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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
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
105
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (6th), Cloud and Data Center Security (5th), Container Security (2nd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (3rd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (3rd), Compliance Management (3rd)
AWS GuardDuty
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
5th
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)
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
74
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 (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) category, the mindshare of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is 2.2%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS GuardDuty is 9.3%, down from 9.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is 12.9%, down from 14.9% 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

"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."
"Cloud Native Security has helped us with our risk posture and securing our agenda. It has been tremendous in terms of supporting growth."
"Support has been very helpful and provides regular feedback and help whenever needed. They've been very useful."
"PingSafe provides email alerts and ranks issues based on severity, such as high, critical, etc., that help us prioritize issues."
"PingSafe can integrate all your cloud accounts and resources you create in the AWS account, We have set it up to scan the AWS transfer services, EC2, security groups, and GitHub."
"It is fairly simple. Anybody can use it."
"It's positively affected the communication between cloud security, application developers, and AppSec teams."
"Singularity Cloud Security's most valuable features are its ease of scalability and comprehensive security measures."
"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."
"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 way it monitors accounts is definitely a very important feature."
"Overall, GuardDuty is a very easy-to-use tool, and I would recommend it even to those who are not tech-savvy."
"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."
"The out-of-band malware detection from the EBS volumes. It's really cool. No agents or anything needed, it automatically finds and correlates based on malware."
"The correlation back end is the solution's most valuable feature."
"We have over 1,000 employees, and we monitor their activity through AWS GuardDuty."
"I would rate Microsoft Defender for Cloud a ten."
"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."
"Defender for Cloud has improved our security posture."
"It's quite a good product. It helps to understand the infections and issues you are facing."
"The solution's coordinated detection and response across devices and identities is impressive because it is complete."
"The main feature is the security posture assessment through the security score. I find that to be very helpful because it gives us guidance on what needs to be secured and recommendations on how to secure the workloads that have been onboarded."
"The most valuable feature is the hunting feature, which integrates well into the entire Microsoft ecosystem."
"It takes very little effort to integrate it. It also gives very good visibility into what exactly is happening."
 

Cons

"If something happens in our infrastructure, the alert appears on the dashboard, but I have to log in to the dashboard and refresh it. I would prefer it to provide better alerting and notifications so that I can resolve issues on priority."
"One area for improvement could be the internal analysis process, specifically the guidance provided for remediation."
"While SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security offers robust protection, its cost could be a barrier for some users."
"We are experiencing problems with Cloud Native Security reporting."
"When you find a vulnerability and resolve it, the same issue will not occur again. I want PingSafe to block the same vulnerability from appearing again. I want something like a playbook where the steps that we take to resolve an issue are repeated when that issue happens again."
"The resolution suggestions could be better, and the compliance features could be more customizable for Indian regulations. Overall, the compliance aspects are good. It gives us a comprehensive list, and its feedback is enough to bring us into compliance with regulations, but it doesn't give us the specific objects."
"We don't get any notifications from PingSafe when the clusters are down."
"SentinelOne currently lacks a break glass account feature, which is critical for implementing Single Sign-On."
"For the next release, they could provide IPS features as well."
"Because it's a threat detection service, they need to keep up with the various threat factors because new threat factors and attack factors come up all the time."
"We currently find Lacework to be much better at detecting vulnerabilities than AWS GuardDuty. The engines of AWS GuardDuty have to be improved."
"GuardDuty is limited to AWS environments."
"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."
"I would like to see more integration with other AWS provided services."
"It would be great if the solution had some automation capabilities."
"The solution's user interface could be improved because it will help users to understand multiple options."
"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."
"However, some Copilot features aren't available in the GCP environment. This is something we hope will be addressed in the future."
"For Kubernetes, I was using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). To see that whatever is getting deployed into AKS goes through the correct checks and balances in terms of affinities and other similar aspects and follows all the policies, we had to use a product called Stackrox. At a granular level, the built-in policies were good for Kubernetes, but to protect our containers from a coding point of view, we had to use a few other products. For example, from a programming point of view, we were using Checkmarx for static code analysis. For CIS compliance, there are no CIS benchmarks for AKS. So, we had to use other plugins to see that the CIS benchmarks are compliant. There are CIS benchmarks for Kubernetes on AWS and GCP, but there are no CIS benchmarks for AKS. So, Azure Security Center fell short from the regulatory compliance point of view, and we had to use one more product. We ended up with two different dashboards. We had Azure Security Center, and we had Stackrox that had its own dashboard. The operations team and the security team had to look at two dashboards, and they couldn't get an integrated piece. That's a drawback of Azure Security Center. Azure Security Center should provide APIs so that we can integrate its dashboard within other enterprise dashboards, such as the PowerBI dashboard. We couldn't get through these aspects, and we ended up giving Reader security permission to too many people, which was okay to some extent, but when we had to administer the users for the Stackrox portal and Azure Security Center, it became painful."
"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."
"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 pricing could be better."
"However, some Copilot features aren't available in the GCP environment. This is something we hope will be addressed in the future."
"You cannot create custom use cases."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The features included in PingSafe justify its price point."
"I understand that SentinelOne is a market leader, but the bill we received was astronomical."
"The pricing for PingSafe in India was more reasonable than other competitors."
"The pricing is somewhat high compared to other market tools."
"PingSafe is fairly priced."
"It's a fair price for what you get. We are happy with the price as it stands."
"While I'm slightly out of touch with pricing, I know SentinelOne is much cheaper than other products."
"The licensing is easy to understand and implement, with some flexibility to accommodate dynamic environments."
"We use a pay-as-you-use license, which is competitively priced in the market."
"The tool has no subscription charges."
"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."
"It can get very expensive. If you turn on every feature, it can turn into hundreds of thousands of dollars."
"I have heard that the solution's price is quite high."
"The pricing model is pay as you go and is based on the number of events per month."
"GuardDuty only enables accounts in regions where you have an active workload. If there are places where you don't have an active workload, you wouldn't even enable them. That's one area where they could allow you to cut down your cost."
"Pricing is determined by the number of events sent."
"The licensing cost per server is $15 per month."
"The licensing is straightforward but can become expensive if you cover everything. You must balance the cost against the importance of what needs covering."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Currently, Microsoft offers only one plan at the enterprise level which is $15 per machine."
"I am not involved much with the pricing but the bundle offering is good."
"Pricing is a consideration, but we strive to keep costs low by enabling only necessary services."
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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) solutions are best for your needs.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
5%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
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?
SentinelOne is relatively cheap. If ten is the most expensive, I would rate it a seven.
What needs improvement with PingSafe?
From my personal experience, the alerting system needs to be faster. If something happens in our infrastructure, the ...
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?
The licensing is straightforward but can become expensive if you cover everything. You must balance the cost against ...
 

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: January 2025.
841,004 professionals have used our research since 2012.