We compared Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps (MDA) and Qualys VM across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Comparison Results: Qualys VMDR is commended for its prioritization mechanism, comprehensive monitoring, and vulnerability management, while Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is valued for its threat detection capabilities and integration with other Microsoft solutions. Both products require improvements in various areas like user experience, integration, reporting, pricing, visibility, and policy management. The pricing for both products is considered fair but expensive. Customer support for both products has received mixed reviews, with room for improvement in response time and consistency.
"The protection offered by the product is the most valuable feature. It detects vulnerabilities or traps on our users' phones and then prompts them to clean up their devices. Tools we used previously would only discover, which required us to gather information on the backend, so Lookout is a welcome upgrade."
"The solution is stable."
"The most valuable features are the antivirus as a whole, the anti-malware, and all of the protection features that scan our enterprise devices."
"On the outside, the main differentiation is because Lookout ingest. They have ingested basically all of the apps for the last ten years and all the versions of all the apps, and we have that in a corporate database that allows us to do very large-scale machine learning and analysis on that data set. That's not something that any of the competitors really have the capability to do because they don't have access to the data set. A lot of the apps you can no longer get them because that version of the app is five or six years old, and it just doesn't exist anywhere anymore, except within our infrastructure. So, the ability to have that very rich dataset and learn from that dataset is a real differentiator."
"The ability to prevent users from using certain applications is one of the most valuable features. It doesn't require any configuration for implementation from the client perspective. It just works right away and gives you the information you need."
"Shadow IT discovery is the feature I like the most."
"It is very easy to use, which is what we look for in these types of solutions."
"The most valuable feature is the alerting system."
"There are a lot of features with benefits, including discovery, investigation, and putting controls around things. You can't say that you like the investigation part but not the discovery. Everything is correlated; that's how the tool works."
"Better logging allows us to find problems and take appropriate steps to lock them out."
"Threat detection is its key feature, and that's why we use this tool. It gives an alert if a PC is attacked or there is any kind of anomaly, such as there is a spike in sending emails or we see an unauthorized website being accessed. So, it keeps us on our toes. We get to know that there is something wrong, and we can isolate the user and find any issues with it. So, threat detection is very robust in this tool."
"On-demand scanning is the most valuable feature. In addition, it's a fairly fluid product. It syncs back to the cloud and provides metrics. It's pretty intelligent."
"This is one of the best products I have worked with so far. I like the power of Qualys, and it's a better solution because you can scan a compact file, a BIT file, or batch files. The product already knows what's happening inside, and you don't need to expand the package. Tenable will do the same thing, but you need to have a package issuance claim. With Qualys, we can immediately understand the file, even a compact file. If there's some kind of discovery or incident, you will know what happened in the environment."
"Intuitive and easy to use."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"The most valuable features of Qualys VM are its ability to do proper vulnerability assessment. It has a lot of updates for all the vulnerability databases from all over the globe. It's an amazing solution when it comes to the versatility of the features it has. Additionally, the reports are very good. It generates very detailed reports about the vulnerabilities inside the environment"
"Monitors workstations and servers for vulnerabilities and creates reports."
"We also like the flexibility in their licensing."
"The initial setup was good. We didn't have any problems with it."
"Qualys has a continuous endpoint monitoring feature for agent-based scanning. Once you deploy the solution, it monitors everything that is happening every 30 minutes. Then, if there are any vulnerabilities, they are reported."
"We just submitted an enhancement request reflecting the main area we want to see improvement in; the APIs. Currently, we're able to build dashboards, but it's somewhat backward because we use our MDM API to create them. Lookout should provide API to customers so we can query our data and use it in our cloud, and this is the only outstanding area for improvement with the product right now."
"Lookout was moving into the SSE space. And so their work on SecureWeb Gateway and SD-WAN is still sort of evolving."
"From the analysis that we've done, they do seem to be maybe a step behind in trying to enter the market with a new solution. But when they do pick up, they do come out with some good products."
"The stability depends on the service from where you access it. Because sometimes, the place you are in, you have Gateway. You don't have Gateway. The gateway is overutilized. At the end, you need to go through their gateways. And this is the key point here. You have a tracking point. If it's not well orchestrated, and it scales up as you add more to the existing team, you will suffer"
"Defender could integrate better with multi-cloud and hybrid environments. It requires some additional configuration to ingest data from non-Azure environments and integrate it with Sentinel."
"It doesn't actually decrease the time to respond. This has been an issue with Microsoft recently. Sometimes, there is a delay when it comes to getting an alert policy email... Sometimes it takes two or three hours for that email to be sent."
"In the future, I would like to see more plug-and-play capabilities that use AI to tell you what needs to be done. It would be helpful if it scanned our devices and made security suggestions, on a configuration basis."
"Defender for Cloud apps is primarily useful for Azure apps. It has limited capabilities for applications based on other cloud platforms."
"There are challenges with detection and there are challenges with false-positive rates."
"Sometimes, we'll get false positive alarms. For example, when a SharePoint path has no file sharing, but there is an external user, it will trigger an alarm that the file has been shared with an external user... the alerting mechanism should be more precise when giving you an alert about what activity has been done with the file..."
"We sometimes get errors when we create policies, which is somewhat annoying because some policies stop working due to misconfigurations. We find this challenging because it limits our options for troubleshooting an issue."
"The interface needs to be more user-friendly."
"They should make it accessible for more operating systems."
"The reporting and the GUI need improvements."
"One of the biggest issues from the clients' perspective is that all Qualys computing is on the cloud."
"It is a struggle to be able to pull our report and to be able to do onboarding using automated tools."
"The price could be better. Asset view is still a legacy feature. I'm not able to extract the information about the asset with complete details. It would be better if they fixed that in the next release. I know Qualys is already working on it, so I'm hopeful it will be available in the next five or six months. That would be something that's changed where I seek improvement."
"I would like to see more accuracy in detections, better reporting capabilities, and better dashboard download capabilities."
"Qualys VM's vulnerability scan could be improved, especially the number of CVE numbers it can manage at a time."
"It's too early for me to say if there is any room for improvement since we're in the first couple of months of using this solution."
More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Pricing and Cost Advice →
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is ranked 2nd in Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) with 30 reviews while Qualys VMDR is ranked 3rd in Risk-Based Vulnerability Management with 77 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is rated 8.4, while Qualys VMDR is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps writes "Integrates well and helps us in protecting sensitive information, but takes time to scan and apply the policies and cannot detect everything we need". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Qualys VMDR writes "Good visibility but expensive and needs better support". Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is most compared with Zscaler Internet Access, Cisco Umbrella, Netskope , Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks and FortiSASE , whereas Qualys VMDR is most compared with Tenable Nessus, Tenable Security Center, Rapid7 InsightVM, Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management and Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks.
We monitor all Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) 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.