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CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 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...
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Ranking in Container Security
3rd
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
4th
Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
3rd
Ranking in Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
109
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (6th), Cloud and Data Center Security (5th), Compliance Management (2nd)
CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Se...
Ranking in Container Security
6th
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
7th
Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
8th
Ranking in Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)
7th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
Application Security Tools (13th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (2nd), Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) (5th)
Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Ranking in Container Security
4th
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
2nd
Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
4th
Ranking in Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
76
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (7th), Container Management (9th), 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 CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security is 6.4%, up from 4.4% 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.
Saif Ullah Khan - PeerSpot reviewer
Boosts security by automatically blocking applications or activities, but query responses have been slower recently
For the past six months, we have been facing some issues. Because it is a cloud-based infrastructure, it has been getting slower. There are no bugs because they release updates continuously. We highly appreciate that, but during hunting or running a query on different logs, the time frame has increased in the past six months. It takes longer to give us the results. Another issue is the lack of proper documentation. During investigations, there is no proper documentation available. This is a problem because many people are saying there should be proper documentation explaining what CrowdStrike captures from the machine and the meaning of it.
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

"PingSafe released a new security graph tool that helps us identify the root issue. Other tools give you a pass/fail type of profile on all misconfigurations, and those will run into the thousands. PingSafe's graphing algorithm connects various components together and tries to identify what is severe and what is not. It can correlate various vulnerabilities and datasets to test them on the back end to pinpoint the real issue."
"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."
"The user interface is well-designed and easy to navigate."
"PingSafe offers an intuitive user interface that lets us navigate quickly and easily."
"Its performance impact on the systems is low, which means there is a minimal impact on system performance compared to traditional antivirus solutions."
"Our organization is growing steadily, so our infrastructure is expanding, and we're managing more technical resources. Singularity Cloud Security helps us track our resources so that we don't get lost in the overwhelming volume of things and ensures we follow best practices. The solution gives us better visibility into our resources and enables faster resolution."
"The multi-cloud support is valuable. They are expanding to different clouds. It is not restricted to only AWS. It allows us to have different clouds on one platform."
"The Offensive Security Engine, powered by impressive AI/ML capabilities, seamlessly integrates with cloud infrastructure to analyze data and provide optimal security solutions."
"The scalability of the product has been great."
"The most significant benefit is how quickly malware and other malicious attacks are detected."
"The most valuable feature of Falcon Cloud Security is its comprehensive threat-hunting ability."
"It is fully cloud-based, so we don't need to invest in third-party agents repeatedly."
"I have contacted customer service, and they are fast."
"Technical support is helpful."
"Cloud security is one valuable feature. Spotlight is the other one. There is also vulnerability management and a couple of more features."
"I find the easy installation process, quick detection capabilities, and the cloud-based console very useful for this solution."
"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."
"The most valuable feature for me is the variety of APIs available."
"The most valuable feature is the recommendations provided on how to improve security."
"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."
"Microsoft Defender for Cloud helps in improving our overall security posture. We have a nice overview of what is missing where and what can be improved."
"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."
"Defender for Cloud is an improvement over Trend Micro, our previous solution. We like integrating our endpoints and visualizing everything in one place. It provides comprehensive coverage for endpoints, servers, and overall environmental security."
"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."
 

