We performed a comparison between Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management 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.
Features: Microsoft Defender for Cloud includes regulatory compliance, ransomware protection, and UEBA, while Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management provides granular level reports, governance and administration portal panel, and comprehensive security features for data governance. Microsoft Defender for Cloud has room for improvement in consistency, customization, automation, and integration, while Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management needs expanded reporting options, reduced price, and better integration with third-party software.
Service and Support: Both Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management have received mixed reviews for their customer service, with some users reporting positive experiences and others facing frustration or stating that technical support needs improvement.
Ease of Deployment: Microsoft Defender for Cloud is easy to set up and does not require infrastructure deployment, while Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management may be more complicated and require vendor support or multiple administrators. Both solutions are user-friendly.
Pricing: Microsoft Defender for Cloud offers a range of license options with varying metrics, while Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management's pricing is based on the size of the cloud infrastructure. Check Point's setup cost is affordable and easy, but some reviewers express concern that Microsoft Defender for Cloud may be too costly for small or startup businesses.
ROI: Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides basic security features that may or may not provide a good ROI depending on the company's needs. On the other hand, Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management offers a high ROI growth rate along with essential compliance and asset protection.
Comparison Results: Users prefer Microsoft Defender for Cloud over Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management due to its valuable features such as regulatory compliance, ransomware protection, and access controls. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is also more automated and easier to use, with incident alerts and collaborative services.
"The security baseline and vulnerability assessments is the valuable feature."
"The solution is very user-friendly."
"The product supports out-of-the-box reporting with context about the asset and allows us to perform complex custom queries on UI."
"The CSPM module has been the most effective. It was easy to deploy and covered all our accounts through APIs, requiring no agents. Wiz provides instant visibility into high-level risks that we need to address."
"Our most important features are those around entitlement, external exposure, vulnerabilities, and container security."
"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."
"The automation roles are essential because we ultimately want to do less work and automate more. The dashboards are easy to read and visually pleasing. You can understand things quickly, which makes it easy for our other teams. The network and infrastructure teams don't know as much about security as we do, so it helps to have a tool that's accessible and nice to look at."
"The vulnerability management modules and the discovery and inventory are the most valuable features. Before using Wiz, it was a very manual process for both. After implementing it, we're able to get all of the analytics into a single platform that gives us visibility across all the systems in our cloud. We're able to correspond and understand what the vulnerability landscape looks like a lot faster."
"The most valuable features are the ability to create pipeline rules, the enhanced NetOps security, and the deep visibility across our entire infrastructure."
"I can take proactive actions based on an alert without having to interact with the platform directly."
"The reporting against compliance is an important feature that helps you comply with policies and standards within your organization."
"The solution is scalable."
"The ability to integrate it with Microsoft Azure Sentinel allows us to validate the logs in an even more complex and meaningful way."
"This product provides a really nice visualization of the infrastructure, including network topology, firewalls, etc."
"The Compliance engine has helped put our auditors and senior executives at ease, as we can quickly and accurately measure ourselves against hundreds of compliance checks to include CIS benchmarks, PCI, and other best practices."
"The most valuable feature is the single dashboard that enables us to manage the entire cloud environment from one place."
"The solution is very easy to deploy."
"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."
"The most valuable features are ransomware protection and access controls. The solution has helped us secure some folders on our systems from unauthorized modifications."
"Defender is user-friendly and provides decent visibility into threats."
"Microsoft Defender has a lot of features including regulatory compliance and attaching workbooks but the most valuable is the recommendations it provides for each and every resource when we open Microsoft Defender."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the insights, meaning the remediation suggestions, as well as the incident alerts."
"This is a platform as a service provided by Azure. We don't need to install or maintain Azure Security Center. It is a ready-made service available in Azure. This is one of the main things that we like. If you look at similar tools, we have to install, maintain, and update services. Whereas, Azure Security Center manages what we are using. This is a good feature that has helped us a lot."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the vulnerability assessments and the glossary of compliance."
