AWS GuardDuty vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft are both solutions in the Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.4, while Microsoft is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.1. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 11.9% mindshare in CWPP, compared to Microsoft’s 13.9% mindshare. Additionally, 91% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 2025

AWS GuardDuty and Microsoft Defender for Cloud are prominent players in cloud security, offering diverse features to improve security posture. AWS GuardDuty excels in integration with AWS environments, while Microsoft Defender for Cloud shines in compliance management and multi-cloud support.

Features: AWS GuardDuty provides robust threat detection by seamlessly integrating with AWS services like CloudTrail and VPC Flow Logs. Its emphasis on behavior analysis and ease of use make it a comprehensive security tool across AWS accounts. Meanwhile, Microsoft Defender for Cloud excels in compliance management with its ability to integrate with various Microsoft services. It offers a detailed security posture, regulatory compliance features, and security scores, which support multi-cloud and hybrid environments, ensuring extensive security.

Room for Improvement: AWS GuardDuty could enhance its offerings with improved security analytics, automatic alert patching, and better threat intelligence integration. Users suggest that more insightful dashboards and editable alerts could make the service more actionable. Microsoft Defender for Cloud would benefit from enhanced integration options, more granular alert control, and clearer cost structures, along with improved AI features and third-party documentation.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: AWS GuardDuty is praised for its straightforward deployment within AWS environments and responsive technical support, which simplifies the setup process. It primarily focuses on AWS cloud. In contrast, Microsoft Defender for Cloud offers extensive documentation and strong support through Microsoft’s enterprise channels, facilitating hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, which provide a seamless experience for users familiar with Azure products.

Pricing and ROI: AWS GuardDuty operates on a pay-as-you-go model, with costs based on data volume, which is cost-effective for smaller businesses but can grow expensive at scale. It offers ROI by enhancing security posture and customer trust. While seen as costly, Microsoft Defender for Cloud is competitively priced within Microsoft’s suite, offering pricing flexibility and appreciation for its comprehensive security and compliance features.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS GuardDuty vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

AWS GuardDuty vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud

March 2025

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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...

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

VP - Information Technology at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

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.

Read full review

Terence Dube

AWS Cloud Engineer at Standard Telephones and Cables

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.

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Vibhor Goel

Senior Cloud Platform Engineer at Deutsche Börse

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.

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

"The Offensive Security Engine, powered by impressive AI/ML capabilities, seamlessly integrates with cloud infrastructure to analyze data and provide optimal security solutions."

"The agentless vulnerability scanning is great."

"We've seen a reduction in resources devoted to vulnerability monitoring. Before PingSafe we spent a lot of time monitoring and fixing these issues. PingSafe enabled us to divert more resources to the production environment."

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security has saved up to 50 percent in engineering time."

"The most valuable aspect of Singularity Cloud Security is its unified dashboard."

"They're responsive to feature requests. If I suggest a feature for Prisma, I will need to wait until the next release on their roadmap. Cloud Native Security will add it right away."

"I would rate their support a ten out of ten."

"PingSafe stands out for its user-friendly interface and intuitive software, making it easy to navigate and use."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pros

"The solution provides AWS GuardDuty S3 protection, EKS runtime protection, and malware protection."

"GuardDuty is extensive in terms of configuration and security compliance."

"We have over 1,000 employees, and we monitor their activity through AWS GuardDuty."

"It kinda just gives us another layer of security. So it does provide some sort of comfort that we do have something that is monitoring for abnormal behavior."

"The most valuable features are the single system for data collection and the alert mechanisms."

"We use the tool for threat detection. AWS includes AI features as well. AWS GuardDuty gives us reports."

"It helps us detect brute-force attacks based on machine learning."

"GuardDuty is extensive in terms of configuration and security compliance."

More AWS GuardDuty pros

"Scalability is great, and I would rate it a ten out of ten."

"The solution is quite good and addresses many security gaps."

"The pricing is good."

"The security policy is the most valuable feature for us. We can go into the environment settings and attach any globally recognized framework like ISO or any benchmark."

"I would rate Microsoft Defender for Cloud a ten."

"The most valuable features are ransomware protection and access controls. The solution has helped us secure some folders on our systems from unauthorized modifications."

"The first valuable feature was the fact that it gave us a list of everything that users were surfing on the web. Having the list, we could make decisions about those sites."

"The most valuable feature is the hunting feature, which integrates well into the entire Microsoft ecosystem."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pros

Cons

"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."

"The areas with room for improvement include the cost, which is higher compared to other security platforms. The dashboard can also be laggy."

"In version 2, a lot of rules have been deployed for Kubernetes security and CDR, which makes a lot of issues of critical severity, whereas they are not critical or of high severity. There is a mismatch of severities."

"They can work on policies based on different compliance standards."

"The cost has the potential for improvement."

"Maybe container runtime security could be improved."