Cons

"The alerting system of the product is an area that I look at and sometimes get confused about. I feel the alerting feature needs improvement."
"Some of the navigation and some aspects of the portal may be a little bit confusing."
"They can add more widgets to its dashboard. A centralized dashboard with numerous metrics would improve user understanding."
"Customized queries should be made easier to improve PingSafe."
"A vulnerability alert would appear, and we'd fix it, but then the same alert would return the next day."
"The Kubernetes scanning on the Oracle Cloud needs to be improved. It's on the roadmap. AWS has this capability, but it's unavailable for Oracle Cloud."
"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 need to work on severity management."
"The cloud-based operations might pose challenges in areas with limited or unavailable internet connectivity."
"There is room for improvement in the solution's ability to handle Linux systems."
"The file integrity monitoring feature should be enhanced and offered more control"
"I would not say the tool's integration capabilities were straightforward because the complexity depends on the volume of the data."
"The tool could give us more templates so that people who are not updated with the platform can easily get acquainted with how to secure and utilize the product more."
"The pricing is very high and should be improved."
"It gets the work done, but the main problem with the solution is that if you remediate anything, it takes 45 days for you to get any of the features displayed on the dashboard. This is the real weakness of CrowdStrike. Their customer support is also not ready to help with it. If you remediate any cloud vulnerability that they are giving you, such as removing a host from your organization, it takes around 45 days for them to remove it from their console."
"The UI part needs to be improved."
"The only challenge lies in token verification."
"I've heard there might be issues with scalability for larger enterprises."
"There are challenges with the licensing policies, which are quite complicated."
"They could always work to make the pricing a bit lower."
"No possibility to write or edit any capability."
"The range of workloads is broad, but we'd love to add more workloads and make it a single security solution that covers all those workloads. Covering more would allow us to see and protect more workloads from a single pane of glass. Additional features should include protection for more AI workloads as it currently focuses primarily on OpenAI."
"The pricing could be improved, as it is somewhat high for smaller companies."
"Although Microsoft Defender for Cloud is based on security, I wish it went beyond providing assessments, reports, and generic steps. More detailed procedures would be helpful, especially for lower-level support staff."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Their pricing appears to be based simply on the number of accounts we have, which is common for cloud-based products."
"SentinelOne is quite costly compared to other security platforms."
"The tool is cost-effective."
"While SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security offers robust protection, its high cost may be prohibitive for small and medium-sized businesses."
"SentinelOne provided competitive pricing compared to other vendors, and we are satisfied with the deal."
"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 licensing is easy to understand and implement, with some flexibility to accommodate dynamic environments."
"PingSafe's pricing is good because it provides us with a solution."
"CrowdStrike Falcon is very expensive."
"It's an expensive package but does what it says it will do."
"It is expensive, but it adds value."
"CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security is very expensive for us. Last month, we had a big issue that took much time and money to resolve. It slowed down our business and required our management team to get involved. We had a problem similar to the "Blue Screen of Death" issue many US companies faced. This incident used up many of our IT resources in just a few months. That's why we're looking for a replacement tool now."
"It's an expensive product"
"The pricing is fair for what you get. I'd rate them a solid nine out of ten in terms of pricing."
"The pricing is reasonable, neither overly expensive nor excessively cheap, making it competitive compared to other market options."
"Its price is moderate."
"Security Center charges $15 per resource for any workload that you onboard into it. They charge per VM or per data-base server or per application. It's not like Microsoft 365 licensing, where there are levels like E3 and E5. Security Center is pretty straightforward."
"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."
"I am not involved much with the pricing but the bundle offering is good."
"Pricing is difficult because each license has its own metrics and cost."
"The solution is expensive, and I rate it a five to six out of ten."
"Understanding the costs of cloud services can be complicated at first. As with a lot of things in the cloud, it can be quite hard to understand the end cost, but it becomes clearer over time. Early on, the lack of transparency is a challenge. Microsoft does not tell you the cost when they launch something. It is clever marketing, and there is room for improvement there. There should be clarity from the start."
"Pricing depends on your workload size, but it is very cheap. If you're talking about virtual machines, it is $5 or something for each machine, which is minimal. If you go for some agent-based solution for every virtual machine, then you need to pay the same thing or more than that. For an on-premises solution like this, we were paying around $30 to $50 based on size. With Defender, Microsoft doesn't bother about the size. You pay based on the number of machines. So, if you have 10 virtual machines, and 10 virtual machines are being monitored, you are paying based on that rather than the size of the virtual machine. Thus, you are paying for the number of units rather than paying for the size of your units."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
5%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
5%
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?
The documentation could be better. Besides improving the documentation, obtaining a professional or partner specializ...
What do you like most about CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security?
It's easy to gather insights and conduct analysis about existing threats.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security?
It's an expensive product. The solution costs around $60 for a single user on a yearly basis. I would rate the pricin...
What needs improvement with CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security?
I am not part of the current monitoring team, so I do not know how they feel about the tool. I am sharing information...
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
CrowdStrike Falcon ASPM
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
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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 CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
848,716 professionals have used our research since 2012.