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Microsoft Defender for Identity vs Morphisec comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 1, 2024

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

Microsoft Defender for Iden...
Ranking in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)
5th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
Microsoft Security Suite (7th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (1st)
Morphisec
Ranking in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)
33rd
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (58th), Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (56th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (59th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (36th), Threat Deception Platforms (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Identity is 6.9%, down from 7.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Morphisec is 1.0%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)
 

Featured Reviews

Sachin Vinay - PeerSpot reviewer
Easily detects advanced attacks based on user behavior
The best feature is security monitoring, which detects and investigates suspicious user activities. It can easily detect advanced attacks based on the behavior. The credentials are securely stored, so it reduces the risk of compromise. It will monitor user behavior based on artificial intelligence to protect the identities in your organization. It will even help secure the on-premise Active Directory. It syncs from the cloud to on-premise, and on-premise modifications will be reflected in the cloud. Identity harvesting is the most common threat. Legacy Microsoft solutions and Amazon face the same issues in the cloud. Users don't implement other security mechanisms in the cloud. In an on-premise environment, we would have multiple security devices like firewalls and several layers of security. Cloud users are less bothered because cloud features are there and only need to be configured. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is the best solution because all threats are completely visible, and it has a great dashboard. The dashboard displays each threat and score, so we can identify the threat rating and act efficiently to avoid compromising user identities. We have a single sign-on feature on the cloud. If we lose a single set of identities, it can compromise the entire organization, including cloud and on-premise. The same identities are being used everywhere. The user activity has to be completely visible on the dashboard, and it has to generate a pattern. It will notify us if there is any security breach. It is a complete monitoring set. Minor changes in the user identity can lead to data leakage. If a password is changed in the cloud, it will be reflected automatically in the on-premise. This minor change will trigger an alert in Microsoft Defender for Identity. It ensures that each cloud identity is well protected from spoofing. It has a comprehensive database of well-known spoofing techniques, enabling us to provide cloud identity protection completely. It has a vast scope because it is completely single sign-on. In the emerging industry, we use single sign-on because users need to authenticate, but it's challenging to remember multiple passwords. Once your user signs in, you can access all the data. An identity compromise would lead to various issues and affect the data on-premises. Defender maintains a constantly updated database with the latest signatures, attack models, and threats. If it detects one threat, it will monitor the suspicious event and give us frequent alerts. Identity protection is vital because we use an identity mechanism for everything, including firewall-related activities. The exact identity used in the cloud is used in the most complex firewalls. We require an excellent migration technique to regain this user credential if something gets compromised. Blocking this requires a massive set of procedures. Microsoft Defender comprehensively monitors identity and provides frequent alerts regarding any issue, so we don't need to think of anything else. Defender's bidirectional sync capabilities are helpful because we need to sync data from multiple directions, including tenant-to-tenant, on-premise-to-cloud, and cloud-to-cloud syncing. As a university, we have multiple tenants, so we need to sync or access data across platforms. That way, everything is more secure, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud also provides ample security for cloud transfers. The bidirectional sync capabilities are flawless—10 out of 10. Our on-premise Active Directory is perfectly synced with the Azure AD. Everything is synced with on-premise, and changes are reflected in minutes. If a problem with identity is addressed on the cloud, the fix will be mirrored on-premise and vice versa. Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Identity are bundled. If we have these two solutions, we don't need to worry about anything else or third-party antivirus. Microsoft Defender for Identity acts as a link to all the Microsoft security features that require identity-based validation. Microsoft Defender instantly provides identity security for all our applications, and users need not worry about typing their passwords. Even in situations with less complex encryption mechanisms, users don't need to worry about typing in their passwords. Defender will check and monitor if there are any flaws in that, and it will let us know if there are any issues. We're a Microsoft shop, so everything works together. If one feature isn't working, everything will be affected. If Defender isn't working, half of our Microsoft security features will be dead. Without identity security, user data can easily be compromised, and data can fall into the hands of intruders or other