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AWS GuardDuty vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 2025

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

SentinelOne Singularity Clo...
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
107
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (6th), Cloud and Data Center Security (5th), Container Security (3rd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (3rd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (3rd), Compliance Management (2nd)
AWS GuardDuty
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (7th), Container Management (9th), Container Security (4th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (4th), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (4th), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (3rd), Microsoft Security Suite (4th), Compliance Management (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) category, the mindshare of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is 2.5%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS GuardDuty is 11.9%, down from 13.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is 13.9%, down from 17.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
 

Featured Reviews

Andrew W - PeerSpot reviewer
Tells us about vulnerabilities as well as their impact and helps to focus on real issues
Looking at all the different pieces, it has got everything we need. Some of the pieces we do not even use. For example, we do not have Kubernetes Security. We are not running any K8 clusters, so it is good for us. Overall, we find the solution to be fantastic. There can be additional education components. This may not be truly fair to them because of what the product is going for, but it would be great to see additional education for compliance. It is not a criticism of the tool per se, but anything to help non-development resources understand some of the complexities of the cloud is always appreciated. Any additional educational resources are always helpful for security teams, especially those without a development background.
Terence Dube - PeerSpot reviewer
Comprehensive threat detection simplifies security management
GuardDuty is limited to AWS environments. While incorporating Amazon Detective for detailed investigation can be useful, including more granular details in findings, such as specific user actions or historical comparisons, would be beneficial. Furthermore, managing global AWS environments requires setting up additional tools for viewing GuardDuty findings across multiple regions. A unified dashboard that aggregates findings across all regions without requiring manual aggregation could enhance convenience for users.
Vibhor Goel - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security offers valuable scalability suitable for organizations of all sizes, from small businesses to large enterprises."
"The UI is responsive and user-friendly."
"Overall, I would rate it a ten on ten for cloud security."
"I would rate SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security a ten out of ten."
"It gives me the information I need."
"I would rate their support a ten out of ten."
"Singularity Cloud Security's most valuable features are its ease of scalability and comprehensive security measures."
"It is fairly simple. Anybody can use it."
"GuardDuty's comprehensive threat detection does not only monitor data - it also detects a wide range of security threats."
"We use the tool for threat detection. AWS includes AI features as well. AWS GuardDuty gives us reports."
"AWS GuardDuty helps by providing continuous threat detection and signaling potential threats. Its most valuable feature is continuous monitoring. The tool's integration with other AWS services has improved security. It provides continuous monitoring and intelligent threat detection, quickly signaling any issues. I would rate this improvement a seven out of ten."
"We have over 1,000 employees, and we monitor their activity through AWS GuardDuty."
"The correlation back end is the solution's most valuable feature."
"One of the advantages of cloud services is the ability to use them on demand. There's minimal installation involved; you can check the latest offerings and make new deployments while dismantling the previous ones. This approach keeps you ahead of potential services, showcasing the agility of AWS."
"The product has automated protection powered by AI/ML, which is now far more powerful than before. It uses AI/ML in its detection algorithm, providing fast and quick results."
"The most valuable features are the single system for data collection and the alert mechanisms."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the remote workforce capabilities and the general experience of the remote workforce."
"Microsoft Defender for Cloud is stable and reliable as advertised."
"It's got a lot of great features."
"The most valuable feature is the regulatory compliance aspect, where we utilize predefined initiatives like NIST. Alert management is another useful feature. Alerts are directly integrated with our email or DevOps board for easy viewing, allowing us to identify problem areas efficiently."
"The solution is quite good and addresses many security gaps."
"Defender for Cloud provides a complete DevOps security package for cloud services."
"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."
"The most valuable feature for me is the variety of APIs available."
 

