at seven out of 10, but for build-time there is a lot of work to be done."
"Areas like the deployment of their defenders and their central control need manual intervention. They should focus more on automation. They have a very generic case for small companies. However, for bigger companies to work, we have to do a lot of changes to our system to accommodate it. Therefore, they should change their system or deployment models so it can be easy to integrate into existing architectures."
"We identified two things that we felt would be great to have, but they are under NDA. So, I can't disclose them. Other than those two things, we identified a generic bug in the secret key management service on AWS that needs to be fixed. We reported it to them, and we want them to fix it."
"They charge seven workloads for monitoring one compute, and that is quite expensive. This makes it difficult to move fully with the compute part because of the workload."
"Currently, custom reports are available, but I feel that those reports are targeting just the L1 or L2 engineers because they are very verbose. So, for every alert, there is a proper description, but as a security posture management portal, Prisma Cloud should give me a dashboard that I can present to my stakeholders, such as CSO, CRO, or CTO. It should be at a little bit higher level. They should definitely put effort into reporting because the reporting does not reflect the requirements of a dashboard for your stakeholders. There are a couple of things that are present on the portal, but we don't have the option to customize dashboards or widgets. There are a limited set of widgets, and those widgets don't add value from the perspective of a security team or any professional who is above L1 or L2 level. Because of this, the reach of Prisma Cloud in an organization or the access to Prisma Cloud will be limited only to L1 and L2 engineers. This is something that their development team should look into."
"One definite area for improvement is the auto-remediation or the CWP area. The second one is the RQL language. It is still not very flexible and does not cover a lot of use cases. The RQL language could be dramatically improved to add more options."
More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Pricing and Cost Advice →
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 2nd in CWPP (Cloud Workload Protection Platforms) with 31 reviews while Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is ranked 1st in CWPP (Cloud Workload Protection Platforms) with 20 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.2, while Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is rated 7.6. The top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Cloud writes "Provides good recommendations and makes policy administration easy". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks writes "Gives us security control gates and automated notifications in container orchestrator, but deploy is API-driven, not a built-in integration". Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with Microsoft 365 Defender, Amazon GuardDuty, Trend Micro Cloud One Workload Security, Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks and Orca Security, whereas Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is most compared with Aqua Security, Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management, Snyk, Orca Security and Amazon GuardDuty. See our Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks report.
See our list of best CWPP (Cloud Workload Protection Platforms) vendors, best Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) vendors, and best Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) vendors.
We monitor all CWPP (Cloud Workload Protection Platforms) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
