Amazon Inspector vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud comparison

Amazon Inspector vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud

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Helped 889,955 peers since 2012

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

Amazon Inspector

Ranking in Vulnerability Management

21st

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Vendor Risk Management (6th)

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Ranking in Vulnerability Management

6th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Container Management (7th), Container Security (6th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (4th), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (4th), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (5th), Microsoft Security Suite (7th), Compliance Management (4th), Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Vulnerability Management category, the mindshare of Amazon Inspector is 1.4%, down from 2.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is 3.3%, down from 4.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Vulnerability Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Microsoft Defender for Cloud	3.3%
Amazon Inspector	1.4%
Other	95.3%

Vulnerability Management

Featured Reviews

Abdalla Kenawy

AWS DevOps SRE/Infrastructure Engineer at Capgemini

Automated insights streamline data security assessment

For Amazon Inspector, we have many EC2 or virtual machines deployed inside our AWS environment, and the problem is that the existing package deployed inside this EC2 instance has already outdated packages. As we progress with time, this package needs to be updated for security enhancement, which requires us to uninstall the package, install the new version, and then we should be fine. However, the challenge comes with how to scan all our EC2 instances for security vulnerabilities, which is currently managed by Amazon Inspector. Amazon Inspector can scan EC2 instances or ECR, which is the ECR registry where we can save artifacts Docker images. Amazon Inspector can also scan Docker images uploaded to ECR for Elastic Registry service, and it can scan databases and S3 based on the latest updates. I noticed this from a couple of months ago, and it provides huge benefits for security. Regarding the best features of Amazon Inspector, it gives us a list of all existing outdated packages as part of a deployed package on EC2 instances or specific Python packages that are part of the Docker file and the Docker image itself, which are causing security concerns. Amazon Inspector can list these security concerns and offer guidance on how we can remediate it by updating the package to a specific upper version or something similar.

Read full review

RyanWalker

Head Of IT at Cirrus Response

Cloud security has cut investigation time and now reveals threats faster but needs simpler oversight

When deploying AI applications, my key security concerns with Microsoft Defender for Cloud are data loss, leakage of data, and guardrails around the actual AI, and I am hoping that this is going to help me put those guardrails in place and identify data exfiltration. Microsoft Defender for Cloud has not helped me manage and secure multi-cloud environments, as we are 100 percent Microsoft and have not really got it in any other environment at all. I am not yet using the unified AI-powered security feature offered by Microsoft Defender for Cloud, but that is coming. I am not yet using the integrated XDR feature of Microsoft Defender for Cloud, but that is coming. I am not yet utilizing the GenAI threat protection features of Microsoft Defender for Cloud. That is also coming and a lot of that will come from learning it here. I have enabled the agentless scanning in my cloud environment with Microsoft Defender for Cloud. Assessing the impact on my workload protection without needing to install agents with Microsoft Defender for Cloud makes it a lot easier, but it also identifies a lot more, which puts more load on me sometimes. I would advise another organization considering Microsoft Defender for Cloud that it is the most logical route to follow if their whole ecosystem is Microsoft. It is easy to implement and it is very self-explanatory when doing it, making sense to just follow the steps as it is too simple, really. I would rate this review a 7.5 out of 10.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Amazon Inspector is highly stable, rated ten out of ten, and this stability impacts business security and administration positively."

"The scalability of the solution itself is unparalleled."

"The most valuable feature of Amazon Inspector is the categorization of findings, which filters vulnerabilities by instance, container image, container repository, and Lambda function."

"I recommend Amazon Inspector because it allows the automation of processes and requires less manual monitoring."

"The vulnerability discovery is valuable, and they also rank those vulnerabilities for you. So, you could rapidly attack some of the higher, severe vulnerabilities as they pop up, if they do pop up."

"The assessment reports provided by Amazon Inspector have helped me in identifying security vulnerabilities in my cloud applications by giving us a nicely designed dashboard that provides all the security information we need to work on remediation."

"The findings dashboards are neat and easy to understand, offering clear demarcations for different types of findings and detailed insights into specific vulnerabilities and their associated instances. It is not a place where everything is dumped together. It offers an easy-to-understand layout."

"It is scanning the whole repository for any sort of vulnerabilities, so it allows us to be more confident in our DevSecOps and not put a lot of folks or attention to it."

More Amazon Inspector pros

"This solution is more cost-effective than some competing products."

"Microsoft Defender for Cloud has helped us manage and secure our cloud environments, and having observability to vulnerabilities is important for us so that we can take actions against any 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."

"It is very intuitive when it comes to policy administration, alerts and notifications, and ease of setting up roles at different hierarchies. It has also been good in terms of the network technology maps. It provides a good overview, but it also depends on the complexity of your network."

"If you're in the world of cloud and your company is using Azure as their primary cloud, I think Azure Security Center is a must-have feature, because it provides a bird's eye view of the entire security position of the organization."

"Defender is a robust platform for dealing with many kinds of threats; we're protected from various threats, like viruses, and attacks can be easily minimized with this solution defending our infrastructure."

"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."

"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."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pros

Cons

"There isn't too much to improve right now. Scanning on demand or as a part of the pipeline versus a post pipeline solution would be good, but it is not a deal breaker by any means."

"The other point is that the reporting features of Inspector need improvement. For example, I am in an organization with millions of CVEs, and getting an overview of all this is challenging."

"There isn't too much to improve right now. Scanning on demand or as a part of the pipeline versus a post pipeline solution would be good, but it is not a deal breaker by any means."

