Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Tenable Vulnerability Management comparison

Microsoft and Tenable are both solutions in the Vulnerability Management category. Microsoft is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.1, while Tenable is ranked #5 with an average rating of 7.9. Microsoft holds a 5.6% mindshare in VM, compared to Tenable’s 6.3% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of Tenable users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

Tenable Vulnerability Management and Microsoft Defender for Cloud compete in the domain of cybersecurity solutions focused on vulnerability management and threat protection. Microsoft Defender for Cloud appears to have an upper hand due to its strong threat intelligence, regulatory compliance features, and integration within the Azure ecosystem.

Features: Tenable Vulnerability Management emphasizes comprehensive visibility across traditional and cloud environments, robust vulnerability scanning, and seamless integrations, particularly for enterprise organizations. It offers traditional and container scanning supported by real-time scanning through agents. Microsoft Defender for Cloud highlights threat intelligence and regulatory compliance, along with a holistic security view and advanced threat protection. It integrates well within the Azure ecosystem, managing multi-cloud environments with real-time alerts.

Room for Improvement: Tenable Vulnerability Management users note the need for improvement in customization of dashboards, reporting capabilities, and the clarity of licensing options, alongside better integration with other tools and customer support. Microsoft Defender for Cloud could enhance UI consistency, improve integration with third-party tools, and provide more user-friendly documentation, with noted areas for improvement in pricing clarity and configuration granularity.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Tenable Vulnerability Management offers flexible deployment options ranging from on-premises to hybrid clouds, with customer support described as generally positive but having slower response times. Microsoft Defender for Cloud primarily deploys in public and hybrid clouds with tight integration within the Microsoft ecosystem. Its support is strong, with efficient responses and comprehensive guidance, though training and better integration can be enhanced.

Pricing and ROI: Tenable Vulnerability Management is viewed as costly, with recommendations for a more flexible pricing model, yet it offers good ROI by managing vulnerabilities effectively. Microsoft Defender for Cloud offers competitive pricing within the Microsoft suite, with flexibility in module selection contributing to favorable ROI, despite occasional views of high pricing.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Tenable Vulnerability Management Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Tenable Vulnerability Management

April 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

Zafran Security

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Vulnerability Management category, the mindshare of Zafran Security is 0.6%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is 5.6%, up from 4.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tenable Vulnerability Management is 6.3%, down from 9.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Vulnerability Management

Featured Reviews

Israel Cavazos Landini

Associate Director IT Security Operations at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

Weekly insights and risk analysis facilitate informed security decisions

I appreciate the weekly insights Zafran provides, which include critical topics for networks and IT security, allowing us to evaluate which insights apply to our environment. The organization score feature is valuable to keep the leadership team updated on how our infrastructure fares security-wise. The applicable risk level versus base risk level feature is beneficial because prior to Zafran, we only used the base risk level, but now understand that risk depends on the asset itself. Zafran is an excellent tool.

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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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Mani Bommisetty

Infrastructure patching Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Streamlines vulnerability management with excellent reporting and potential AI integration

Tenable is user-friendly and excels in reporting. It allows me to easily fetch and schedule reports. The software's discovery feature aids in strengthening our security posture. The single-sensor installation process on various operating systems is smooth, unlike Rapid7, which requires different versions for separate systems. Furthermore, Tenable enables vulnerability management through potential AI integration that consolidates efforts and resolves multiple vulnerabilities simultaneously.

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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

"We are able to see the real risk of a vulnerability on our environment with our security tools."

"Zafran has become an indispensable tool in our cybersecurity arsenal."

"Zafran is an excellent tool."

"One of the features that I like about the solution is it is both a hybrid cloud and also multi-cloud. We never know what company we're going to buy, and therefore we are ready to go. If they have GCP or AWS, we have support for that as well. It offers a single-panel blast across multiple clouds."

"The valuable features include the ability to manage devices and the fact that Defender can replace other security tools like SCCM."

"The solution's coordinated detection and response across devices and identities is impressive because it is complete."

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

"The most valuable feature for me is the variety of APIs available."

"I have not experienced any difficulties or issues with the stability of Microsoft Defender for Cloud."

"Using Security Center, you have a full view, at any given time, of what's deployed, and that is something that is very useful."

"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

"The initial setup is very straightforward."

"The product is easy to use."

"Technical support has been good. They respond quite quickly."

"The price of Tenable.io Vulnerability Management is reasonable as it is ten times cheaper than other options."

"Tenable.io, in particular, is quite a powerful product. It looks at your traditional environment, which is pretty much anything that is on-premises, and it also goes a step ahead and covers your modern assets, which is anything that is currently sitting in the cloud. You get complete visibility of your entire environment and tech operation. The ability to give you visibility across the entire tech surface is one of the biggest advantages that Tenable.io has."

"The solution is quite friendly."

"The solution can integrate with third parties and meets standard compliance."

"It helps us create remediation projects and assign the console’s responsibility to specific engineers."

More Tenable Vulnerability Management pros

Cons

"Initially, we were somewhat concerned about the scalability of Zafran due to our large asset count and the substantial amount of information we needed to process."

"Early on, the lack of transparency is a challenge. Microsoft does not tell you the cost when they launch something."

"The customer service at Microsoft has room for improvement. The first line of support is not technically adept and often requires engaging higher-level technicians to resolve issues."

"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."

"For improvements, I'd like to see more use cases integrated with Microsoft Sentinel and support for multi-cloud environments beyond just Azure."

"The documentation and implementation guides could be improved."

"I would like to see more connectors and plugins with other platforms."

"There are challenges with the licensing policies, which are quite complicated."

"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."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud cons

"The UI has room for improvement."

"They need to have more dependable and faster support."

"More flexibility is required compared to other solutions."

