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 7.5, while Varonis is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.0. Additionally, 92% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Varonis users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention and Varonis Platform both compete in the data protection and compliance category. While Microsoft Purview stands out with strong integration into the Microsoft ecosystem, Varonis excels in data governance and comprehensive threat management.

Features: Microsoft Purview focuses on auto-labeling, integration with Microsoft services, and real-time compliance insights. It supports education on data handling and achieves broad platform compatibility. In contrast, Varonis emphasizes robust data governance, threat management, and access monitoring with a focus on identifying behavioral anomalies within unstructured data sources. It offers a comprehensive reporting system.

Room for Improvement: Microsoft Purview needs enhancements in label setup, endpoint coverage, and third-party system integration, facing issues with stability and scalability. Varonis requires improvement in cloud migration and licensing costs, along with document interface enhancements and better IAM tool integration.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Microsoft Purview offers multi-cloud support with reliable technical documentation, though it struggles with delays in support and lacks a robust ticketing system. Varonis provides superior technical support, promptly addressing setup issues, supported by well-regarded documentation, though it faces challenges with licensing complexity.

Pricing and ROI: Microsoft Purview pricing is tied to the E5 bundle, making it competitive and cost-effective for large enterprises, though potentially expensive for smaller ones. Varonis has high licensing costs, justified for Fortune 500 companies by its feature set. Both platforms demonstrate ROI, especially when leveraging existing licenses to minimize additional costs.

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

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention vs. Varonis Platform

July 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 861,524 peers since 2012

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

Carlos Alam Hernandez Baruch

Engineer at SITMEXICO

Fast and secure deployments simplify operations for government and fintech clients

It is a fast and secure DNS. It is very easy to deploy, and my customers are happy with this tool. Additionally, the CDN performance in Mexico is excellent, providing fast service and tools. It offers reliability during high-traffic periods, ensuring no impact on the environment. It helps my clients avoid using on-premise boxes, simplifying operations as they only use the prices on Cloudflare.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

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

"What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering, so it's a valuable tool."

"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."

"Cloudflare has many features."

"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall."

"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."

"The features of Cloudflare were found to be more beneficial and led to the decision to utilize it over other options."

"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."

More Cloudflare pros

"We can triage based on quick and sometimes constant alerts."

"I rate Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention's stability a ten out of ten."

"Because everything is on Microsoft and we use Azure, integration with the product is easier. That's the most important thing when you use many Microsoft products. It's easier to integrate everything in one place."

"When you are going to use Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention, most of the setup is already done by default as per your needs."

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

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

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

"The solution's most valuable feature is the mature O365 DLP, which works with SharePoint and Teams."

More Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention pros

"On the Varonis side, technical support is phenomenal. Their ability to explain is very good, and they seem to be very knowledgeable. When I get an alert that doesn't quite make sense, they dive in there and kind of take me through it. That's very useful and very good. There are some false alerts, but it is better to have a false alert than no alert at all."

"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 analytics would have to be our most valuable feature."

"I also appreciate the reporting feature, which allows for the extraction of various reports based on specific needs. These reports can be used for audit purposes, such as tracking changes in file locations or deletions."

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

"Varonis offers robust data access governance, allowing us to understand which sensitive data exists and who has access to it."

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

"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."

More Varonis Platform pros

Cons

"Technical support is lacking."

"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."

"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."

"There are some issues with the CDN services."

"Cloudflare's free plan is limited to 5,000 records for their free plan. They should increase that. For example, if I create a domain called abc.com and a subdomain called a.abc.com, my record count will be two. I can make a maximum of 5,000 subdomains. However, if we use our own DNS hosted on another provider, there is no limit. Their free plan also lacks name server customization."

"Cloudflare's console should be made more user-friendly."

"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."

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

More Cloudflare cons

"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."

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

"The solution should provide better integration with other systems."

"I would like Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention to be on the source code or SQL databases. It is difficult to do classification and labeling when you have a third-party source code or a third-party Oracle database. It is seamless when it comes to Microsoft documents but is not so with third-party source codes. Microsoft needs to work on it a little bit more."

"Improving Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention would involve recognizing that the whole AI path we are all on is going to help, given the massive amount of data we handle; even if there are true positives, implementing a degree of severity ranking is essential."

"There is a lot of ambiguity when you are setting up labels, such as sensitive information labels. It is a little daunting at first if you don't have prior knowledge, and there is a little bit of a learning curve for setting up the labels. Some of the setup wizards could be more helpful from an AI perspective. They can streamline the setup through more AI technologies so that you don't have to jump through so many hoops and different menus and dropdowns. It would be useful to have a setup wizard that is more hands-off and engaging for setting up the information type labels. If you tell them this is what we're trying to protect, it should basically start to lead you down that path of best practices. Such a feature would be great."

"The amount of false positives and the hash issue we had have brought down the score for me."

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

More Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention cons

"The product is very complicated."

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

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

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

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

"The solution's areas of improvement are the interface and the dependency on on-premises deployment for some components."

"We have Microsoft Office 365. I just saw an article today which says that they're actually getting integrated with Microsoft Office 365, which would be a useful feature. For user-based reports, log on activity, and stuff like that, it doesn't seem to really be present like Log360. That could just be my inexperience with it. I've been dealing with it for only about two and a half months."

"One area for improvement is the calculation engine. When applying rules in Varonis, especially for large datasets (terabytes of data), the calculations can be slow and require time to process. Speeding up this process would be beneficial."

More Varonis Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."

"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."

"We are using the free version."

"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."

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

"The product's pricing is cheap."

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

"We don't have any issues with the price."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"If one is very cheap and ten is very expensive, I rate the price as one out of ten."

"The solution’s pricing is reasonable."

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

"I am satisfied with the tool's pricing."

"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."

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

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

"The pricing is reasonable."

More Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention pricing and cost advice

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

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

"You could do a subscription, where you pay yearly, or you could purchase it outright. The licensing cost is based on the number of users on the system that you are monitoring."

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

"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."

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

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare 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?

My experience with the pricing, setup costs, and licensing is not something I manage directly since I'm the owner ope...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention?

Improving Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention would involve recognizing that the whole AI path we are all on is go...

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?

Varonis started as an on-premises solution and is transitioning to cloud. It hasn't fully moved yet, which is an area...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Varonis Platform?

The primary use case for Varonis Platform is data discovery, specifically for discovering sensitive data in our organ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Myra Security DDoS Protection vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention vs Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention

Compared 12% of the time

Symantec Data Loss Prevention vs Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention

Compared 12% of the time

Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform vs Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention

Compared 11% of the time

Amazon Macie vs Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention

Compared 9% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint vs Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention

Compared 3% of the time

More Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention Competitors

Microsoft Purview Data Governance vs Varonis Platform

Compared 20% of the time

Cyera vs Varonis Platform

Compared 11% of the time

BigID vs Varonis Platform

Compared 11% of the time

Wiz vs Varonis Platform

Compared 5% of the time

CrowdStrike Falcon vs Varonis Platform

Compared 2% of the time

More Varonis Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

July 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention

June 2025

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention report

Download Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention product report

Buyer's Guide

Varonis Platform

June 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.

Information Not Available

Nottingham Building Society

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention vs. Varonis Platform

July 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: July 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention vs. Varonis Platform report.

See our list of best Data Loss Prevention (DLP) vendors.

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.