Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Orca Security comparison

Microsoft and Orca Security are both solutions in the Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) category. Microsoft is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.1, while Orca Security is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.6. Microsoft holds a 10.4% mindshare in CSPM, compared to Orca Security’s 6.7% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Orca Security users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 2025

Orca Security and Microsoft Defender for Cloud are in the cloud security space, where Orca Security leads with innovative features such as agentless deployment and risk ranking capabilities.

Features: Orca Security provides side-scanning technology for agentless deployment, critical risk ranking, and container visibility, ensuring comprehensive cloud security insights. Microsoft Defender for Cloud benefits from integration with Azure, leveraging threat intelligence and seamless security posture management that covers infrastructure, applications, and databases.

Room for Improvement: Orca Security could expand to include real-time risk assessment and better support for data centers while enhancing automatic remediation and third-party integration. Microsoft Defender for Cloud's licensing model is complex, and it could benefit from better alert management and compatibility with non-Windows systems. Reducing false positives would also enhance its usability.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Orca Security offers efficient agentless deployment for public clouds but lacks support for private data centers. Its customer service is responsive, though could be improved in technical expertise. Microsoft Defender for Cloud excels in hybrid environments, integrating well with Azure. Its support is strong but managing documentation could be better to reduce user confusion.

Pricing and ROI: Orca Security provides high ROI through visibility and agentless operations despite perceptions of high pricing, which is offset by significant resource savings. Microsoft Defender for Cloud’s pricing structure is complex and costly, especially for SMBs, although it delivers good ROI within Microsoft's ecosystem.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Orca Security Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Orca Security

March 2025

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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...

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) category, the mindshare of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is 2.5%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is 10.4%, down from 12.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Orca Security is 6.7%, down from 9.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

Featured Reviews

Andrew W

VP - Information Technology at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

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.

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Vibhor Goel

Senior Cloud Platform Engineer at Deutsche Börse

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.

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CHINTAN MEHTA

Cloud Security Automation Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Consolidating security tools with comprehensive cloud visibility

The documentation for Orca Security could be improved. The compliance framework also needs enhancements, especially concerning integrations with other tools like ServiceNow's vulnerability modules, which are not as mature as expected. It should also increase its capability to ingest data from other security tools like CloudSight for endpoint detection and provide real-time monitoring.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The mean time to detect has been reduced."

"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 cooperative nature of SentinelOne has influenced our decision not to shift."

"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 gives me the information I need."

"I like CSPM the most. It captures a lot of alerts within a short period of time. When an alert gets triggered on the cloud, it throws an alert within half an hour, which is very reasonable. It is a plus point for us."

"Singularity Cloud Security's most valuable features are its ease of scalability and comprehensive security measures."

"The most valuable features are automated threat response, AI detection, and static and dynamic detection."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pros

"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."

"I would rate Microsoft Defender for Cloud a nine out of 10."

"It's got a lot of great features."

"The most valuable feature is the hunting feature, which integrates well into the entire Microsoft ecosystem."

"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."

"The scalability of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is very good."

"The most valuable feature is the regulatory compliance aspect, where we utilize predefined initiatives like NIST."

"Defender is a robust platform for dealing with many kinds of threats. We're protected from various threats, like viruses. Attacks can be easily minimized with this solution defending our infrastructure."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pros

"The visibility Orca provides into my environment is at the highest level... When I dropped them into the environment, from the very get-go I had more insight into the risks in my environment than I had had during the entire two and a half years I had been here."

"The best features of Orca Security include its ability to perform a lot of security controls without requiring any installation of agents, making it very easy to set up."

"I recommend Orca Security to others looking for a cloud security solution due to its seamless integration and side-scanning technology that does not hamper cloud asset performance."

"There are so many valuable features that I could list, but one that I appreciate is the PCI DSS compliance report."

"I find Orca Security's CIEM feature invaluable, as it focuses on entitlement and posture management, identifying assets with older OS versions, and asset misconfiguration."

"The most valuable feature of Orca Security is the automated scanning tool, user-friendliness, and ease of use."

"Orca gives you great visibility into your assets. It shows you the issues and the things that you need to attend to first, by prioritizing things. You can see a lot of information that is not always visible, even to DevOps, to help you know about the machines and their status. It's very easy to see everything in a single dashboard. That makes it a very useful tool."

"Orca's dashboard is excellent. My team needs to be able to focus on specific areas for improvement in our cloud environment. And most recently, we've started to get good use out of sonar, the search capabilities, and the alert creation."

