Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Symantec Cloud Workload Protection comparison

Microsoft and Broadcom are both solutions in the Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) category. Microsoft is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.1, while Broadcom is ranked #32. Microsoft holds a 13.3% mindshare in CWPP, compared to Broadcom’s 0.2% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

Symantec Cloud Workload Protection and Microsoft Defender for Cloud compete in offering cloud security solutions. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is perceived to have the edge due to its advanced features.

Features: Symantec Cloud Workload Protection provides robust threat protection, workload visibility, and simplified management making it attractive for organizations looking for straightforward administration. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is noted for its integrated threat intelligence, extensive compliance tools, and superior cloud-native application protection, appealing to enterprises needing advanced security.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Symantec Cloud Workload Protection is recognized for easy deployment and strong customer support which is beneficial for quick implementations. Microsoft Defender for Cloud, being integrated within the Azure ecosystem, allows seamless onboarding for Azure users and offers extensive documentation, although it can be complex for non-Azure environments. Its customer service, while adequate, is less highlighted compared to Symantec.

Pricing and ROI: Symantec Cloud Workload Protection is appealing with its competitive upfront costs, ensuring effective ROI through streamlined processes. Microsoft Defender for Cloud, while seen as more expensive, provides substantial value through deep integrations, offering significant ROI for those utilizing Microsoft's ecosystem. Pricing can vary based on organizational needs and chosen deployment mode.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Symantec Cloud Workload Protection Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Symantec Cloud Workload Protection

June 2025

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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

SentinelOne Singularity Clo...

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) category, the mindshare of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is 2.9%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is 13.3%, down from 16.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Symantec Cloud Workload Protection is 0.2%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)

Featured Reviews

Andrew W

VP - Information Technology at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

Tells us about vulnerabilities as well as their impact and helps to focus on real issues

Looking at all the different pieces, it has got everything we need. Some of the pieces we do not even use. For example, we do not have Kubernetes Security. We are not running any K8 clusters, so it is good for us. Overall, we find the solution to be fantastic. There can be additional education components. This may not be truly fair to them because of what the product is going for, but it would be great to see additional education for compliance. It is not a criticism of the tool per se, but anything to help non-development resources understand some of the complexities of the cloud is always appreciated. Any additional educational resources are always helpful for security teams, especially those without a development background.

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Vibhor Goel

Senior Cloud Platform Engineer at Deutsche Börse

A single tool for complete visibility and addressing security gaps

Currently, issues are structured in Microsoft Defender for Cloud at severity levels of high, critical, or warning, but these severity levels are not always right. For example, Microsoft might consider a port being open as critical, but that might not be the case for our company. Similarly, it might suggest closing some management ports, but you might need them to be able to log in, so the severity levels for certain things can be improved. Even though Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides a way to temporarily disable certain alerts or notifications without affecting our security score, it would be better to have more granularized control over these recommendations. Currently, we cannot even disable certain alerts or notifications. There should be an automated mechanism to design Azure policies based on the recommendations, possibly with AI integration. Instead of an engineer having to write a policy to fix security gaps, which is very time-consuming, there should be an inbuilt capability to auto-remediate everything and have proper control in place. Additionally, enabling Defender for Cloud at the resource group level, rather than only at the subscription level, would be beneficial.

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Mahadi Ma

Engineer at M.Tech

Has a good active directory feature and good technical support

One area for improvement in Symantec Cloud Workload Protection is integration. Other features that could be improved are defense control and encryption, particularly in the USB. For example, users should be able to control the USB and have the capability of blocking and allowing USB reading and writing. Having a USB encryption feature in Symantec Cloud Workload Protection would also be very useful. An additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of Symantec Cloud Workload Protection is more advanced defense on mobile devices such as iOS and Android. For example, even offline or with no internet connection, it would be good if the solution could defend devices against malware and ransomware.

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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

"It is scalable, stable, and can detect any threat on a machine. It uses artificial intelligence and can lock down any virus."

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security's graph explorer is a valuable tool that lets us visualize all connected services."

"The solution's most valuable features are its ability to detect vulnerabilities inside AWS resources and its ability to rescan after a specific duration set by the administrator."

"It saves time, makes your environment more secure, and improves compliance. SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security helps with audits, ensuring that you are following best practices for cloud security. You don't need to be an expert to use it and improve your security."

"It gives me the information I need."

"Cloud Native Security is user-friendly. Everything in the Cloud Native Security tool is straightforward, including detections, integration, reporting, etc. They are constantly improving their UI by adding plugins and other features."

"The monitoring tool has comprehensive monitoring features."

"The mean time to detect has been reduced."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pros

"Provides a very good view of the entire security setup of your organization."

"Defender for Cloud is an improvement over Trend Micro, our previous solution. We like integrating our endpoints and visualizing everything in one place. It provides comprehensive coverage for endpoints, servers, and overall environmental security."

