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.

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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

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security offers valuable features like runtime notifications. These alerts come to my account, ensuring that if any port or component within my infrastructure is opened or compromised, I am informed immediately. It highlights issues within minutes or even seconds."

"The remediation process is good."

"Overall, I would rate it a ten on ten for cloud security."

"The most valuable features are automated threat response, AI detection, and static and dynamic detection."

"The user-friendly dashboard offers both convenience and security by providing quick access to solutions and keeping us informed of potential threats."

"Singularity Cloud Security's most valuable features are its ease of scalability and comprehensive security measures."

"SentinelOne is far superior to our previous solution, Accops, due to its seamless updates, effortless maintenance, and user-friendly interface and dashboard."

"The tool identifies issues quickly."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pros

"The solution will detect abnormalities in the AWS workload and alert us so that we can monitor and take action."

"With anomaly detection, active threat monitoring, and set correlation, GuardDuty alerts me to any unusual user behavior or traffic patterns right away, which is great for staying on top of potential security risks."

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

"Deployment is great, and we didn't face any big challenges."

"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."

"Since our environment is cloud based and accessible from the internet, we like the ability to check where the user has logged in from and what kind of API calls that user is doing."

"The way it monitors accounts is definitely a very important feature."

"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."

More AWS GuardDuty pros

"I would rate Microsoft Defender for Cloud a nine out of 10."

"The most valuable feature for me is the variety of APIs available."

"Defender for Cloud provides a prioritized list of remediations for security issues, reducing risk and improving security operations."

"Some of the most valuable features of Microsoft Defender for Cloud include its effectiveness in threat detection through unsupervised machine learning, CTI, and advanced sandboxing."

"The security alerts and correlated alerts are most valuable. It correlates the logs and gives us correlated alerts, which can be fed into any security information and event management (SIEM) tool. It is an analyzed correlation tool for monitoring security. It gives us alerts when there is any kind of unauthorized access, or when there is any malfunctioning in multifactor authentication (MFA). If our Azure is connected with Azure Security Center, we get to know what types of authentication are happening in our infra."

"Most importantly, it's an integrated solution. We not only have Defender for Cloud, but we also have Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Office 365, and Defender for Identity. It's an integrated, holistic solution."

"Defender is user-friendly and provides decent visibility into threats."

"The vulnerability reporting is helpful. When we initially deployed Defender, it reported many more threats than we currently see. It gave us insight into areas we had not previously considered, so we knew where we needed to act."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pros

Cons

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security has limited legacy system support and may not fully support older operating systems or legacy environments."

"PingSafe can be improved by developing a comprehensive set of features that allow for automated workflows."

"A two-month grace period for extended searches would be a valuable improvement."

"After closing an alert in Cloud Native Security, it still shows as unresolved."

"The application module focuses on the different codes and libraries that can be run on the machines. It is very important for Singularity EDR to detect what type of codes and what type of libraries can run in the machine. If they can implement a white list or a black list of codes or libraries that can be used in the machine, it would be very helpful. They can focus more on the application module."

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

"One of our use cases was setting up a firewall for our endpoints, specifically for our remote users... We were hoping to utilize SentinelOne's firewall capabilities, but there were limitations on how many URLs we could implement. Because of those limitations on the number of URLs, we weren't able to utilize that feature in the way we had hoped to."

"We use PingSafe and also SentinelOne. If PingSafe integrated some of the endpoint security features of SentinelOne, it would be the perfect one-stop solution for everything. We wouldn't need to switch between the products. At my organization, I am responsible for endpoint security and vulnerability management. Integrating both functions into one application would be ideal because I could see all the alerts, heat maps, and reports in one console."

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."

"Amazon GuardDuty could be better enriched in threat intelligence data."

"There is currently no consolidated dashboard for AWS GuardDuty. It would be helpful if they could provide a dashboard based on severity levels (high, medium, low) and offer insights account-wise, especially for users utilizing automation structures."

"GuardDuty is limited to AWS environments."

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

"AWS GuardDuty needs to be more customer-oriented."

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

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

More AWS GuardDuty cons

"I would like to have the ability to customize executive reporting."

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

"The product must improve its UI."

"Defender could improve how data is represented. It can be unstructured or slow to load. The recent update allowing policy grouping into control groups is beneficial, but further enhancements for speed and clarity are needed."

"Defender could provide more in-depth visibility into vulnerabilities and services. For instance, we wanted to scan Azure NetApp for sensitive data, but they didn't have that feature. It was only for storage accounts. I want Azure Defender features to cover all Azure resources rather than a few."

"You cannot create custom use cases."

"I would like to see better automation when it comes to pushing out security features to the recommendations, and better documentation on the step-by-step procedures for enabling certain features."

"Sometimes it's very difficult to determine when I need Microsoft Defender for Cloud for a special resource group or a special kind of product."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"We have an enterprise license. It is affordable. I'm not sure, but I think we pay 150,000 rupees per month."

"The pricing for PingSafe in India was more reasonable than other competitors."

"Its pricing is okay. It is in line with what other providers were providing. It is not cheap. It is not expensive."

"I am personally not taking care of the pricing part, but when we moved from CrowdStrike to PingSafe, there were some savings. The price of CrowdStrike was quite high. Compared to that, the price of PingSafe was low. PingSafe is charging based on the subscription model. If I want to add an AWS subscription, I need to pay more. It should not be based on subscription. It should be based on the number of servers that I am scanning."

"PingSafe's pricing is good because it provides us with a solution."

"The pricing is somewhat high compared to other market tools."

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is costly."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pricing and cost advice

"The pricing model is pay as you go and is based on the number of events per month."

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

"The platform is inexpensive."

"I have heard that the solution's price is quite high."

"I prefer to have something on demand for myself. That's why I haven't been paying for GuardDuty specifically. AWS provides a wide range of offerings, especially in the security area."

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

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

"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

"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 product's pricing policy is generally favorable."

"The pricing and licensing of Microsoft Defender for Cloud have been good for us. We appreciate the licensing approach based on employee count rather than a big enterprise license."

"The cost of the license is based on the subscriptions that you have."

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

"Currently, Microsoft offers only one plan at the enterprise level which is $15 per machine."

"It has global licensing. It comes with multiple licenses since there are around 50,000 people (in our organization) who look at it."

"I am not involved in this area. However, I believe its price is okay because even small customers are using Azure Security Center. I don't think it is very 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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