"The categorization of the results from the vulnerability assessment could be improved."

"I would like PingSafe to add real-time detection of vulnerabilities and cloud misconfigurations."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security cons

"We currently find Lacework to be much better at detecting vulnerabilities than AWS GuardDuty. The engines of AWS GuardDuty have to be improved."

"AWS GuardDuty sometimes shows false positives and should have better detection accuracy."

"It would be great if the solution had some automation capabilities."

"One improvement I would suggest for AWS GuardDuty is the ability to assign findings to specific users or groups, facilitating better communication and follow-up actions."

"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."

"The solution's user interface could be improved because it will help users to understand multiple options."

"I would like to see more integration with other AWS provided services."

More AWS GuardDuty cons

"The pricing could be improved, as it is somewhat high for smaller companies."

"There needs to be improvement in the security recommendations, particularly in attack path mapping. Sometimes, it misleads users about the real exposure of external-facing assets."

"However, some Copilot features aren't available in the GCP environment. This is something we hope will be addressed in the future."

"Support needs to be highly responsive, especially in large enterprise environments."

"From a compliance standpoint, they can include some more metrics and some specific compliances such as GDPR."

"From my own perspective, they just need a product that is tailored to micro-segmentation so I can configure rules for multiple systems at once and manage it."

"It's hard to reach someone who understands my problems. I haven't had many issues, so I haven't called them."

"We haven't experienced issues with Microsoft Defender for Cloud for our company size of about five hundred people. However, I've heard there might be issues with scalability for larger enterprises."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"As a partner, we receive a discount on the licenses."

"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 price depends on the extension of the solution that you want to buy. If you want to buy just EDR, the price is less. XDR is a little bit more expensive. There are going to be different add-ons for Singularity."

"The tool is cost-effective."

"It's not expensive. The product is in its initial growth stages and appears more competitive compared to others. It comes in different variants, and I believe the enterprise version costs around $55 per user per year. I would rate it a five, somewhere fairly moderate."

"Singularity Cloud Workload Security's licensing and price were cheaper than the other solutions we looked at."

"PingSafe is cost-effective for the amount of infrastructure we have. It's reasonable for what they offer compared to our previous solution. It's at least 25 percent to 30 percent less."

"The cost for PingSafe is average when compared to other CSPM tools."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pricing and cost advice

"80 percent of the customers are using AWS GuardDuty, and we recommend it due to its low cost, especially for small customers, ranging from five to ten dollars a month. In our policies, we enforce the usage of this service, making it a recommended practice for security."

"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."

"The platform is inexpensive."

"The tool's licensing model is pay-as-you-go."

"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."

"Pricing is determined by the number of events sent."

"We use a pay-as-you-use license, which is competitively priced in the market."

"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."

More AWS GuardDuty pricing and cost advice

"Azure Defender is a bit pricey. The price could be lower."

"I'm not privy to that information, but I know it's probably close to a million dollars a year."

"This is a worldwide service and depending on the country, there will be different prices."

"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."

"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."

"Defender for Cloud is pretty costly for a single line. It's incredibly high to pay monthly for security per server. The cost is considerable for an enterprise with 500-plus virtual machines, and the monthly bill can spike."

"The product's pricing policy is generally favorable."

"The tool is pretty expensive."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

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...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PingSafe?

It is cost-effective compared to other solutions in the market.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon GuardDuty?

GuardDuty is limited to AWS environments. While incorporating Amazon Detective for detailed investigation can be usef...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Microsoft Defender for Cloud?

The entire Defender Suite is tightly coupled, integrated, and collaborative.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Wiz vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 24% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 20% of the time

Orca Security vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 5% of the time

Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 5% of the time

Aqua Cloud Security Platform vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 4% of the time

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security Competitors

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security vs AWS GuardDuty

Compared 14% of the time

Wiz vs AWS GuardDuty

Compared 11% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs AWS GuardDuty

Compared 6% of the time

Trend Vision One - Cloud Security vs AWS GuardDuty

Compared 4% of the time

Orca Security vs AWS GuardDuty

Compared 2% of the time

More AWS GuardDuty Competitors

Wiz vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 13% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 12% of the time

Microsoft Defender XDR vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 4% of the time

Orca Security vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 3% of the time

Wazuh vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 3% of the time

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

March 2025

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security report

Download SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security product report

Buyer's Guide

AWS GuardDuty

March 2025

Download AWS GuardDuty product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

March 2025

Download Microsoft Defender for Cloud product report

Also Known As

PingSafe

No data available

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

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

SentinelOne

Demo not available

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Microsoft

Overview

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security protects cloud workloads, offering advanced threat detection and automated response. It integrates seamlessly with cloud environments and secures containerized applications and virtual machines against vulnerabilities.