"It's quite a good product. It helps to understand the infections and issues you are facing."

"The most valuable feature is the comprehensive overview across different workloads. It allows us to see protection not just across one workload, such as virtual machines, containers, infrastructure, or data, but across all our workloads. This overall visibility is really helpful."

"Defender lets you orchestrate the roll-out from a single pane. Using the Azure portal, you can roll it out over all the servers covered by the entire subscription."

"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is its ability to assess an environment and give us a clear idea of what security components are lacking and which are not."

"The most valuable features of this solution are the remote workforce capabilities and the general experience of the remote workforce."

"It helps you to identify the gaps in your solution and remediate them. It produces a compliance checklist against known standards such as ISO 27001, HIPAA, iTrust, etc."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pros

"It will read various logs, diagnose what is wrong, and then alert you."

"The most valuable features in Symantec Cloud Workload Protection are endpoint protection and active directory features. The active directory features in the product are very good, and in terms of security, the most valuable feature in Symantec Cloud Workload Protection is threat defense or threat protection."

Cons

"Their search feature could be better."

"The cloud-based operations might pose challenges in areas with limited or unavailable internet connectivity."

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security's current documentation could be improved to better assist customers during the cluster onboarding process."

"When we request any changes, they must be reflected in the next update."

"We've found a lot of false positives."

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security can be improved by developing a comprehensive set of features that allow for automated workflows."

"They could generally give us better comprehensive rules."

"Bugs need to be disclosed quickly."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security cons

"Customizing some of the compliance requirements based on individual needs seems like the biggest area of improvement. There should be an option to turn specific controls on and off based on how your solution is configured."

"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."

"Azure's system could be more on point like AWS support. For example, if I have an issue with AWS, I create a support ticket, then I get a call or a message. With Azure support, you raise a ticket, and somebody calls back depending on their availability and the priority, which might not align with your business priority."

"Defender could improve how data is represented. It can be unstructured or slow to load. The recent update allowing policy grouping into control groups is beneficial, but further enhancements for speed and clarity are needed."

"There should be an automated mechanism to design Azure policies based on the recommendations, possibly with AI integration. Instead of an engineer having to write a policy to fix security gaps, which is very time-consuming, there should be an inbuilt capability to auto-remediate everything and have proper control in place."

"Customer service and support from Microsoft are very poor. Even for high-severity cases, response or resolution time can extend to three or four weeks."

"After getting a recommendation, it takes time for the solution to refresh properly to show that the problem has been eliminated."

"If they had an easier way to display all the vulnerabilities of the machines affected and remediation steps on one screen rather than having to dive deep into each of them, that would be a lot easier."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud cons

"In the future, we may need to use features that are only available in one of the competing products."

"One area for improvement in Symantec Cloud Workload Protection is integration. Other features that could be improved are defense control and encryption, particularly in the USB. For example, users should be able to control the USB and have the capability of blocking and allowing USB reading and writing. Having a USB encryption feature in Symantec Cloud Workload Protection would also be very useful."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We found it to be fine for us. Its price was competitive. It was something we were happy with. We are not a Fortune 500 company, so I do not know how pricing scales at the top end, but for our cloud environment, it works very well."

"Its pricing is okay. It is in line with what other providers were providing. It is not cheap. It is not expensive."

"Singularity Cloud Security by SentinelOne is cost-efficient."

"It was reasonable pricing for me."

"I am personally not taking care of the pricing part, but when we moved from CrowdStrike to PingSafe, there were some savings. The price of CrowdStrike was quite high. Compared to that, the price of PingSafe was low. PingSafe is charging based on the subscription model. If I want to add an AWS subscription, I need to pay more. It should not be based on subscription. It should be based on the number of servers that I am scanning."

"PingSafe is fairly priced."

"PingSafe is cost-effective for the amount of infrastructure we have. It's reasonable for what they offer compared to our previous solution. It's at least 25 percent to 30 percent less."

"The pricing is fair. It is not inexpensive, and it is also not expensive. When managing a large organization, it is going to be costly, but it meets the business needs. In terms of what is out there on the market, it is fair and comparable to what I have seen, so I do not have any complaints about the cost"

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pricing and cost advice

"There are two different plans. We're using the secure basic plan, but we have used the end security plan as well. There are additional costs, but it gives us more functionalities compared to the basic plan."

"Azure Defender is a bit pricey. The price could be lower."

"I'm not privy to that information, but I know it's probably close to a million dollars a year."

"Security Center charges $15 per resource for any workload that you onboard into it. They charge per VM or per data-base server or per application. It's not like Microsoft 365 licensing, where there are levels like E3 and E5. Security Center is pretty straightforward."

