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Fortra's Digital Guardian vs Varonis Platform comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 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

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
Fortra's Digital Guardian
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) (19th)
Varonis Platform
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) (13th), Data Governance (7th), SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) (5th), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (8th), Compliance Management (8th), Ransomware Protection (9th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (7th)
 

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes
Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.
Christian Dagal - PeerSpot reviewer
Ease of sensitive information detection and provides flexibility to customize and redefine policies and user analytics that detect data channels
In my opinion, there's a need for an extensive skill set or knowledge of creating policies. There's room for improvement to make it more user-friendly in creating custom rules and policies. In future releases, I would like to see a quick glance at detected data without downloading the actual file for both Windows and MacOS.
Frederic  Delos - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers the ability to identify sensitive areas, allowing you to drill down into the sensitive data
The most effective feature for me is its ability to identify sensitive areas, allowing you to drill down into the sensitive data, provided you have access, to determine whether it's a false positive or a true positive. That's the best thing for me, out of all of it. It's got everything, like other ones, but I like to be able to look at something if I'm doing forensics on the alert and say, "Okay, do I really need to do something with this?" For example, we don't want sensitive data in our OneDrive. So it identifies the sensitive data that's possibly in the OneDrive. And what I can do is look at it and identify whether it's actually sensitive data in Datalert or whether it looks like sensitive data, but I know it's a false positive. If it is a false positive, I can basically say ignore this pattern based on X, Y, and Z, you know, whether it's Redjax or keyword proximity. So I like that. With other tools, I gotta go through a whole process because it's a little bit more complex. Here, I can tag it and bag it in one shot. And the next good time I scan, it slips over it. So it helps in that.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"
"Its most significant benefit to date is the speed with which it refreshes DNS records on the internet once you change it. If you are changing a website or registering a new record, it is very quick."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."
"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."
"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."
"What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering, so it's a valuable tool."
"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."
"We have accurate detection on data protection and more visibility on different data channels compared to other DLP solutions. So, basically, more on the principle, there is ROI."
"As long as you know the flow and how the setup phase works, the process can be totally straightforward."
"The solution's classification engine is highly configurable and efficient."
"On the Varonis side, technical support is phenomenal. Their ability to explain is very good, and they seem to be very knowledgeable. When I get an alert that doesn't quite make sense, they dive in there and kind of take me through it. That's very useful and very good. There are some false alerts, but it is better to have a false alert than no alert at all."
"I also appreciate the reporting feature, which allows for the extraction of various reports based on specific needs. These reports can be used for audit purposes, such as tracking changes in file locations or deletions."
"That alerting and reporting service is great."
"There's also a 90-day policy where if a user is not using the warehouse, it will automatically delete that username."
"The 24/7 support is the most valuable feature. They have been able to answer support questions pretty quickly."
"The solution ensures that users have not accidentally shared sensitive information with the wrong people or too many people."
"The analytics would have to be our most valuable feature."
 

Cons

"It would be beneficial for us if Cloudflare could offer a scrubbing solution. This would involve taking a snapshot of my website and keeping it live during a DDoS attack, ensuring uninterrupted service for our users. DDoS attacks are typically short in duration, and having Cloudflare maintain the site's availability from its secure network would enhance the overall user experience. I would appreciate it if Cloudflare could consider implementing this feature. Many organizations already utilize similar capabilities in their CDN platforms, where a static snapshot of the web page is displayed during DDoS attacks. In terms of features, Cloudflare needs to enhance its resilience and stay more focused on adopting new technologies. For instance, solutions like F5 XC Box, Access Solution, and Distributed Cloud Solution have impressive features, and Cloudflare should strive to match and exceed those capabilities. There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features. Cloudflare should prioritize enhancements in areas such as behavioral DDoS and protection against SQL injection attacks, considering the prevalent trend of public exposure to the internet for business reasons. Overall, Cloudflare needs to invest more in advancing its feature set."
"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."
"The solution could work at being less expensive. It costs a lot to use it."
"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."
"If they improve on the placement of their data centers, it would be better. I'm living in a remote area. I would like to connect to them without any kind of lag."
"Cloudflare's free plan is limited to 5,000 records for their free plan. They should increase that. For example, if I create a domain called abc.com and a subdomain called a.abc.com, my record count will be two. I can make a maximum of 5,000 subdomains. However, if we use our own DNS hosted on another provider, there is no limit. Their free plan also lacks name server customization."
"I believe they currently have this feature, but there will most likely be integration with APIs so we can control some features through API."
"Cloudflare doesn't have a reverse lookup. We can only do a DNS lookup to get the IP address from the hostname. It doesn't work if you want to look up the hostname from an IPA address."
"The trouble with the tool is its ability to integrate with a third-party application."
"In my opinion, there's a need for an extensive skill set or knowledge of creating policies. There's room for improvement to make it more user-friendly in creating custom rules and policies."
"I'd like to see automatic updates for this solution. Currently, it's a manual process to update all the keywords"
"We have Microsoft Office 365. I just saw an article today which says that they're actually getting integrated with Microsoft Office 365, which would be a useful feature. For user-based reports, log on activity, and stuff like that, it doesn't seem to really be present like Log360. That could just be my inexperience with it. I've been dealing with it for only about two and a half months."
"The solution's areas of improvement are the interface and the dependency on on-premises deployment for some components."
"For unstructured data monitoring, it's one of the top ones, if not the top one, due to its usability."
"The product is very complicated."
"It is significantly complex."
"There is one thing that if I add something manually, I get so many alerts. That's the biggest bad thing."
"The solution's interface is a little complicated with regard to setting up filters and reports."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the solution is expensive."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"I believe their performance has improved, but I'd like to refrain from discussing the pricing aspect related to the cloud. The pricing, in my opinion, could be simplified, and I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high. At times, this cost can make it challenging to choose CARFAGuard or opt for the support."
"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"The price is reasonable."
"As long as your needs are fulfilled, even if the price is high, you will buy the tool."
"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, with ten being the most expensive."
"The pricing is good. It neither expensive nor cheap. It is average."
"The platform is expensive. I rate the pricing a nine out of ten."
"Varonis Platform wasn't certainly the cheapest solution."
"It's expensive, kind of, really expensive."
"You could do a subscription, where you pay yearly, or you could purchase it outright. The licensing cost is based on the number of users on the system that you are monitoring."
"Licensing is on an annual basis. Maintenance and renewal fees are separate. Varonis Datalert is quite expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
No data available
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GR...
Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?
Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service...
What do you like most about Cloudflare?
Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.
What do you like most about Fortra's Digital Guardian?
We have accurate detection on data protection and more visibility on different data channels compared to other DLP so...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortra's Digital Guardian?
As per my experience with both of my clients, I would say that the price is a bit high, but it didn't matter once the...
What needs improvement with Fortra's Digital Guardian?
The trouble with the tool is its ability to integrate with a third-party application. For example, integrating an SIE...
What do you like most about Varonis Platform?
The solution has significantly improved data security and compliance posture by allowing us to track and monitor acti...
What needs improvement with Varonis Platform?
The solution's areas of improvement are the interface and the dependency on on-premises deployment for some component...
What is your primary use case for Varonis Platform?
Customers use the product to identify sensitive information, correlate it with access permissions, and utilize its au...
 

Comparisons

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Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

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