"There needs to be better dashboard navigation."

"The solution must provide penetration testing."

"The stability has room for improvement."

"The solution is a bit slow."

"The one drawback that we have found is the reports."

More Tenable Vulnerability Management cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"Defender for Cloud is pretty costly for a single line. It's incredibly high to pay monthly for security per server. The cost is considerable for an enterprise with 500-plus virtual machines, and the monthly bill can spike."

"It is bundled with our enterprise subscription, which makes it easy to go for it. It is available by default, and there is no extra cost for using the standard features."

"The licensing is straightforward but can become expensive if you cover everything. You must balance the cost against the importance of what needs covering."

"The tool is pretty expensive."

"Defender's basic version is free, which is good. Many of our teams are evaluating the paid version against third-party products."

"This solution is more cost-effective than some competing products. My understanding is that it is based on the number of integrations that you have, so if you have fewer subscriptions then you pay less for the service."

"The pricing is very difficult because every type of Defender for Cloud has its own metrics and pricing. If you have Cloud for Key Vault, the pricing is different than it is for storage. Every type has its own pricing list and rules."

"The cost of the license is based on the subscriptions that you have."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pricing and cost advice

"Tenable.io is not known for being a cheap product."

"There are additional features that can be licensed for an additional cost."

"Compared to other VM solutions, Tenable.io Vulnerability Management is expensive."

"The tool is reasonably priced."

"The total cost we pay for this solution is over 45K. This is for a large education organization."

"Tenable.io Vulnerability Management's pricing solution model isn't great."

"Yearly payments are to be made toward the licensing cost of the product. It is neither a cheap nor an expensive product."

"The solution is not too expensive."

More Tenable Vulnerability Management pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Educational Organization

22%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zafran Security?

I find that the pricing for Zafran aligns well with the comprehensive features it offers. The asset and user-based li...

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What needs improvement with Zafran Security?

Zafran is a new startup. Features are continuously being added or improved. 1) Continued integrations with existing (...

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What is your primary use case for Zafran Security?

We connect this to our vulnerability scanner as input, our security tools to better determine risk, and our change ma...

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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.

See all answers

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

The cost is generally reasonable. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Plan 2 costs $15 per server, per month. For a normal c...

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What's the difference between Tenable Nessus and Tenable.io Vulnerability Management?

Tenable Nessus is a vulnerability assessment solution that is both easy to deploy and easy to manage. The design of ...

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What do you like most about Tenable.io Vulnerability Management?

The tool has an easy-to-use interface.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Tenable.io Vulnerability Management?

I would suggest HP WebInspect as a better option than Tenable.io. My current client doesn't have access to it. Howeve...

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Comparisons

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Compared 51% of the time

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Compared 20% of the time

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Compared 13% of the time

Armis vs Zafran Security

Compared 7% of the time

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AWS GuardDuty vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

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 11% of the time

Microsoft Defender XDR vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 5% of the time

Orca Security vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 3% of the time

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Tenable Nessus vs Tenable Vulnerability Management

Compared 21% of the time

Tenable Security Center vs Tenable Vulnerability Management

Compared 13% of the time

Amazon Inspector vs Tenable Vulnerability Management

Compared 10% of the time

Qualys VMDR vs Tenable Vulnerability Management

Compared 5% of the time

Snyk vs Tenable Vulnerability Management

Compared 4% of the time

More Tenable Vulnerability Management Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)

May 2025

Download Zafran Security product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

May 2025

Download Microsoft Defender for Cloud product report

Buyer's Guide

Tenable Vulnerability Management

April 2025

Download Tenable Vulnerability Management product report

Also Known As

No data available

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

Tenable.io

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

Zafran Security

Microsoft

Demo not available

Tenable

Overview

Zafran Security integrates with existing security tools to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities effectively, proving that most critical vulnerabilities are not exploitable, optimizing threat management.

Zafran Security introduces an innovative operating model for managing security threats and vulnerabilities. By leveraging the threat exposure management platform, it pinpoints and prioritizes exploitable vulnerabilities, reducing risk through immediate remediation. This platform enhances your hybrid cloud security by normalizing vulnerability signals and integrating specific IT context data, such as CVE runtime presence and internet asset reachability, into its analysis. No longer reliant on patch windows, Zafran Security allows you to manage risks actively.

What are the key features of Zafran Security?

Threat Exposure Management: Utilizes existing tools to prioritize vulnerabilities and manage threats.
Integrative Analysis: Combines security data with IT context for precise vulnerability management.
Real-time Risk Reduction: Enables immediate risk management without waiting for patches.
Hybrid Cloud Compatibility: Functions across diverse cloud environments for comprehensive security.

What benefits can users expect from Zafran Security?

Improved Security: Enhances protection by efficiently identifying and mitigating risks.
Cost Efficiency: Reduces unnecessary patching expenses by confirming non-exploitable vulnerabilities.
Time Savings: Frees developers to focus on root causes by handling immediate threats.
Comprehensive Insight: Offers a holistic view of security threats and vulnerabilities.

In industries where security is paramount, such as finance and healthcare, Zafran Security provides invaluable protection by ensuring that only exploitable vulnerabilities are addressed. It allows entities to maintain robust security measures while allocating resources efficiently, fitting seamlessly into existing security strategies.

Zafran Security

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

Managed in the cloud and powered by Tenable Nessus, Tenable Vulnerability Management (formerly Tenable.io) provides the industry's most comprehensive vulnerability coverage with real-time continuous assessment of your organization. Built-in prioritization, threat intelligence and real-time insight help you understand your exposures and proactively prioritize remediations.

Tenable

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

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

Global Payments AU/NZ

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Tenable Vulnerability Management

April 2025

Free Report: Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Tenable Vulnerability Management

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Tenable Vulnerability Management and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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