More Orca Security pros

Cons

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security has limited legacy system support and may not fully support older operating systems or legacy environments."

"A vulnerability alert would appear, and we'd fix it, but then the same alert would return the next day."

"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."

"Singularity Cloud Security currently lacks a break-glass account function, which is a critical component for implementing Single Sign-On as it allows for regaining access in emergencies."

"The main area for improvement I want to see is for the platform to become less resource-intensive. Right now, it can slow down processes on the machine, and it would be a massive improvement if it were more lightweight than it currently is."

"A few YouTube videos could be helpful. There isn't a lot of information out there to look at."

"Crafting customized policies can be tricky."

"The SentinelOne customer support needs improvement, as they are sometimes late in responding, which is critical in a production issue."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security cons

"I would suggest building a single product that addresses endpoint server protection, attack surface, and everything else in one solution. That is the main disadvantage with the product. If we are incorporating some features, we end up in a situation where this solution is for the server, and that one is for the client, or this is for identity, and that is for our application. They're not bundling it. Commercially, we can charge for different licenses, but on the implementation side, it's tough to help our end-customer understand which product they're getting."

"Sometimes, it's very difficult to determine when I need Microsoft Defender for Cloud for a special resource group or certain kinds of products. That's not an issue directly with the product, though."

"Microsoft Defender for Cloud is not compatible with Linux machines."

"The product was a bit complex to set up earlier, however, it is a bit streamlined now."

"I recommend that they extend the scope for legacy infra assets."

"Customizing some of the compliance requirements based on individual needs seems like the biggest area of improvement. There should be an option to turn specific controls on and off based on how your solution is configured."

"From a compliance standpoint, they can include some more metrics and some specific compliances such as GDPR."

"They could always work to make the pricing a bit lower."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud cons

"Orca needs improvement in snoozing or dismissing specific alarms. Currently, snoozing dismisses all future vulnerabilities related to a CVE."

"The presentation of the data in the dashboard is a little bit chaotic."

"The automatic scan only runs every 24 hours, and if an alert is remediated within an hour, it still remains until the next scheduled scan."

"A notable limitation with Orca Security is its scanning feature. The automatic scan only runs every 24 hours, and if an alert is remediated within an hour, it still remains until the next scheduled scan."

"The documentation for Orca Security could be improved."

"I think Orca could give me more alerts. It could give me a dashboard with all the specific types of alerts I want to see for the day. It should just be one click."

"It's not all clouds that they are currently onboarded with. For instance, they are not yet with public cloud and many other private clouds."

"There were a couple of times when Orca was down when I was trying to access it. I work strange hours because all of my team is in the UK right now. It was 2 a.m. on a Saturday and I was trying to log in but it wasn't working. But relative to my other security tools, Orca is definitely the most stable that I've seen."

More Orca Security cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"SentinelOne is relatively cheap. If ten is the most expensive, I would rate it a seven."

"I am not involved in the pricing, but it is cost-effective."

"PingSafe falls within the typical price range for cloud security platforms."

"The licensing is easy to understand and implement, with some flexibility to accommodate dynamic environments."

"PingSafe is less expensive than other options."

"It's not expensive. The product is in its initial growth stages and appears more competitive compared to others. It comes in different variants, and I believe the enterprise version costs around $55 per user per year. I would rate it a five, somewhere fairly moderate."

"Pricing is based on modules, which was ideal for us."

"Singularity Cloud Workload Security's pricing is good."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pricing and cost advice

"We only use the free tier, so we haven't faced any pricing, setup costs, or licensing challenges."

"The pricing and licensing of Microsoft Defender for Cloud have been good for us. We appreciate the licensing approach based on employee count rather than a big enterprise license."

"The tool is pretty expensive."

"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."

"It is bundled with our enterprise subscription, which makes it easy to go for it. It is available by default, and there is no extra cost for using the standard features."

"It has global licensing. It comes with multiple licenses since there are around 50,000 people (in our organization) who look at it."

"Defender's basic version is free, which is good. Many of our teams are evaluating the paid version against third-party products."

"Microsoft's licensing and pricing are sometimes complicated. If someone is new to Microsoft's licensing, they might have difficulty with it."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pricing and cost advice

"The pricing depends on how many assets you have running in your cloud and how many environments you have. If you have a dev environment, test environment, and a production environment then it's really important that you have coverage for all of them."

