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Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps vs Microsoft Defender for Endpoint comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 1, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
7.7
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps delivers 35%-60% cost savings through enhanced security, operational efficiency, and seamless integration with Microsoft products.
Sentiment score
7.2
Users report positive ROI from Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, citing cost savings, improved security, and effective system integration.
The biggest return on investment so far has been visibility, knowing what we have in our environment.
The return on investment is primarily in time savings and better observability of what's happening.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.2
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps support is generally positive, but users experience varying response times and expertise levels.
Sentiment score
6.6
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint's support is generally reliable, with mixed reviews on response time and resolution quality.
Their customer service is pretty good, but it's frustrating to go through three or four channels before reaching the right person.
Due to our size, we don't have access to direct technical support, but the knowledge base, Microsoft Learn, and the articles available are really good.
I rate Microsoft support 10 out of 10.
The level-one support seems disconnected from subject matter experts.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.3
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps offers scalability and flexibility, easily integrating apps and managing large enterprises' security needs.
Sentiment score
7.6
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint offers scalable integration and cloud-based management, but customization may need extra tools in complex settings.
For what I know about the log collector and how much data it can take in, it is super scalable and capable of handling high workloads.
We managed to scale it out in a short amount of time, with two months of planning and three months of implementation on 10,000 computers.
It's pretty easy to scale with Microsoft, as they make it easy if you look into the documentation.
Defender's scalability is phenomenal, and it's going to be one of the keys to resolving issues for the SOC.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.0
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps offers reliable performance with minimal downtime, overcoming occasional external issues and network-related latency.
Sentiment score
7.9
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is stable, integrates well with Windows, but occasionally has configuration and memory issues.
I would rate it a ten because I have not experienced any stability issues so far with Defender for Cloud Apps.
Like any other Microsoft product, the uptime is good.
Defender for Endpoint is extremely stable.
I haven't seen any outages with Microsoft.
I rate Defender 10 out of 10 for stability.
 

Room For Improvement

Users suggest better integration, pricing, and UI for Apple and Microsoft tools, with enhancements in reporting, support, and threat protection.
Users criticize Microsoft Defender for Endpoint's complex interface, limited integration, and request enhancements in analytics, protection, and support.
For data loss prevention, it would be useful to be able to drill down into the kind of data being transferred over CloudApp.
We are having trouble with our continuous reporting configuration and struggling with configuring the collector properly with our log parsing.
Repeated interactions are necessary due to Level One's lack of tools and knowledge, hindering efficient problem-solving and negatively impacting our experience with Microsoft support.
We have multiple endpoints, and we want to look for signals across tenants.
An additional feature that could be included in the next release is free Copilot.
 

Setup Cost

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is cost-effective with Microsoft 365 bundles but pricey separately, with varied licensing complexity.
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint offers flexible, cost-effective pricing, especially in E5 bundles, adapting to various enterprise licensing needs.
Given our extensive Microsoft licensing, transitioning to Defender for Endpoint did not affect licensing costs.
The pricing, setup, and licensing were very easy and simple.
 

Valuable Features

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps offers integrated security, real-time alerts, and strong threat detection for comprehensive enterprise cloud protection.
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint provides comprehensive cybersecurity with seamless integration, robust threat analytics, and efficient management across platforms without performance impact.
The ability to sanction unsanctioned apps using Secure Score benchmarking, included in Cloud, is also beneficial.
We have also locked down our consent apps, so users can no longer consent on their own behalf to create apps in our environment.
Defender for Endpoint's coverage across different platforms in our environment is pretty good. We have devices running Linux, Mac OS, Windows, iOS, and Android. It covers all of them.
Attack surface reduction and limiting attack surface vectors are valuable features.
Web filtering is the most valuable feature of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint because it effectively maintains security for website access.
 

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Defender for Clou...
Ranking in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)
13th
Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite
12th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
34
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) (4th)
Microsoft Defender for Endp...
Ranking in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)
2nd
Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
190
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (1st), Anti-Malware Tools (1st), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is 1.5%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is 9.2%, down from 11.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)
 

