Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention vs Varonis Platform comparison

Microsoft and Varonis are both solutions in the Data Loss Prevention (DLP) category. Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 7.7, while Varonis is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.0. Additionally, 91% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Varonis users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention and Varonis Platform compete in the data security and compliance market. Microsoft Purview seems to have the upper hand with its comprehensive integration within Microsoft's ecosystem, offering significant value to businesses already invested in these platforms.

Features: Microsoft Purview stands out with its automatic labeling capabilities, seamless integration with Azure, Dynamics 365, and Office 365, and its real-time compliance tracking, which provides robust protection across multiple environments. Varonis Platform offers a transparent toolset for monitoring data access, a unified reporting system to identify unauthorized data access, and capabilities to secure sensitive data without performance impact.

Room for Improvement: Microsoft Purview faces challenges such as complex initial label setups, limited integration with non-Microsoft environments, and a steep learning curve for users. Its licensing could also be seen as pricey. Varonis Platform could improve its user interface for better usability, enhance calculation speeds for extensive datasets, and streamline its update process for better user experience.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Microsoft Purview offers deployment across Public Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, and Private Cloud, supported by extensive documentation, though its customer service has been inconsistent. Varonis Platform supports on-premises and Hybrid Cloud environments, generally earning high praise for its effective technical support and problem resolution capabilities.

Pricing and ROI: Microsoft Purview offers an economical solution integrated into existing E5 licenses with flexible payment options, although some users find upfront costs high, the ROI is justified through saved time and expenses. Varonis' pricing is seen as expensive, but its comprehensive capabilities targeting larger organizations offer strong data security, justifying the high costs with reduced need for third-party DLP tools.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention vs. Varonis Platform Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention vs. Varonis Platform

January 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

Cloudflare

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

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.

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Roby Skariah

Solution Architect : Corporate wide systems at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Automation has given us consistent analytics and improved quality of insights into user activity

One of the valuable features of Purview is the ability to create a legal hold on a user's account within the compliance portal. That's pretty useful when it comes to any litigation or if you want to redeem the content within a mailbox, OneDrive, or a generic public SharePoint site. If you want to retain the user's data until the case is resolved, you can use the legal hold feature. Also, it's important that Purview can connect to iOS, Mac, and Android devices. With smartphone involvement, so many applications can now be accessed through them and it is important to apply Purview across operating systems and platforms. Purview's natively integrated compliance across Azure Dynamics and Office 365 is also significant because within Microsoft 365 there are multiple applications. Irrespective of whether it's Dynamics or Azure, it's very important that it has native support. The data connectivity should be efficient enough to support and secure their own platform's data. In addition, with varying regulations in different industries and matters, Purview lets you create rules and conditions based on industry standards around the world. That is important. Our company is in pharmaceuticals and the rules and conditions are different from other industries. It is important to be able to keep track of all these regulations and have a tool that is flexible enough to create the regulatory rules and conditions we need. And when it comes to data loss protection, Purview has features that can recognize patterns and detect any sort of data loss, where the data is being transferred from its platform to a different one. The default settings that come with it are pretty nice for identifying data transfer or data loss across the platform. It also comes with a lot of training materials, with use cases and examples, to help educate users and make them familiar with the tool.

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Frederic Delos

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

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.

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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 web application firewall brought us good security and a view of the accesses/blocks of the entire domain and subdomain that were accessed both by region (country) and IPs."

"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."

"Easier http to https redirect using page rules"

"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."

"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."

"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."

"The overall experience with Cloudflare is positive, with a rating of eight out of ten."

More Cloudflare pros

"There's a good amount of documentation in case you run into any problems."

"The policy customization feature is very useful, and we have successfully used the auto policy configuration."

"It's secure and can be integrated with an existing Forcepoint DLP setup."

"For Purview's natively integrated compliance across Azure, Dynamics 365, and Office 365, I would give it a 10 out of 10. It provides all the insights and information."

"We can use Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention to manage devices and site policies."

"The product can block the uploads to cloud services."

"The auto-labeling feature is definitely the most valuable feature. It goes in and labels the documents for you in different repositories. It covers the Outlook and Exchange repositories along with SharePoint and OneDrive. It is really helpful in those areas."

"It has helped our clients to reduce the time to action on insider threats because it can be integrated."

More Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention pros

"Varonis Platform is transparent and captures everything in the environment without impacting the performance. The tool helps us unify data feeds into a single reporting system."

"There's also a 90-day policy where if a user is not using the warehouse, it will automatically delete that username."

"That alerting and reporting service is great."

"The solution's classification engine is highly configurable and efficient."

"The 24/7 support is the most valuable feature. They have been able to answer support questions pretty quickly."

"The most important feature is remediation. In remediation support, there is no group permission. We'll go ahead and remediate the access from the Dell folder to the parent folder."

"The telemetry to capture everything and the reports are very easy to configure without having a developer degree."

"The solution ensures that users have not accidentally shared sensitive information with the wrong people or too many people."

More Varonis Platform pros

Cons

"It should confirm audit findings of the assigned area with auditees to ensure that the audit conclusions are based on an accurate understanding of the issues."

"It would be helpful if the solution could continue evolving to compete with the other solutions on the market."

"One area of improvement is in the Access Rules. Hypothetically, if we wanted to block or challenge traffic outside of the United States, the only way to currently do that (as far as I know) is to enter every single country outside of the United States. That could be a labor intensive job. A solution could be to enable users to create a rule where traffic is only allowed within a certain country."

"The solution could work at being less expensive. It costs a lot to use it."

"Cloudflare could be improved by introducing a mid-tier pricing option."