hackers. The solutions have to complement each other. If anything got wrong, the entire setup would have flaws. Microsoft security has a legacy security mechanism. A while back, we might have gone with Defender for Endpoint, but Microsoft has also grown into the face of the cloud. The same Defender solution is completely maintaining cloud security. We can imagine Microsoft's vast scale and how Defender can protect the cloud environment from vulnerabilities and attacks. We are definitely delighted with Microsoft products. The dashboard features are fantastic because it provides a comprehensive overview. It has a great alert mechanism and log inspector that tracks when users access various servers. With this kind of identity validation, we can control which servers the users can access. We have total visibility from the dashboard. We can track identity usage even if there are no issues. That is an essential advantage.
Islam Shaikh - PeerSpot reviewer
Lightweight, detects everything quickly, and takes corrective action
We sometimes have to depend on the support team to know what action we should take. If the solution for an alert can be built into the report that we are getting, it will save time, and the interaction with support would be less. At times, corrective action is required, but at times, we don't need to take any action. It would be good if we get to know in the report that a particular infection doesn't require any action. It will save us time and effort. Other than that, nothing else is required. They have taken care of everything. We are getting alerts, and we can have multiple admins. We get a good model with this view.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Microsoft Defender for Identity provides excellent visibility into threats by leveraging real-time analytics and data intelligence."
"I would rate Microsoft Defender for Identity at nine out of ten."
"One of our users had the same password for every personal and company account. That was a problem because she started receiving phishing emails that could compromise all of her accounts. Defender told us that the user was not changing their password."
"The most valuable feature is its hybrid artificial intelligence, which gathers forensic data to track and counteract security threats, much like the CSI series in effect."
"It is easy to set up. Based on the number of devices you would like to set up, you can use scripts, Group Policy, etc. It takes five minutes to set up."
"All the integration it has with different Microsoft packages, like Teams and Office, is good."
"The integration into the Microsoft Defender ecosystem is the most valuable feature of Microsoft Defender for Identity."
"The solution’s alerting is fairly efficient."
"Morphisec provides full visibility into security events from Microsoft Defender and Morphisec in one dashboard. Defender and Morphisec are integrated. It's important because it lowers the total cost of maintenance on the engineer's time, more or less. So the administrative time is dramatically reduced in maintaining the product. This saves an engineer around four to five hours a week."
"Morphisec Guard enables us to see at a glance whether our users have device control and disk encryption enabled properly. This is important because we are a global company operating with multiple entities. Previously, we didn't have that visibility. Now, we have visibility so we can pinpoint some locations where there are machines that are not really protected, offline, etc. It gives us visibility, which is good."
"Morphisec has absolutely helped save money on our security stack. The ransomware at the end of the day can cost organizations millions upon millions of dollars. Investing in tools like Morphisec is a great reduction in that cost. If I can spend $10,000 in a year to protect assets that could be ransomed for $20,000,000, that's definitely a bet that one should pursue. Morphisec absolutely it's worth the investment."
"It provides full visibility into security events and from both solutions in one dashboard. I'm not a big security guy, if I have a threat that looks like there's a problem, I will ask Morphisec to dissect it for me, and tell me what might be happening. Because it tends to be all hash codes, so I can tell what's going on. They've been pretty good with that."
"It also provides full visibility into security events from Microsoft Defender and Morphisec in one dashboard. We've always had that capability with Morphisec. The more recent version appears to do that even a little bit more natively and it's given us visibility that we didn't have otherwise."
"Morphisec makes use of deterministic attack prevention that doesn’t require investigation of security alerts. It changes the memory locations of where certain applications run. If you think of Excel, opening a PDF, running an Excel macro, or opening a webpage and clicking on a link, all of those actions run in a certain area of memory. Morphisec changes the memory locations of where those run."
"All the alerts are on the dashboard, which is quite simple and useful for us. You can easily check all the alerts that are being blocked or allowed, or whatever the action is. You can easily see that and you can take the necessary actions. You can add a PowerShell extension or any activities for blocking at your network level or for endpoints."
"The fact that Morphisec uses deterministic attack prevention that does not require human intervention has affected our security team's operations by making things much simpler. We don't have to really track down various alerts anymore, they've just stopped. At that point, we can go in and we can clean up whatever needs to be cleaned up. There are some things that Morphisec detects that we can't really remove, it's parts of Internet Explorer, but it's being blocked anyway. So we're happy with that."
 