Featured Reviews

Jagadeesh Gunasekaran - PeerSpot reviewer
Saves us time, has good visibility, and a single dashboard
The solution is user-friendly and provides great visibility into threats. There are easy options available for specific workflow inspections. We can also get support by going through the Microsoft documentation, which is straightforward. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps helps us prioritize threats across our enterprise. It covers us from a compliance perspective and protects our organization's data. Data protection is a very important aspect of any new organization, as we need to protect our data from both external attacks and insider threats. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps helps us monitor for abnormal activity by insiders, which is one of the most important access points for attackers today. Additionally, the different cloud apps that Defender for Cloud Apps supports provide us with much more visibility into potential threats and activities on the internet. We have integrated Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps alerts with Sentinel. The integration is straightforward. We can find the configuration details on Microsoft's official documentation website. If we are familiar with how Microsoft products work, we will be able to follow the instructions clearly. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps and Sentinel work natively together to deliver coordinated detection and response across our environment. Our integrated Microsoft solutions provide comprehensive threat protection, covering most of the tactics and techniques relevant to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. Sentinel allows us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem. When implementing an SIEM solution, there are always prerequisites such as Active Directory logs, security logs, firewall logs, and DNS logs. These are important logs that need to be ingested into the environment. Sentinel has many third-party connectors available that make integrations straightforward. Microsoft provides the configuration details in the Sentinel platform. It is important to integrate all relevant log sources into the SIEM solution so that we can detect and be alerted to any type of threat factor, whether it is from an internal or external source. Integrating third-party solutions into the platform requires a separate configuration, but Microsoft provides the necessary information. However, we need to have the appropriate permissions to execute these setups. Sentinel provides a centralized dashboard that covers threat management and configuration. It gives us complete insight into what entities are accessing, as well as full details for investigation. We can see how the alerts and threats are relevant to suspicious activities, whether they are related to malicious IP addresses, suspicious ASHAs, or any other indicators of compromise. All of this relevant data can be seen in a single pane. Recently, Microsoft introduced a new investigation experience in a single pane. This means that we can now get a lot of details in a single pane, without having to go there and execute a query. There are a lot of new insights being developed in the Sentinel platform these days. It has software intelligence. They recently introduced Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence, which covers almost all IOCs. This protects organizational assets from threats and suspicious traffic associated with IOCs. If a match is found, alerts are generated. This is a very interesting feature. Another great feature is automation and logic apps. We can create a number of operations, such as posting in a team's channel if a severe incident occurs or sending an email notification. There are many operations available, so we can automate a lot of tasks. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps helps us stay compliant. It has predefined mechanisms in place to prevent attacks. For example, if an external user tries to access our SharePoint folders or files, an attack will be blocked. This is why it is important to give appropriate access to guest users. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps has many features and benefits. It provides a number of policies that can be configured to meet the specific needs of our security team. These policies can be used to customize cloud applications so that only authorized users can access them and perform operations that benefit the organization. In terms of safety and security, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is top-notch. Using the solution's automation features, we can suppress false positive alerts. We can also close alerts, lower their severity from "high" to "low" or "informational," or close them immediately with the appropriate commands. This will depend on the configuration automation rule and the perspective from which we are testing. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps provides a single console. We are also provided with Microsoft templates to enable workbooks instantly. Alternatively, we can build our own customized workbooks to provide better insights and improve our SOC efficiency and overall performance. Consolidating all of our security data into one dashboard has saved our security operations team a significant amount of time. From an analyst's perspective, it is now much easier to correlate events, investigate alerts, and visualize specific entities. For example, an analyst can quickly see all of the alerts associated with a particular IP address, or they can view all of the activity for a specific entity over the past 24 hours or 7 days. This level of detail and insight would not be possible if our data were siloed in multiple dashboards. The single dashboard saves our operations approximately 20 hours per week by eliminating the need to access multiple consoles and tabs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps threat intelligence can help us prepare for potential threats before they happen. However, it depends on how we develop the policies for the database to block or ignore things in our environment.
AnuragSrivastava - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides detailed visibility into threats but the ability to add exceptions needs improvement
One major item for improvement is the ability to add exceptions. We can add some exceptions, but not at the level we need to. The second major area for improvement involves enhanced capabilities for different operating systems or platforms. That is, even though we have coverage for different operating systems or platforms such as Linux, we don't get all of the controls and enhanced capabilities that are available with Windows devices. Reporting could also be improved because, at present, we get limited results at times. For example, in an environment with more than 100,000 devices, you may just get 10,000 results when you run a report.
report
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
Educational Organization
28%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is the better security solution - Cisco Umbrella or Microsoft Cloud App Security?
Cisco Umbrella is an integral component of the Cisco SASE architecture. It integrates security in a single, cloud-native solution, unifying multiple features like DNS-layer security, threat intelli...
What do you like most about Microsoft Cloud App Security?
It does a great job of monitoring and maintaining a security baseline. For us, that is a key element. The notifications are pretty good.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Cloud App Security?
I'm familiar with the licensing requirements to get our job done, but not from a pricing standpoint. That is not my job.
How is Cortex XDR compared with Microsoft Defender?
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a cloud-delivered endpoint security solution. The tool reduces the attack surface, applies behavioral-based endpoint protection and response, and includes risk-ba...
Which offers better endpoint security - Symantec or Microsoft Defender?
We use Symantec because we do not use MS Enterprise products, but in my opinion, Microsoft Defender is a superior solution. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a cloud-delivered endpoint security s...
How does Microsoft Defender for Endpoint compare with Crowdstrike Falcon?
The CrowdStrike solution delivers a lot of information about incidents. It has a very light sensor that will never push your machine hardware to "test", you don't have the usual "scan now" feature ...
 

Also Known As

MS Cloud App Security, Microsoft Cloud App Security
Microsoft Defender ATP, Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection, MS Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender Antivirus
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Customers for Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps include Accenture, St. Luke’s University Health Network, Ansell, and Nakilat.
Petrofrac, Metro CSG, Christus Health
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps vs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
832,765 professionals have used our research since 2012.