"For the free and Pro plans, Cloudflare could use a simple bot to provide information to users. This would improve support, especially for less advanced users who utilize the free components."

"The integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."

"Technical support is lacking."

More Cloudflare cons

"The platform can be challenging to navigate and has the potential for improvement."

"There is no AIP for Linux systems. That's a setback. Another thing it's lacking is libraries to work with Python. It has libraries for C# and C++, for example, but not for Python and, these days, Python is very useful."

"A major improvement is required in the solution's incident handling and alerting."

"Some main features are limited in comparison to other solutions."

"The tool's user interface and document fingerprinting have been very poor for my customers because uploading files manually can be problematic."

"The support is poor."

"I rate the overall solution 3 out of 10."

"They do not provide language options beyond the ones already available, so our language option is missing."

More Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention cons

"For unstructured data monitoring, it's one of the top ones, if not the top one, due to its usability."

"The GUI should be more functional. There should be a process for connecting through Chrome, Internet Explorer, etc."

"It is significantly complex."

"I'd like to see automatic updates for this solution. Currently, it's a manual process to update all the keywords"

"The remediation process can be improved. There will be no existing permission group for the McAfee channel domains. We can create a new permissions group for the required folder."

"Varonis requires more access permissions for its core functions compared to competitors, which can be a concern for companies about data safety."

"There is one thing that if I add something manually, I get so many alerts. That's the biggest bad thing."

"I would like it to have cloud integration."

More Varonis Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."

"We are using the free tier of the solution."

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."

"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."

"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."

"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"It is a part of our Microsoft licensing. We pay for a yearly renewal. Its price is reasonable for the size of the organization we are. It is fairly competitive, and you get what you pay for. We have an E5 license, and a part of understanding the E5 license is to see what all you get with it. If you really look at it from that standpoint, you get a lot of value. You have Defender and all its security features in there as well. Their licensing is fairly flexible. They have different programs. We've seen ones where you could pay for up to three to five years in advance. There is also a monthly pay-as-you-go type of deal, but we're doing a yearly renewal and fixing the budget."

"It's a little bit pricey compared to competitors, but it's not too high."

"We are using the E3 license for Microsoft 365 with the E5 compliance license add-on."

"The product has the best price-to-performance ratio."

"The solution’s pricing is reasonable."

"Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention is part of a bundle and is not sold as a standalone product."

"The cost works out to about $15 per user per month."

"You get the solution in a bundle if you get the E5 suite."

More Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention pricing and cost advice

"Licensing is on an annual basis. Maintenance and renewal fees are separate. Varonis Datalert is quite 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."

"The platform is expensive. I rate the pricing a nine out of ten."

"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."

"It's expensive, kind of, really expensive."

"Varonis Platform wasn't certainly the cheapest solution."

See which vendors are best for you

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839,255 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

23%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What do you like most about Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention?

The most valuable features are identifying sensitive data and issuing alerts.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention?

It is quite expensive for us as the shift to E5 licenses represents a significant increase in cost. The cost works ou...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention?

Endpoint Data Loss Prevention needs to be improved as it is not up to expectations. Auto labeling and Data Loss Preve...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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Compared 13% of the time

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Compared 11% of the time

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Compared 2% of the time

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Compared 16% of the time

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Compared 13% of the time

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Compared 11% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

March 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention

February 2025

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention report

Download Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention product report

Buyer's Guide

Varonis Platform

February 2025

Download Varonis Platform product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

Microsoft Endpoint Data Loss Prevention, MS Endpoint DLP, Microsoft Endpoint DLP

No data available

Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“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.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

Cloudflare

At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our mission is grounded in both the world in which we live and the future we strive to create. Today, we live in a mobile-first, cloud-first world, and the transformation we are driving across our businesses is designed to enable Microsoft and our customers to thrive in this world.

Microsoft

Varonis Platform specializes in network security and data monitoring with modules for alerting, data classification, and access management, benefiting environments like Microsoft 365.

Varonis is designed to secure data by auditing and tracking data movement. It leverages data alert and classification modules to identify and manage sensitive information. The platform enhances network security by alerting users to unexpected data modifications and deletions, crucial for effective data loss prevention. It supports unstructured data management, ensuring proper data access and permission controls. Known for its 24/7 support, Varonis offers comprehensive analytics and unified reporting, helping prevent data overexposure and facilitating compliance efforts.

What are the key features of Varonis Platform?

24/7 Support: Provides round-the-clock assistance.
Data Monitoring: Tracks data activities efficiently.
Unified Reporting: Consolidates data access reports.
Data Classification: Identifies sensitive data effectively.
Permission Management: Simplifies managing access rights.
Behavior Analytics: Detects abnormal behavior patterns.

What benefits should be highlighted in user reviews?

Enhanced Security: Improves data protection measures.
Compliance Support: Assists in meeting compliance standards.
Data Transparency: Offers clarity in data access activities.
Access Control: Ensures proper access to data.
Centralized Remediation: Eases remediation procedures.

Varonis Platform is widely utilized in industries needing stringent data confidentiality and management, such as finance and healthcare, for tracking data modifications and unauthorized access. Enterprises deploy it to manage permissions within large datasets, benefiting Microsoft 365 environments. While Varonis requires enhancements in cloud integration, the current deployment is often based on-premises, with attention to addressing the security needs and effective data handling for critical infrastructure.

Varonis

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

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Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention vs. Varonis Platform

January 2025

Free Report: Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention vs. Varonis Platform

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention vs. Varonis Platform and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

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839,255 professionals have used our research since 2012.

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We monitor all Data Loss Prevention (DLP) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.