Cons

"Defender for Identity gives us visibility, but we often get false positives from Azure that take us down the garden path. We go through 30 incidents each day and most of those are false positives or benign positive alerts. Occasionally, we get true positive alerts."
"The areas of Microsoft Defender for Identity that can be improved include its cost, which is quite expensive when integrated into Sentinel. Additionally, there is room for improvement in its integration with non-Microsoft applications and systems."
"And when you are working in a priority IP address, Identity is not able to know that those IPs are from the company. It sees that the IPs are from Taiwan or from Hong Kong or from India, even though they are internal IPs, resulting in a lot of false positives."
"An area for improvement is the administrative interface. It's basic compared to other administrative centers. They could make it more user-friendly and easier to navigate."
"One improvement I would recommend is the integration of an admin application within Teams, allowing easy access to attack information on a mobile platform to promptly alert affected users and their friends."
"Microsoft should look at what competing vendors like CrowdStrike and Broadcom are doing and incorporate those features into Sentinel and Defender. At the same time, I think the intelligence inside the product is improving fast. They should incorporate more zero-trust and hybrid trust approaches. They need to build up threat intelligence based on threats and methods used in attacks on other companies."
"The technical support needs significant improvement. Documentation for more minor issues in the form of guides or walkthroughs could help to resolve this issue. The number of tickets raised would decrease, removing some pressure from the support team and making it easier to clear the remaining tickets."
"The documentation provided by Microsoft is often seen as a waste of time."
"Some of the filters for the console need improvement. There are alerts that show up and just being able to acknowledge that we've seen those and not turn them off, but dismiss them, would be a huge benefit."
"It would be useful for them if they had some kind of network discovery. That kind of functionality I think would give IT administrators a little bit more confidence that they have 100 percent coverage, and it gives them something to audit against. Network discovery would be one area I would definitely suggest that they put some effort into."
"In the Windows Defender integration, they have put in a report of computers that need Windows Defender updates. If those updates could be kicked off directly from the dashboard, instead of having to go to another system entirely, that would be good."
"Those are some of the features that I was looking for on my on-prem platform that they've already instituted in the cloud and that I'm sure will be instituting on their on-prem platform as well. Having to have an on-prem server required a lot of administration. Being able to push that to the cloud and have it managed up there for us is a real nice addition."
"We wanted to have multi-tenants in their cloud platform, so every entity can look into their own systems and not see other systems in other entities. I have a beta version on that now. I would like them to incorporate that in the cloud solution."
"It might be a bit much to ask, but we are now beginning to use Morphisec Scout, which provides vulnerability information. At this time, it's recognizing vulnerabilities and reporting them to us, but it's not necessarily resolving them. There's still a separate manual process to resolve those vulnerabilities, primarily through upgrades. We have to do that outside of Morphisec. If Morphisec could somehow have that capability built into it, that would be very effective."
"It would be nice if they could integrate Morphisec with other traditional antivirus solutions beyond Microsoft Defender. That is probably my biggest gripe."
"Automating reports needs improvement. I would like to have better reporting capabilities within it or automated reporting to be a little bit more dynamic. That's something I know they're working on. We literally are in the process. We started the process a week and a half ago of going to their latest version, so I've not seen their latest one up and running yet."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Microsoft Defender for Identity comes as part of the Microsoft E5 licensing stack."
"Defender for Identity is a little more expensive than other Microsoft products. Identity and Microsoft Defender for Cloud are both a bit costly."
"It is very affordable considering that other SIEM solutions are much more expensive and have many more licensing restrictions and fees."
"You won't be able to change your tenants from where you deploy them. For example, if you select Canada, they will charge you based on Canadian pricing. If you are also in London, when you deploy in Canada, the pound is higher than Canadian dollars, but your platform resources are billable in Canadian dollars. Using your pounds to pay for any of these things will be cheaper. Or, if you deploy in London, they will charge you based on your local currency."
"The product is costly, and we had multiple discussions with accounting to receive a discounted rate. However, on the open market, the tool is expensive."
"It does not have multi-tenants. If South Africa wants to show only the machines that they have, they need their own cloud incidence. It is not possible to have that in a single cloud incidence with multiple tenants in it, instead you need to have multiple cloud incidences. Then, if you have that, it will be more expensive. However, they are going to change that, which is good."
"Price-wise, it's on the higher side. A traditional antivirus solution is cheaper, but in terms of security and manageability, its ROI is better than a traditional antivirus. I would recommend it to anybody evaluating or considering an antivirus solution. If your system gets compromised, the cost of ransom would be a lot more. This way, it saves a lot of cost."
"Compared to their competitors, the price of Morphisec is not that high. You can easily deploy it on a large-scale or small-scale network."
"The pricing is definitely fair for what it does."
"It is a little bit more expensive than other security products that we use, but it does provide us good protection. So, it is a trade-off."
"Our licensing is tied into our contract. Because we have a long-term contract, our pricing is a little bit lower. It is per year, so we don't get charged per endpoint, but we do have a cap. Our cap is 80 endpoints. If we were to go over 80, when we renewed our contract, which is not until three years are over. Then, they would reevaluate, and say, "Well, you have more than 80 devices active right now. This is going to be the price change." They know that we are installing and replacing computers, so the numbers will be all over the place depending on whether you archive or don't archive, which is the reason why we just have to keep up on that stuff."
"It is an annual subscription basis per device. For the devices that we have in scope right now, it is about $25,000 a year."
"Licenses are per endpoint, and that's true for the cloud version as well. The only difference is that there is a little extra charge for the cloud version."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Outsourcing Company
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Microsoft Defender for Identity?
Microsoft Defender for Identity provides excellent visibility into threats by leveraging real-time analytics and data intelligence.
What needs improvement with Microsoft Defender for Identity?
There is room for improvement in delivering knowledge to technical users, especially regarding what we can gain from the solution and how to apply it. The documentation provided by Microsoft is oft...
What is your primary use case for Microsoft Defender for Identity?
The primary use case for Microsoft Defender for Identity is to maintain control and privilege inside our organization and revoke rights when they are not needed. The solution is used to keep our or...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

Azure Advanced Threat Protection, Azure ATP, MS Defender for Identity
Morphisec, Morphisec Moving Target Defense
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft Defender for Identity is trusted by companies such as St. Luke’s University Health Network, Ansell, and more.
Lenovo/Motorola, TruGreen, Covenant Health, Citizens Medical Center
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Defender for Identity vs. Morphisec and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.