Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Tenable Security Center comparison

Microsoft and Tenable are both solutions in the Vulnerability Management category. Microsoft is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.1, while Tenable is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.5. Microsoft holds a 5.6% mindshare in VM, compared to Tenable’s 5.7% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Tenable users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

Tenable Security Center and Microsoft Defender for Cloud are prominent products in the cybersecurity domain, specifically in vulnerability management and cloud security. Microsoft Defender for Cloud seems to have an edge due to its extensive integrations, regulatory compliance features, and centralized management.

Features: Tenable Security Center offers a customizable dashboard, Assurance Report Card, and a distributed scan model, optimizing its performance for large-scale network management. Conversely, Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides strong features like regulatory compliance, threat protection, and seamless integration with Microsoft Sentinel, enhancing overall security insights and cloud service management.

Room for Improvement: Tenable Security Center could benefit from enhanced flexibility in report configuration and better integration capabilities. Its web application scanning and export functionalities also need improvement. Microsoft Defender for Cloud requires improvements around pricing structure transparency and user interface consistency, along with reducing false positives through advanced AI capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Tenable Security Center operates mainly on-premises, which could complicate deployment compared to cloud-based solutions, although its customer service is generally responsive with varying international support. Microsoft Defender for Cloud, suitable for hybrid and multi-cloud environments, facilitates straightforward deployment for cloud-centric organizations, with technical support available but potentially improved at initial tiers.

Pricing and ROI: Tenable Security Center, though considered expensive due to asset-based pricing, offers a high ROI in vulnerability management. Microsoft Defender for Cloud operates with a tiered pricing approach that offers more flexibility and cost-effectiveness when integrated with other Microsoft services, but its complex pricing may lead to significant overall costs, though providing a substantial ROI demonstrated in threat protection and infrastructure insights.

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

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Tenable Security Center

April 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

Zafran Security

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Vulnerability Management category, the mindshare of Zafran Security is 0.4%. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is 5.6%, up from 4.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tenable Security Center is 5.7%, down from 11.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Vulnerability Management

Featured Reviews

Israel Cavazos Landini

Associate Director IT Security Operations at Novartis

Weekly insights and risk analysis facilitate informed security decisions

I appreciate the weekly insights Zafran provides, which include critical topics for networks and IT security, allowing us to evaluate which insights apply to our environment. The organization score feature is valuable to keep the leadership team updated on how our infrastructure fares security-wise. The applicable risk level versus base risk level feature is beneficial because prior to Zafran, we only used the base risk level, but now understand that risk depends on the asset itself. Zafran is an excellent tool.

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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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OndrejKOVAC

Solution engineer at EXPERTience

Empower clients with risk-based vulnerability management through continuous workflow and valuable insights

Tenable Security Center could improve by implementing more dynamic data displays and translating reports into European languages. This is especially relevant in Central Eastern Europe, where clients often require reports in local languages. Additionally, the licensing model could be more flexible for managed security providers, similar to a pay-as-you-go model.

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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

"Zafran has become an indispensable tool in our cybersecurity arsenal."

"We are able to see the real risk of a vulnerability on our environment with our security tools."

"Zafran is an excellent tool."

"Defender for Cloud provides a prioritized list of remediations for security issues, reducing risk and improving security operations."

"This is a platform as a service provided by Azure. We don't need to install or maintain Azure Security Center. It is a ready-made service available in Azure. This is one of the main things that we like. If you look at similar tools, we have to install, maintain, and update services. Whereas, Azure Security Center manages what we are using. This is a good feature that has helped us a lot."

"My favorite part of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is the compliance features. Defender covers a wide range of workloads, on par with competing products on the market."

"Microsoft Defender for Cloud monitors our entire cloud environment. It enables conditional access and incorporates features like number matching and single sign-on for all our cloud apps. It is great for protecting against ransomware and various security threats."

"I have not experienced any difficulties or issues with the stability of Microsoft Defender for Cloud."

"One of the features that I like about the solution is it is both a hybrid cloud and also multi-cloud. We never know what company we're going to buy, and therefore we are ready to go. If they have GCP or AWS, we have support for that as well. It offers a single-panel blast across multiple clouds."