Cons

"here is a bit of a learning curve. However, you only need two to three days to identify options and get accustomed."
"A beneficial improvement for PingSafe would be integration with Jira, allowing for a more streamlined ticketing system."
"They can add more widgets to its dashboard. A centralized dashboard with numerous metrics would improve user understanding."
"In terms of ease of use, initially, it is a bit confusing to navigate around, but once you get used to it, it becomes easier."
"PingSafe takes four to five hours to detect and highlight an issue, and that time should be reduced."
"The recommended actions aren't always specific, so it might suggest recommendations that don't apply to the particular infrastructure code I'm reviewing."
"While SentinelOne offers robust security features, its higher cost may present a challenge for budget-conscious organizations."
"It took us a while to configure the software to work well in this type of environment, as the support documents were not always clear."
"For me, I would say just the presentation of findings, like the dashboards and other stuff, could be improved a bit."
"GuardDuty is limited to AWS environments."
"For the next release, they could provide IPS features as well."
"An improvement would be to have a mobile version where remote workers can log in and monitor and fix issues."
"I work in a bank, and it would be good if AWS GuardDuty could be integrated with other monitoring and detection tools we use."
"Amazon GuardDuty could be better enriched in threat intelligence data."
"Improvement-wise, Amazon GuardDuty should have an overall dashboard analytics function so we could see what's in the current environment, and then in addition to that, provide best practices and recommendations, particularly to provide some type of observability, and then figure out the login side of it, based on our current environment, in terms of what we're not monitoring and what we should monitor. The solution should also give us a sample code configuration to implement that added feature or feature request. What I'd like to see in the next release of Amazon GuardDuty are more security analytics, reporting, and monitoring. They should provide recommendations and additional options that answer questions such as "Hey, what can we see in our environment?", "What should we implement within the environment?", What's recommended?" We know that cost will always be associated with that, but Amazon GuardDuty should show us the increased costs or decreased costs if we implement it or don't implement it, and that would be a good feature request, particularly with all products within AWS, just for cloud products in general because there are times features are implemented, but once they're deployed, they don't tell you about costs that would be generated along with those features. After features are deployed, there should a summary of the costs that would be generated, and projected based on current usage, so they would give us the option to figure out how long we're going to use those features and the option to keep those on or turn those off. If more services were like that, a lot more people would use those on the cloud."
"GuardDuty is limited to AWS environments."
"Consistency is the area where the most improvement is needed. For example, there are some areas where the UI is not uniform across the board."
"The documentation could be much clearer."
"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."
"Microsoft Defender for Cloud is not compatible with Linux machines."
"The pricing could be improved, as it is somewhat high for smaller companies."
"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."
"Microsoft Graph needs improvement."
"For improvements, I'd like to see more use cases integrated with Microsoft Sentinel and support for multi-cloud environments beyond just Azure."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would rate the cost a seven out of ten with ten being the most costly."
"The pricing is fair. It is not inexpensive, and it is also not expensive. When managing a large organization, it is going to be costly, but it meets the business needs. In terms of what is out there on the market, it is fair and comparable to what I have seen, so I do not have any complaints about the cost"
"The pricing for PingSafe in India was more reasonable than other competitors."
"PingSafe's pricing is good because it provides us with a solution."
"Singularity Cloud Security by SentinelOne is cost-efficient."
"PingSafe falls within the typical price range for cloud security platforms."
"SentinelOne is quite costly compared to other security platforms."
"Their pricing appears to be based simply on the number of accounts we have, which is common for cloud-based products."
"Pricing is determined by the number of events sent."
"It can get very expensive. If you turn on every feature, it can turn into hundreds of thousands of dollars."
"The tool has no subscription charges."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is a high price, and ten is a low price, I rate the pricing a four or five, which is somewhere in the middle."
"I don't have all the details in terms of licensing for Amazon GuardDuty, but my organization does have a license set up for it."
"In terms of the costs associated with Amazon GuardDuty, it was $1 per GB from what I recall. Pricing was based on per gigabyte. For example, for the first five hundred gigabytes per month, it'll be $1 per GB, so it'll be $500. If your usage was greater, there's another bracket, for example, the next two thousand GB, then there's an add-on cost of 50 cents per GB. That's how Amazon GuardDuty pricing slowly goes up. I can't remember if there was any kind of additional cost apart from standard licensing for the solution. Nothing else that at least comes to mind. What the service was charging was worth it. That was one good thing when using Amazon GuardDuty because my company could be in a certain tier for a certain period. My company wasn't under a licensing model where it could overestimate its usage and under-utilize its usage and pay much more. This was what made the pricing model for Amazon GuardDuty better."
"We use a pay-as-you-use license, which is competitively priced in the market."
"I have heard that the solution's price is quite high."
"They have a free version, but the license for this one isn't too high. It's free to start with, and you're charged for using it beyond 30 days. Some other pieces of Defender are charged based on usage, so you will be charged more for a high volume of transactions. I believe Defender for Cloud is a daily charge based on Azure's App Service Pricing."
"The licensing cost per server is $15 per month."
"We only use the free tier, so we haven't faced any pricing, setup costs, or licensing challenges."
"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."
"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 pricing model for most plans is generally good, but the cost of the new Defender for Storage plan is high and should be revisited, as it could lead to disabling desirable security features due to cost."
"While we pay for any additional features, the pricing seems competitive, though I am not involved in the specific cost details."
"Azure Defender is a bit pricey. The price could be lower."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
5%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about PingSafe?
The dashboard gives me an overview of all the things happening in the product, making it one of the tool's best featu...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PingSafe?
It is cost-effective compared to other solutions in the market.
What needs improvement with PingSafe?
In version 2, a lot of rules have been deployed for Kubernetes security and CDR, which makes a lot of issues of criti...
What do you like most about Amazon GuardDuty?
With anomaly detection, active threat monitoring, and set correlation, GuardDuty alerts me to any unusual user behavi...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon GuardDuty?
GuardDuty is very cheap and operates on a pay-as-you-go basis. It's priced around a dollar per million requests, maki...
What needs improvement with Amazon GuardDuty?
GuardDuty is limited to AWS environments. While incorporating Amazon Detective for detailed investigation can be usef...
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...
What do you like most about Microsoft Defender for Cloud?
The entire Defender Suite is tightly coupled, integrated, and collaborative.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Defender for Cloud?
Initially, the cost was reasonable, but additional services from Microsoft sometimes incur extra expenses that seem h...
 

Also Known As

PingSafe
No data available
Microsoft Azure Security Center, Azure Security Center, Microsoft ASC, Azure Defender
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
autodesk, mapbox, fico, webroot
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is trusted by companies such as ASOS, Vatenfall, SWC Technology Partners, and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS GuardDuty vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
844,944 professionals have used our research since 2012.