Microsoft Defender users appreciated its threat protection and integration capabilities, some requested better third-party integration and customization options. Wiz users praised its data security, exposure prevention, and actionable insights. Overall, both products offer value, but differ in areas like integration options, customization, and UI.
The summary above is based on 41 interviews we conducted recently with Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Wiz users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"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."
"It isn't a highly complex solution. It's something that a lot of analysts can use. Defender gives you a broad overview of what's happening in your environment, and it's a great solution if you're a Microsoft shop."
"The entire Defender Suite is tightly coupled, integrated, and collaborative."
"Provides a very good view of the entire security setup of your organization."
"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."
"It has seamless integration with any of the services I mentioned, on Azure, such as IaaS platforms, virtual machines, applications, or databases, because it's an in-house product from Microsoft within the Azure ecosystem."
"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."
"We saw improvement from a regulatory compliance perspective due to having a single dashboard."
"The product supports out-of-the-box reporting with context about the asset and allows us to perform complex custom queries on UI."
"I like Wiz's reporting, and it's easy to do queries. For example, it's pretty simple to find out how many servers we have and the applications installed on each. I like Wiz's security graph because you can use it to see the whole organization even if you have multiple accounts."
"The solution is very user-friendly."
"With Wiz, we get timely alerts for leaked data or any vulnerabilities already existing in our environment."
"The first thing that stood out was the ease of installation and the quick value we got out of the solution."
"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."
"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 security baseline and vulnerability assessments is the valuable feature."
"The documentation and implementation guides could be improved."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Pricing could be improved. There are limited options based on pricing for the government."
"No possibility to write or edit any capability."
"You cannot create custom use cases."
"The solution could improve by being more intuitive and easier to use requiring less technical knowledge."
"We would like to see improvements to executive-level reporting and data reporting in general, which we understand is being rolled out to the platform."
"We're looking at some of the data compliance stuff that they've got Jon offer. I know they're looking at container security, which we gonna be looking at next."
"The only thing that needs to be improved is the number of scans per day."
"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."
"The reporting isn't that great. They have executive summaries, but it's only a compliance report that maps all current issues to specific controls. Whether you look at one subscription or project, regardless of the size, you will get a multipage report on how the issues in that account map to that control. Our CSO isn't going to read through that. He won't filter that out or show that to his leadership and say, "Here's what we're doing." It isn't a helpful report. They're working on it, but it's a poor executive summary."
"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."
"The remediation workflow within the Wiz could be improved."
"One significant issue is that the searches are case-sensitive, so finding a misconfigured resource can become very challenging."
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 3rd in Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) with 46 reviews while Wiz is ranked 2nd in Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) with 11 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0, while Wiz is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Cloud writes "Provides multi-cloud capability, is plug-and-play, and improves our security posture". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Wiz writes "Multiple features help us prioritize remediation, and agentless implementation reduces overhead". Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with AWS GuardDuty, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Microsoft Sentinel, whereas Wiz is most compared with Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Orca Security, AWS Security Hub, Lacework and Aqua Cloud Security Platform. See our Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Wiz report.
See our list of best Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) vendors, best Vulnerability Management vendors, and best Container Security vendors.
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