"It has seamless integration with any of the services I mentioned, on Azure, such as IaaS platforms, virtual machines, applications, or databases, because it's an in-house product from Microsoft within the Azure ecosystem."

"The most valuable features of the solution are the insights, meaning the remediation suggestions, as well as the incident alerts."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pros

"What is useful to me is being able to fulfill very customized scanning policies. In the clinical environment, because of vendor control, we can't perform credential-vulnerability scanning. And network scans, which I've done before, can cause a lot of impact. Being able to create very customized policies to be able to routinely scan and audit our clinical networks, while simultaneously not causing impact, is important to us."

"Overall, I rate the solution 9.8 out of 10."

"Tenable Security Center scans networks and gives reports."

"The most valuable features of Tenable SC are the reports and the dashboards."

"The product is our second solution, and we are happy that it meets our requirements."

"I think that this is a good solution for evaluating vulnerability in the network."

"Support is knowledgeable."

"The most important features are the dashboard and reporting. The dashboard provides statistics with graphs and bar charts for our management."

More Tenable Security Center pros

Cons

"Initially, we were somewhat concerned about the scalability of Zafran due to our large asset count and the substantial amount of information we needed to process."

"Another thing that could be improved was that they could recommend processes on how to react to alerts, or recommend best practices based on how other organizations do things if they receive an alert about XYZ."

"The most significant areas for improvement are in the security of our identity and endpoints and the posture of the cloud environment. Better protection for our cloud users and cloud apps is always welcome."

"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."

"It's hard to reach someone who understands my problems. I haven't had many issues, so I haven't called them."

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

"The solution could extend its capabilities to other cloud providers. Right now, if you want to monitor a virtual machine on another cloud, you can do that. However, this cannot be done with other cloud platform services. I hope once that is available then Defender for Cloud will be a unified solution for all cloud platform services."

"When you work with it, the only problem that we're struggling with is that we have 21 different subscriptions we're trying to apply security to. It's impossible to keep everything organized."

"The product must improve its UI."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud cons

"The solution should provide better web application features and support."

"Tenable SC could improve by making the creation of the initial reports easier that correspond to our network."

"The web application scanning area can be improved."

"There is not much room for improvement. However, there should be a guide that describes the step-by-step procedures for doing tasks. Otherwise, training is required from a senior guy to a junior guy."

"The product should provide risk-based vulnerability management."

"We would like to see the inclusion of external IPs and simplified reporting that's easier to deal with"

"The biggest issue I have with the solution is when I'm using the scanning it picks up the original DNS of that device. That means, before we image it and actually change the DNS to something within our company structure, it'll just be random numbers and letters and Tenable will stick to that DNS for a long time."

"The product could be user-friendly, and they could enhance the web application's security features."

More Tenable Security Center cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"The tool is pretty expensive."

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

"The product's pricing policy is generally favorable."

"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."

"The price of the solution is good for the features we receive and there is an additional cost for Microsoft premier support. However, some of my potential customers have found it to be expensive and have gone on to choose another solution."

"There are improvements that have to be made to the licensing. Currently, for servers, it has to be done by grouping the servers on a single subscription... We don't have an option whereby, if all those resources are in one subscription, we can have each of the individual servers subject to different planning."

"The pricing is very difficult because every type of Defender for Cloud has its own metrics and pricing. If you have Cloud for Key Vault, the pricing is different than it is for storage. Every type has its own pricing list and rules."

"There are two different plans. We're using the secure basic plan, but we have used the end security plan as well. There are additional costs, but it gives us more functionalities compared to the basic plan."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pricing and cost advice

"For 500 users the licensing fee is roughly $100,000."

"This solution's price is quite high."

"Tenable is open-source."

"The pricing is more than Nexpose."

"The tool costs around 15,000 Saudi riyals monthly."

"Though reasonable, the main competitor of Tenable SC, Rapid7, offers a more aggressive and better priced product."

"I use a local license to perform penetration testing and I'm pretty happy with everything when it comes to pricing and licensing."

"The pricing depends upon the number of IPs."