"The most expensive solution is Palo Alto. They claim to be very robust. The next most expensive is Wiz, followed by Orca and all the rest."

"Orca is very competitive when compared to the alternatives and is not the most expensive in the market, that's for sure."

"Orca Security is cheaper compared to other solutions in the same space."

"Orca Security charges are based on cloud workloads. So, it's based on workloads. If we look at one feature, it might be expensive."

"I think their pricing model is aligned with market demand. Of course, Orca could probably better align their pricing model with the needs of smaller businesses as well as some larger-scale enterprises with millions of assets. But in all fairness, I think the Orca sales team has been accommodating and ensured that we're happy with the pricing."

"We have a total of 25 licenses for this solution. The solution is on a pay-and-you-use model."

"Overall, the pricing is reasonable and the discounts have been acceptable."

More Orca Security pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

University

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...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PingSafe?

It is cost-effective compared to other solutions in the market.

See all answers

What needs improvement with PingSafe?

In version 2, a lot of rules have been deployed for Kubernetes security and CDR, which makes a lot of issues of criti...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Microsoft Defender for Cloud?

The entire Defender Suite is tightly coupled, integrated, and collaborative.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Orca Security?

It's for protection. It's an agentless tool. We don't need to install anything at a customer's premises. We can just ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Orca Security?

Orca Security could improve its ticket creation process. Currently, it allows for creating tickets in only one bucket...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Orca Security?

I am primarily using Orca Security for cloud security. Being part of the vulnerability management team, I utilize Orc...

See all answers

Comparisons

Wiz vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 24% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 20% of the time

AWS GuardDuty vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 8% of the time

Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 5% of the time

Aqua Cloud Security Platform vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 4% of the time

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security Competitors

AWS GuardDuty vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 21% of the time

Wiz vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 13% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 12% of the time

Microsoft Defender XDR vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 4% of the time

Wazuh vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 3% of the time

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Competitors

Wiz vs Orca Security

Compared 36% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Orca Security

Compared 7% of the time

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security vs Orca Security

Compared 5% of the time

AWS Security Hub vs Orca Security

Compared 4% of the time

Aqua Cloud Security Platform vs Orca Security

Compared 2% of the time

More Orca Security Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

March 2025

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security report

Download SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

March 2025

Download Microsoft Defender for Cloud product report

Buyer's Guide

Orca Security

March 2025

Download Orca Security product report

Also Known As

PingSafe

Microsoft Azure Security Center, Azure Security Center, Microsoft ASC, Azure Defender

No data available

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

SentinelOne

Microsoft

Demo not available

Orca Security

Overview

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security protects cloud workloads, offering advanced threat detection and automated response. It integrates seamlessly with cloud environments and secures containerized applications and virtual machines against vulnerabilities.

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is renowned for its efficiency in mitigating threats in real-time. The platform integrates effortlessly with existing cloud environments, ensuring robust cloud security management with minimal manual intervention. Securing containerized applications and virtual machines, it excels in threat intelligence and endpoint protection. However, improvements are needed in performance during high workload periods, and more integrations with third-party tools and better documentation would be beneficial. Users often find the installation process complex, support response times slow, and the dashboard's navigation unintuitive.

What are the key features of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security?

Real-time Threat Detection: Identifies and mitigates threats as they occur.
Automated Response: Automatically responds to threats to minimize impact.
Ease of Deployment: Simple setup process with scalable options.
Machine Learning Insights: AI-driven insights enhance threat prevention.
Seamless Integration: Integrates with cloud environments for unified security management.

What are the primary benefits or ROI to expect from SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security?

Enhanced Threat Mitigation: Improved security against real-time threats.
Reduced Manual Intervention: Automated processes save time and resources.
Scalability: Easily adapts to growing security requirements.
Centralized Management: Manage security across platforms from a single console.
Advanced Threat Intelligence: Provides in-depth analysis and protection.

In specific industries, SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is implemented to safeguard critical data and infrastructure. Organizations in finance, healthcare, and technology depend on its real-time threat detection and automated response to protect sensitive information. Its ability to secure containerized applications and virtual machines is particularly valuable in dynamic environments where rapid scaling is necessary.

SentinelOne

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a comprehensive security solution that provides advanced threat protection for cloud workloads. It offers real-time visibility into the security posture of cloud environments, enabling organizations to quickly identify and respond to potential threats. With its advanced machine learning capabilities, Microsoft Defender for Cloud can detect and block sophisticated attacks, including zero-day exploits and fileless malware.