"The false positive rate of Amazon Inspector is a little high, and it is not covering all different applications and scanning."

"There are challenges associated with the interdependencies in AWS services, like requiring an Active Directory for other services, resulting in additional charges."

"One major area for improvement is remediation. My team works on remediating findings over time, likely using available patches. However, easier integration with Amazon's patching services would be very helpful."

"It has automated vulnerability assessment, yet I seek more flexibility in defining custom vulnerability checks tailored to my needs, which is more difficult."

"It has a limited scope. So, AWS Inspector primarily focuses on the security of the EC2 instance. So, if your architecture includes other AWS services, then you may need to use additional tools for your comprehensive security assessment. So that is one con. Another is, like, we have a dependency on agents."

More Amazon Inspector cons

"One of the main challenges that we have been facing with Azure Security Center is the cost. The costs are really a complex calculation, e.g., to calculate the monthly costs. Azure is calculating on an hourly basis for use of the resource. Because of this, we found it really complex to promote what will be our costs for the next couple of months. I think if Azure could reduce the complex calculation and come up with straightforward cost mapping that would be very useful from a product point of view."

"The pricing could be better."

"An area where Microsoft Defender for Cloud could be improved is in getting away from having multiple menus that do the same thing, which seems imposing when looking at it."

"Microsoft Defender could be more centralized. For example, I still need to go to another console to do policy management."

"The product was a bit complex to set up earlier, however, it is a bit streamlined now."

"The overview provides you with good information, but if you want more details, there is a lot more customization to do, which requires knowledge of the other supporting solutions."

"The pricing is very difficult because every type of Defender for Cloud has its own metrics and pricing."

"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."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The lowest cost would be around $10 for a few small accounts, however, for thousands of accounts, it could be around $5000 to $6000 dollars per month."

"The pricing is very transparent and clear."

"It's priced according to market standards for its services."

"It is scaled as you go. There are probably a certain number of scans per month, and there are tiers. If you're under a certain tier, it is free. The second level is pennies, and then all the way up to like a million. So, it has a tiered pricing program. They're pretty good with your initial scanning, and there is room to scale based on being affordable, but it is fairly cheap. There are no additional costs. They pretty much think about it as a pay-per-scan type model."

"While we pay for any additional features, the pricing seems competitive, though I am not involved in the specific cost details."

"The tool is pretty expensive."

"The price of the solution is good for the features we receive and there is an additional cost for Microsoft premier support. However, some of my potential customers have found it to be expensive and have gone on to choose another solution."

"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."

"The cost is fair. There aren't any costs in addition to the standard licensing fee."

"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."

"There are improvements that have to be made to the licensing. Currently, for servers, it has to be done by grouping the servers on a single subscription... We don't have an option whereby, if all those resources are in one subscription, we can have each of the individual servers subject to different planning."

"Pricing is a consideration, but we strive to keep costs low by enabling only necessary services."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

Government

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	29
Midsize Enterprise	10
Large Enterprise	49

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Inspector?

I am not honestly sure about the pricing side of Amazon Inspector, but that is taken care of by a separate team. I believe it's cheaper than the other third-party solutions.

What needs improvement with Amazon Inspector?

They might launch support for third-party environments in the next version regarding the best features in Amazon Inspector from my perspective. The false positive rate of Amazon Inspector is a litt...

What is your primary use case for Amazon Inspector?

I mostly use Amazon Inspector for vulnerability scanning on AWS native applications. For hybrid applications, we have different security scanners.

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 across your ecosystem. It also has great remote workforce capabilities and supports a...

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

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing was that the license cost was the only consideration. Setup and support had no issues.

What needs improvement with Microsoft Defender for Cloud?

To improve Microsoft Defender for Cloud, I think pricing-wise, the license price is a little bit higher from an ingestion cost perspective. Depending on what license you choose, you might have to p...

Tenable Nessus vs Amazon Inspector

Comparisons

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Compared 8% of the time

Rapid7 Metasploit vs Amazon Inspector

Compared 6% of the time

Qualys CyberSecurity Asset Management vs Amazon Inspector

Compared 6% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Amazon Inspector

Compared 4% of the time

More Amazon Inspector Competitors

AWS GuardDuty vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 30% of the time

Wiz vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 5% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 3% of the time

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 2% of the time

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Competitors

Product Reports

Amazon Inspector

Download Amazon Inspector product report

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Download Microsoft Defender for Cloud product report

Also Known As

No data available

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

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Microsoft

Overview

Amazon Inspector is an automated security assessment service that helps improve the security and compliance of applications deployed on AWS. Amazon Inspector automatically assesses applications for exposure, vulnerabilities, and deviations from best practices. After performing an assessment, Amazon Inspector produces a detailed list of security findings prioritized by level of severity. These findings can be reviewed directly or as part of detailed assessment reports which are available via the Amazon Inspector console or API.

Amazon Inspector security assessments help you check for unintended network accessibility of your Amazon EC2 instances and for vulnerabilities on those EC2 instances. Amazon Inspector assessments are offered to you as pre-defined rules packages mapped to common security best practices and vulnerability definitions. Examples of built-in rules include checking for access to your EC2 instances from the internet, remote root login being enabled, or vulnerable software versions installed. These rules are regularly updated by AWS security researchers.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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

Sample Customers

betterment, caplinked, flatiron, university of nutri dame

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

Amazon Inspector vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud