We performed a comparison between Cloudflare and Microsoft Defender for Cloud based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Microsoft Defender for Cloud focuses on regulatory compliance, ransomware protection, access controls, incident alerts, collaborative services, UEBA features, and a single pane of glass view. On the other hand, Cloudflare provides good load balancing, DDoS protection, a user-friendly GUI, and a proxy for hiding servers. Microsoft Defender for Cloud needs work on consistency, customization, integration, collaboration, and resource coverage. Cloudflare could use improvements in reporting, support response time, traffic routing, and on-premise solutions.
Service and Support: Microsoft Defender for Cloud's customer service has received a combination of positive and negative feedback, with some customers reporting satisfactory experiences, while others have encountered difficulties with outsourced support and slow response times. On the other hand, Cloudflare's support is generally considered good, although some users have suggested that it could be enhanced, particularly for those who are new to the service.
Ease of Deployment: Microsoft Defender for Cloud's setup requires prior knowledge and policy creation while Cloudflare's setup is easy and comes with configuration instructions. Deploying Cloudflare may take a few days if many pieces of equipment are needed.
Pricing: Microsoft Defender for Cloud is seen as a fair and cost-effective option, despite complex licensing. In contrast, Cloudflare is generally considered expensive, although some users don't pay for licensing. Both solutions are viewed as cost-effective, but Cloudflare may benefit from a customized pricing model for enterprise customers.
ROI: Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides basic security features and facilitates the management of security service providers, while Cloudflare specializes in website protection and server overload prevention.
Comparison Results: Microsoft Defender for Cloud is the preferred option when compared to Cloudflare. It has a lot more security features, such as regulatory compliance, access controls, and ransomware protection. Despite Cloudflare's decent load balancing and DDoS protection, it falls short in terms of regulatory compliance and ransomware protection.
"The CSPM module has been the most effective. It was easy to deploy and covered all our accounts through APIs, requiring no agents. Wiz provides instant visibility into high-level risks that we need to address."
"Out of all the features, the one item that has been most valuable is the fact that Wiz puts into context all the pieces that create an issue, and applies a particular risk evaluation that helps us prioritize when we need to address a misconfiguration, vulnerability, or any issue that would put our environment into risk."
"I like Wiz's reporting, and it's easy to do queries. For example, it's pretty simple to find out how many servers we have and the applications installed on each. I like Wiz's security graph because you can use it to see the whole organization even if you have multiple accounts."
"Our most important features are those around entitlement, external exposure, vulnerabilities, and container security."
"The security baseline and vulnerability assessments is the valuable feature."
"The product supports out-of-the-box reporting with context about the asset and allows us to perform complex custom queries on UI."
"The automation roles are essential because we ultimately want to do less work and automate more. The dashboards are easy to read and visually pleasing. You can understand things quickly, which makes it easy for our other teams. The network and infrastructure teams don't know as much about security as we do, so it helps to have a tool that's accessible and nice to look at."
"With Wiz, we get timely alerts for leaked data or any vulnerabilities already existing in our environment."
"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"
"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is that it has a free version. They give us the free version with the anti-DDoS features and also the load balancing solution."
"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."
"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."
"Easier http to https redirect using page rules"
"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."
"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."
"One important security feature is the incident alerts. Now, with all these cyberattacks, there are a lot of incident alerts that get triggered. It is very difficult to keep monitoring everything automatically, instead our organization is utilizing the automated use case that we get from Microsoft. That has helped bring down the manual work for a lot of things."
"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 entire Defender Suite is tightly coupled, integrated, and collaborative."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the insights, meaning the remediation suggestions, as well as the incident alerts."
"We saw improvement from a regulatory compliance perspective due to having a single dashboard."
"It works seamlessly on the Azure platform because it's a Microsoft app. Its setup is similar, so if you already have a Microsoft account, it just flows into it."
"Defender lets you orchestrate the roll-out from a single pane. Using the Azure portal, you can roll it out over all the servers covered by the entire subscription."
"We can create alerts that trigger if there is any malicious activity happening in the workflow and these alerts can be retrieved using the query language."
"We would like to see improvements to executive-level reporting and data reporting in general, which we understand is being rolled out to the platform."
"One significant issue is that the searches are case-sensitive, so finding a misconfigured resource can become very challenging."
"The solution's container security could be improved."
"The reporting isn't that great. They have executive summaries, but it's only a compliance report that maps all current issues to specific controls. Whether you look at one subscription or project, regardless of the size, you will get a multipage report on how the issues in that account map to that control. Our CSO isn't going to read through that. He won't filter that out or show that to his leadership and say, "Here's what we're doing." It isn't a helpful report. They're working on it, but it's a poor executive summary."
"Wiz's reporting capabilities could be refined a bit. They are making headway on that, but more executive-style dashboards would be nice. They just implemented a community aspect where you can share documents and feedback. This was something users had been requesting for a while. They are listening to customer feedback and making changes."
"The only thing that needs to be improved is the number of scans per day."
"The only small pain point has been around some of the logging integrations. Some of the complexities of the script integrations aren't supported with some of the more automated infrastructure components. So, it's not as universal. For example, they have great support for cloud formation and other services, but if you're using another type of management utility or governance language for your infrastructure-as-code automation components, it becomes a little bit trickier to navigate that."
"The remediation workflow within the Wiz could be improved."
"It should have easier documentation for the configuration. It's very technical and people who aren't technical should also be able to do the configuration."
"I would like Cloudflare to offer a dedicated account manager for large enterprise clients like us."
"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."
"Cloudflare's console should be made more user-friendly."
"The timing aspect can lead to it being considered overpriced. This is a particular concern we have with Cloudflare, as they may struggle with accurately detecting the client."
"The reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened."
"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."
"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."
"Azure Security Center takes a long time to update, compared to the on-premises version of Microsoft Defender."
"Azure is a complex solution. You have so many moving parts."
"The product must improve its UI."
"The overview provides you with good information, but if you want more details, there is a lot more customization to do, which requires knowledge of the other supporting solutions."
"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."
"The solution could improve by being more intuitive and easier to use requiring less technical knowledge."
"If a customer is already using Okta as an SSO in its entire environment, they will want to continue with it. But Security Center doesn't understand that and keeps making recommendations. It would help if it let us resolve a recommendation, even if it is not implemented."
"The remediation process could be improved."
Cloudflare is ranked 11th in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) with 56 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 3rd in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) with 46 reviews. Cloudflare is rated 8.4, while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Cloudflare writes "It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Cloud writes "Provides multi-cloud capability, is plug-and-play, and improves our security posture". Cloudflare is most compared with Akamai, Azure Front Door, Imperva DDoS, AWS Shield and Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, whereas Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with AWS GuardDuty, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Microsoft Sentinel. See our Cloudflare vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud report.
See our list of best Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) vendors.
We monitor all Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.