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is renowned for its efficiency in mitigating threats in real-time. The platform integrates effortlessly with existing cloud environments, ensuring robust cloud security management with minimal manual intervention. Securing containerized applications and virtual machines, it excels in threat intelligence and endpoint protection. However, improvements are needed in performance during high workload periods, and more integrations with third-party tools and better documentation would be beneficial. Users often find the installation process complex, support response times slow, and the dashboard's navigation unintuitive.

What are the key features of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security?

Real-time Threat Detection: Identifies and mitigates threats as they occur.
Automated Response: Automatically responds to threats to minimize impact.
Ease of Deployment: Simple setup process with scalable options.
Machine Learning Insights: AI-driven insights enhance threat prevention.
Seamless Integration: Integrates with cloud environments for unified security management.

What are the primary benefits or ROI to expect from SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security?

Enhanced Threat Mitigation: Improved security against real-time threats.
Reduced Manual Intervention: Automated processes save time and resources.
Scalability: Easily adapts to growing security requirements.
Centralized Management: Manage security across platforms from a single console.
Advanced Threat Intelligence: Provides in-depth analysis and protection.

In specific industries, SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is implemented to safeguard critical data and infrastructure. Organizations in finance, healthcare, and technology depend on its real-time threat detection and automated response to protect sensitive information. Its ability to secure containerized applications and virtual machines is particularly valuable in dynamic environments where rapid scaling is necessary.

SentinelOne

Amazon Guard Duty is a continuous cloud security monitoring service that consistently monitors and administers several data sources. These include AWS CloudTrail data events for EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) audit logs, VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) flow logs, DNS (Domain Name System) logs, S3 (Simple Cloud Storage), and AWS CloudTrail event logs.

Amazon GuardDuty intuitively uses threat intelligence data - such as lists of malicious domains and IP addresses - and ML (machine learning) to quickly discover suspicious and problematic activity in a user's AWS ecosystem. Activities may include concerns such as interactions with malicious IP addresses or domains, exposed credentials usage, or changes and/or escalation of privileges.

GuardDuty is able to easily determine problematic AWS EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances delivering malware or mining bitcoin. It is also able to trace AWS account access history for evidence of destabilization. such as suspicious API calls resulting in changing password policies to minimize password strength or anomalous infrastructure deployments in new or different never-used regions.

GuardDuty will continually alert users regarding their AWS environment status and will send the security discoveries to the GuardDuty dashboard or Amazon CloudWatch events for users to view.

Users can access GuardDuty via:

AWS SDKs: Amazon provides users with several software development kits (SDKs) that are made up of libraries and sample code of numerous popular programming languages and platforms, such as Android, iOS, Java, .Net, Python, and Ruby. The SDKs make it easier to develop programmatic access to GuardDuty.
GuardDuty HTTPS API: This allows users to issue HTTPS requests directly to the service.
GuardDuty Console: This is a browser-based intuitive dashboard interface where users can access and use GuardDuty.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)

Kubernetes protection is an optional add-on in Amazon GuardDuty. This tool is able to discover malicious behavior and possible destabilization of an organization's Kubernetes clusters inside of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS).

When Amazon EKS is activated, GuardDuty will actively use various data sources to discover potential risks against Kubernetes API. When Kubernetes protection is enabled, GuardDuty uses optional data sources to detect threats against Kubernetes API.

Kubernetes audit logs are a Kubernetes feature that captures historical API activity from applications, the control plane, users, and endpoints. GuardDuty collates these logs from Amazon EKS to create Kubernetes discoveries for the organization's Amazon EKS assets; there is no need to store or turn on the logs.

As long as Kubernetes protection remains activated, GuardDuty will continuously dissect Kubernetes data sources from the Amazon EKS clusters to ensure no suspicious or anomalous behavior is taking place.

Amazon Simple Cloud Storage (S3) Protection

Amazon S3 allows Amazon GuardDuty to actively audit object-level API processes to discover possible security threats to data inside an organization's S3 buckets. GuardDuty continually audits risk to the organization’s S3 assets by carefully dissecting AWS CloudTrail management events and AWS CloudTrail S3 data events. These tools are continually auditing various CloudTrail management events for potential suspicious activities that affect S3 buckets, such as PutBucketReplication, DeleteBucket, ListBucket, and data events for S3 object-level API processes, such as PutObject, GetObject, ListObject, and DeleteObject.

Reviews from Real Users

“The most valuable features are the single system for data collection and the alert mechanisms. Prior to using GuardDuty, we had multiple systems to collect data and put it in a centralized location so we could look into it. Now we don't need to do that anymore as GuardDuty does it for us.” - Arunkumar A., Information Security Manager at Tata Consultancy Services

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

Information Not Available

autodesk, mapbox, fico, webroot

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

Buyer's Guide

AWS GuardDuty vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud

March 2025

Free Report: AWS GuardDuty vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Find out what your peers are saying about AWS GuardDuty vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.

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