The solution also provides automated remediation capabilities, allowing security teams to quickly and easily respond to security incidents. With Microsoft Defender for Cloud, organizations can ensure the security and compliance of their cloud workloads, while reducing the burden on their security teams.

Microsoft

Orca Security is the pioneer of agentless cloud security that is trusted by hundreds of enterprises globally. Orca makes cloud security possible for enterprises moving to and scaling in the cloud with its patented SideScanning™ technology and Unified Data Model. The Orca Cloud Security Platform delivers the world's most comprehensive coverage and visibility of risks across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Kubernetes.

At Orca Security, we’re on a mission to make it fast, easy, and cost effective for organizations to address critical cloud security issues so they can operate in the cloud with confidence.

Key Platform Features:

Agentless: Complete, centralized coverage of the entire cloud estate, without the need for installing and configuring agents or layering together multiple siloed tools. Full visibility of cloud misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, workload protection, malware scanning, image scanning, file integrity monitoring and more.
Asset Inventory: Get a complete inventory of all your public cloud assets, including detailed information on installed OSes, software, and applications, as well as data and network assets such as storage buckets, Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), and Security Groups.

Attack Path Analysis: Visualize attack vectors to critical assets or crown jewels. See which assets are susceptible to lateral movement, assume roles, privilege escalation, and more.

Risk Prioritization: Prioritize the 1% of risks that matter the most, based on impact scores. Secure the vulnerabilities and misconfigured targets (critical assets) and eliminate the potential risks residing on the attack paths to those targets.
Cloud Threat Detection: Monitor for malicious activity within your entire cloud estate. Be aware of detected threats, user behavior anomalies and more.

Breach Forensics: Log every change and all activity into a central repository for investigation procedures to confirm or deny entry and compromises within the cloud estate.
Cloud To Dev (Shift Left): Orca’s built-in shift left capabilities enables DevOps to focus more security attention earlier in the CI/CD pipelines. Security teams are able to trace a production risk (misconfiguration or vulnerability) directly to the original source code repository from which it came, even down to the exact line of code that is at the root of the identified risk.
Compliance: Choose from over 60 preconfigured compliance frameworks, cloud security best practices, CIS Benchmarks, or design and build your own compliance framework for fast and continuous reporting.
Security Score: The Orca Security Score is found on Orca’s Risk Dashboard and is updated daily. The overall score is calculated based on performance in the following five categories - Suspicious Activity, IAM, Data at Risk, Vulnerable Assets, and Responsiveness. Since the scores are percentage based and not raw numbers, you can objectively make comparisons to other organizations within your industry or business units of different sizes. In addition to reporting to senior management, the Orca Security Score can help with internal self-monitoring, as a way of measuring risk mitigation efforts, to know where to focus efforts, and track progress.

Orca Security Benefits

Consolidate technologies to reduce costs and complexity:

“The more I can get out of this one solution, the better. I see Orca as the tool where we get all cloud-related security data.” - Joshua Scott, Head of Security and IT | Postman

Avoid costly breaches:

"I look at proactive asset discovery, configuration management, and vulnerability management as being able to find a vulnerability before the bad guys do and being able to deal with it before something exploits it. This is what Orca does for us." - Doug Graham, CSO & CPO | Lionbridge

Increase team productivity and efficiency by focusing on high-value activities and solving the 1% of risks that matter most:

"Orca is unique in that it locates vulnerabilities with precision and delivers tangible, actionable results – without having to sift through all the noise." - Aaron Brown, Senior Cloud Security Engineer | Sisense

Quick Time-to-Value with Immediate ROI:

"Orca told us we could have some visibility within 5 or 10 minutes, and I thought, ‘There’s no way.’ Well, I was wrong. They really did it." - Thomas Hill, CISO | Live Oak Bank

Reduce MTTR and remove operational friction:

“We can’t ask developers things like ‘Did you think about security? When you start a new VM on AWS, can you please let me know so I’m able to scan it? Can you please deploy an agent on that machine for me?’ We need a better way to work. Orca provides that better way by eliminating organizational friction.” - Erwin Geirnaert, Cloud Security Architect | NG Data

Orca Security

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is trusted by companies such as ASOS, Vatenfall, SWC Technology Partners, and more.

BeyondTrust, Postman, Digital Turbine, Solarisbank, Lemonade, C6 Bank, Docebo, Vercel, and Vivino

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Orca Security

March 2025

Free Report: Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Orca Security

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Orca Security and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.

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