"The only thing that needs to be improved is the number of scans per day."
"One significant issue is that the searches are case-sensitive, so finding a misconfigured resource can become very challenging."
"The solution's container security could be improved."
"The only small pain point has been around some of the logging integrations. Some of the complexities of the script integrations aren't supported with some of the more automated infrastructure components. So, it's not as universal. For example, they have great support for cloud formation and other services, but if you're using another type of management utility or governance language for your infrastructure-as-code automation components, it becomes a little bit trickier to navigate that."
"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."
"Given the level of visibility into all the cloud environments Wiz provides, it would be nice if they could integrate some kind of mechanism to better manage tenants on multiple platforms. For example, let's say that some servers don't have an application they need, such as an antivirus. Wiz could include an API or something to push those applications out to the servers. It would be great if you could remedy these issues directly from the Wiz platform."
"The remediation workflow within the Wiz could be improved."
"Wiz's reporting capabilities could be refined a bit. They are making headway on that, but more executive-style dashboards would be nice. They just implemented a community aspect where you can share documents and feedback. This was something users had been requesting for a while. They are listening to customer feedback and making changes."
"Check Point must provide a multi-cloud facility where AWS, Azure, and GCP can seamlessly work together and display posture in an integrated manner."
"The impact analysis that they perform can be improved. It is currently lacking. It should be more detailed."
"The support must be more effective."
"Check Point tools need to improve the latency in the portal since they take a long time to load."
"CloudGuard could be more customizable. It has built-in standards for things like GDPR compliance. But depending on your business lane, you might want to build your own controls based on your own standards."
"Almost all features are good, however, they still require improvements to the code security portion on which integration with the major source code repository is required."
"The dashboard customization has room for improvement."
"It should have some options to activate API calls to the platform in the cloud, another improvement would be that when the rules are colonized and they want to be published."
"Another thing that could be improved was that they could recommend processes on how to react to alerts, or recommend best practices based on how other organizations do things if they receive an alert about XYZ."
"Most of the time, when we log into the support, we don't get a chance to interact with Microsoft employees directly, except having it go to outsource employees of Microsoft. The initial interaction has not been that great because outsourced companies cannot provide the kind of quality or technical expertise that we look for. We have a technical manager from Microsoft, but they are kind of average unless we make noise and ask them to escalate. We then can get the right people and the right solution, but it definitely takes time."
"The initial setup is not actually so complex but it feels complex because there are many add-ons. There are many options and my team needs to be aware of all of these changes happening on the backend which is a distraction."
"Microsoft sources most of their threat intelligence internally, but I think they should open themselves up to bodies that provide feel intelligence to build a better engine. There may be threats out there that they don't report because their team is not doing anything on that and they don't have arrangements with another party that is involved in that research."
"When you work with it, the only problem that we're struggling with is that we have 21 different subscriptions we're trying to apply security to. It's impossible to keep everything organized."
"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."
"Another thing is that Defender for Cloud uses more resources than CrowdStrike, which my current company uses. Defender for Cloud has two or three processes running simultaneously that consume memory and processor time. I had the chance to compare that with CrowdStrike a few days ago, which was significantly less. It would be nice if Defender were a little lighter. It's a relatively large installation that consumes more resources than competitors do."
"Azure Security Center takes a long time to update, compared to the on-premises version of Microsoft Defender."
Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP is ranked 5th in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) with 63 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 3rd in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) with 46 reviews. Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP is rated 8.6, while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP writes "Threat intel integration provides us visibility in case any workload is communicating with suspicious or blacklisted IPs". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Cloud writes "Provides multi-cloud capability, is plug-and-play, and improves our security posture". Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP is most compared with Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, AWS GuardDuty, Qualys VMDR, Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks and Orca Security, whereas Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with AWS GuardDuty, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Defender XDR and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. See our Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud report.
See our list of best Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) vendors, best Vulnerability Management vendors, and best Container Management vendors.
We monitor all Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) 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.