"Its pricing is a little bit high in terms of Azure Security Center, but the good thing is that we don't need to maintain and deploy it. So, while the pricing is high, it is native to Azure which is why we prefer using this tool."

"The licensing cost per server is $15 per month."

"This is a worldwide service and depending on the country, there will be different prices."

"Azure Defender is definitely pricey, but their competitors cost about the same. For example, a Palo Alto solution is the same price per endpoint, but the ground strikes cost a bit more than Azure Defender. Still, it's pricey for a company like ours. Maybe well-established organizations can afford it, but it might be too costly for a startup."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pricing and cost advice

"The licensing cost for Symantec Cloud Workload Protection is paid yearly."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about PingSafe?

The dashboard gives me an overview of all the things happening in the product, making it one of the tool's best featu...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PingSafe?

I don't handle the price part, but it isn't more expensive than Palo Alto Prisma Cloud. It's not cheap, but it is wor...

See all answers

What needs improvement with PingSafe?

There is scope for more application security posture management features. Additionally, the runtime protection needs ...

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How is Prisma Cloud vs Azure Security Center for security?

Azure Security Center is very easy to use, integrates well, and gives very good visibility on what is happening acros...

See all answers

What do you like most about Microsoft Defender for Cloud?

The entire Defender Suite is tightly coupled, integrated, and collaborative.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Defender for Cloud?

The pricing is pretty standard.

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Comparisons

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Compared 18% of the time

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Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 5% of the time

Orca Security vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 4% of the time

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Compared 20% of the time

Wiz vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 14% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 10% of the time

Microsoft Defender XDR vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 5% of the time

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AWS GuardDuty vs Symantec Cloud Workload Protection

Compared 100% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

May 2025

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security report

Download SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

May 2025

Download Microsoft Defender for Cloud product report

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)

May 2025

Symantec Cloud Workload Protection report

Download Symantec Cloud Workload Protection product report

Also Known As

PingSafe

Microsoft Azure Security Center, Azure Security Center, Microsoft ASC, Azure Defender

No data available

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

SentinelOne

Microsoft

Demo not available

Broadcom

Overview

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security protects cloud workloads, offering advanced threat detection and automated response. It integrates seamlessly with cloud environments and secures containerized applications and virtual machines against vulnerabilities.

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is renowned for its efficiency in mitigating threats in real-time. The platform integrates effortlessly with existing cloud environments, ensuring robust cloud security management with minimal manual intervention. Securing containerized applications and virtual machines, it excels in threat intelligence and endpoint protection. However, improvements are needed in performance during high workload periods, and more integrations with third-party tools and better documentation would be beneficial. Users often find the installation process complex, support response times slow, and the dashboard's navigation unintuitive.

What are the key features of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security?

Real-time Threat Detection: Identifies and mitigates threats as they occur.
Automated Response: Automatically responds to threats to minimize impact.
Ease of Deployment: Simple setup process with scalable options.
Machine Learning Insights: AI-driven insights enhance threat prevention.
Seamless Integration: Integrates with cloud environments for unified security management.

What are the primary benefits or ROI to expect from SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security?

Enhanced Threat Mitigation: Improved security against real-time threats.
Reduced Manual Intervention: Automated processes save time and resources.
Scalability: Easily adapts to growing security requirements.
Centralized Management: Manage security across platforms from a single console.
Advanced Threat Intelligence: Provides in-depth analysis and protection.

In specific industries, SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is implemented to safeguard critical data and infrastructure. Organizations in finance, healthcare, and technology depend on its real-time threat detection and automated response to protect sensitive information. Its ability to secure containerized applications and virtual machines is particularly valuable in dynamic environments where rapid scaling is necessary.

SentinelOne

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a comprehensive security solution that provides advanced threat protection for cloud workloads. It offers real-time visibility into the security posture of cloud environments, enabling organizations to quickly identify and respond to potential threats. With its advanced machine learning capabilities, Microsoft Defender for Cloud can detect and block sophisticated attacks, including zero-day exploits and fileless malware.

The solution also provides automated remediation capabilities, allowing security teams to quickly and easily respond to security incidents. With Microsoft Defender for Cloud, organizations can ensure the security and compliance of their cloud workloads, while reducing the burden on their security teams.

Microsoft

Symantec Cloud Workload Protection automates security for public cloud workloads, enabling business agility, risk reduction, and cost savings for organizations, while easing DevOps and administrative burdens. Rapid discovery, visibility, and elastic protection of AWS and Azure workloads enable automated security policy enforcement to protect applications from unknown exploits.

Broadcom

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is trusted by companies such as ASOS, Vatenfall, SWC Technology Partners, and more.

LifeLock

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Symantec Cloud Workload Protection

June 2025

Free Report: Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Symantec Cloud Workload Protection

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Symantec Cloud Workload Protection and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.

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