More Tenable Security Center pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Educational Organization

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

11%

Government

10%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zafran Security?

I find that the pricing for Zafran aligns well with the comprehensive features it offers. The asset and user-based li...

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What needs improvement with Zafran Security?

While Zafran Security is already a powerful tool, there are areas where it could be further improved to provide even ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Zafran Security?

Our primary use case for Zafran involves leveraging it to enhance our vulnerability risk scoring methodology. In toda...

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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...

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What do you like most about Tenable SC?

The tool's dashboard and reporting capabilities match our company's needs since we are able to modify the basic view ...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Tenable SC?

Tenable Security Center is quite expensive, particularly for the CEE region, causing us to lose cases due to its pric...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Tenable SC?

Tenable Security Center could improve by implementing more dynamic data displays and translating reports into Europea...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 53% of the time

Vulcan Cyber vs Zafran Security

Compared 22% of the time

ServiceNow Security Operations vs Zafran Security

Compared 15% of the time

Tenable Vulnerability Management vs Zafran Security

Compared 10% of the time

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AWS GuardDuty vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 20% 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 11% of the time

Microsoft Defender XDR vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 4% of the time

Orca Security vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 3% of the time

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Tenable Vulnerability Management vs Tenable Security Center

Compared 16% of the time

Qualys VMDR vs Tenable Security Center

Compared 12% of the time

Rapid7 InsightVM vs Tenable Security Center

Compared 11% of the time

Tenable Nessus vs Tenable Security Center

Compared 10% of the time

Forescout Platform vs Tenable Security Center

Compared 3% of the time

More Tenable Security Center Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)

March 2025

Download Zafran Security product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

April 2025

Download Microsoft Defender for Cloud product report

Buyer's Guide

Tenable Security Center

March 2025

Download Tenable Security Center product report

Also Known As

No data available

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

Tenable.sc, Tenable Unified Security, Tenable SecurityCenter

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

Zafran Security

Microsoft

Demo not available

Tenable

Overview

Zafran Security integrates with existing security tools to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities effectively, proving that most critical vulnerabilities are not exploitable, optimizing threat management.

Zafran Security introduces an innovative operating model for managing security threats and vulnerabilities. By leveraging the threat exposure management platform, it pinpoints and prioritizes exploitable vulnerabilities, reducing risk through immediate remediation. This platform enhances your hybrid cloud security by normalizing vulnerability signals and integrating specific IT context data, such as CVE runtime presence and internet asset reachability, into its analysis. No longer reliant on patch windows, Zafran Security allows you to manage risks actively.

What are the key features of Zafran Security?

Threat Exposure Management: Utilizes existing tools to prioritize vulnerabilities and manage threats.
Integrative Analysis: Combines security data with IT context for precise vulnerability management.
Real-time Risk Reduction: Enables immediate risk management without waiting for patches.
Hybrid Cloud Compatibility: Functions across diverse cloud environments for comprehensive security.

What benefits can users expect from Zafran Security?

Improved Security: Enhances protection by efficiently identifying and mitigating risks.
Cost Efficiency: Reduces unnecessary patching expenses by confirming non-exploitable vulnerabilities.
Time Savings: Frees developers to focus on root causes by handling immediate threats.
Comprehensive Insight: Offers a holistic view of security threats and vulnerabilities.

In industries where security is paramount, such as finance and healthcare, Zafran Security provides invaluable protection by ensuring that only exploitable vulnerabilities are addressed. It allows entities to maintain robust security measures while allocating resources efficiently, fitting seamlessly into existing security strategies.

Zafran Security

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

Get a risk-based view of your IT, security and compliance posture so you can quickly identify, investigate and prioritize your most critical assets and vulnerabilities.

Managed on-premises and powered by Nessus technology, the Tenable Security Center (formerly Tenable.sc) suite of products provides the industry’s most comprehensive vulnerability coverage with real-time continuous assessment of your network. It’s your complete end-to-end vulnerability management solution.

Tenable

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

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

IBM, Sempra Energy, Microsoft, Apple, Adidas, Union Pacific

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Tenable Security Center

April 2025

Free Report: Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Tenable Security Center

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

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