We performed a comparison between CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security and Microsoft Defender for Cloud based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security was lauded for its strong adherence to security best practices. It particularly excels in endpoint protection and its ability to leverage machine learning and AI. Microsoft Defender for Cloud stands out for its automation, threat analysis, and security coverage. CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security could improve its Kubernetes and GCP support. Microsoft Defender for Cloud could be better integrated with non-Microsoft solutions.
Service and Support: CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security users are generally content with the support team's assistance and promptness. Microsoft Defender users generally found the support team responsive and knowledgeable, but others said outsourced support lacked technical expertise and reported longer response times in certain regions.
Ease of Deployment: The setup for CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security was deemed easy, but some users struggled with the Kubernetes implementation. Setting up Microsoft Defender for Cloud is straightforward. The solution requires minimal maintenance and seamlessly integrates with other Microsoft services.
Pricing: Users consider the pricing of CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security to be fair, but it may be pricier than on-premises alternatives. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is seen as a good deal by some users, who consider it to be cost-effective, especially when bundled with other Microsoft products.
ROI: Users have provided limited feedback about the return on investment for CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security. Microsoft Defender for Cloud has demonstrated a potentially high ROI by automating tasks and improving security posture.
"With Wiz, we get timely alerts for leaked data or any vulnerabilities already existing in our environment."
"The CSPM module has been the most effective. It was easy to deploy and covered all our accounts through APIs, requiring no agents. Wiz provides instant visibility into high-level risks that we need to address."
"I like Wiz's reporting, and it's easy to do queries. For example, it's pretty simple to find out how many servers we have and the applications installed on each. I like Wiz's security graph because you can use it to see the whole organization even if you have multiple accounts."
"The product supports out-of-the-box reporting with context about the asset and allows us to perform complex custom queries on UI."
"The automation roles are essential because we ultimately want to do less work and automate more. The dashboards are easy to read and visually pleasing. You can understand things quickly, which makes it easy for our other teams. The network and infrastructure teams don't know as much about security as we do, so it helps to have a tool that's accessible and nice to look at."
"Our most important features are those around entitlement, external exposure, vulnerabilities, and container security."
"The solution is very user-friendly."
"The vulnerability management modules and the discovery and inventory are the most valuable features. Before using Wiz, it was a very manual process for both. After implementing it, we're able to get all of the analytics into a single platform that gives us visibility across all the systems in our cloud. We're able to correspond and understand what the vulnerability landscape looks like a lot faster."
"The initial setup is easy ."
"The most significant benefit is how quickly malware and other malicious attacks are detected."
"Cloud security posture management (CSPM) is most valuable."
"Technical support is helpful."
"The RTR feature stands out as particularly valuable to me due to its capability to log into machines."
"The most valuable feature of Falcon Cloud Security is its comprehensive threat-hunting ability."
"The most valuable feature of CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security is its lightweight sensor, taking minimal space and not impacting server performance."
"CrowdStrike utilizes signatureless technology, eliminating the need for regular signature updates on endpoint systems."
"The integration with Logic Apps allows for automated responses to incidents."
"Defender lets you orchestrate the roll-out from a single pane. Using the Azure portal, you can roll it out over all the servers covered by the entire subscription."
"When we started out, our secure score was pretty low. We adopted some of the recommendations that Security Center set out and we were able to make good progress on improving it. It had been in the low thirties and is now in the upper eighties."
"Microsoft Defender has a lot of features including regulatory compliance and attaching workbooks but the most valuable is the recommendations it provides for each and every resource when we open Microsoft Defender."
"One important security feature is the incident alerts. Now, with all these cyberattacks, there are a lot of incident alerts that get triggered. It is very difficult to keep monitoring everything automatically, instead our organization is utilizing the automated use case that we get from Microsoft. That has helped bring down the manual work for a lot of things."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the vulnerability assessments and the glossary of compliance."
"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."
"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."
"Given the level of visibility into all the cloud environments Wiz provides, it would be nice if they could integrate some kind of mechanism to better manage tenants on multiple platforms. For example, let's say that some servers don't have an application they need, such as an antivirus. Wiz could include an API or something to push those applications out to the servers. It would be great if you could remedy these issues directly from the Wiz platform."
"The solution's container security could be improved."
"We would like to see improvements to executive-level reporting and data reporting in general, which we understand is being rolled out to the platform."
"The reporting isn't that great. They have executive summaries, but it's only a compliance report that maps all current issues to specific controls. Whether you look at one subscription or project, regardless of the size, you will get a multipage report on how the issues in that account map to that control. Our CSO isn't going to read through that. He won't filter that out or show that to his leadership and say, "Here's what we're doing." It isn't a helpful report. They're working on it, but it's a poor executive summary."
"Wiz's reporting capabilities could be refined a bit. They are making headway on that, but more executive-style dashboards would be nice. They just implemented a community aspect where you can share documents and feedback. This was something users had been requesting for a while. They are listening to customer feedback and making changes."
"We're looking at some of the data compliance stuff that they've got Jon offer. I know they're looking at container security, which we gonna be looking at next."
"One significant issue is that the searches are case-sensitive, so finding a misconfigured resource can become very challenging."
"The only thing that needs to be improved is the number of scans per day."
"It would be more convenient if there was an easier way to install CrowdStrike, perhaps through better integration with Active Directory."
"It gets the work done, but the main problem with the solution is that if you remediate anything, it takes 45 days for you to get any of the features displayed on the dashboard. This is the real weakness of CrowdStrike. Their customer support is also not ready to help with it. If you remediate any cloud vulnerability that they are giving you, such as removing a host from your organization, it takes around 45 days for them to remove it from their console."
"The CrowdStrike dashboard currently lacks a username field."
"CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security is expensive."
"Different file options should be available, and clients should be able to select from the options."
"The threat intelligence and user behavioral analysis could be more comprehensive."
"Incorporating threat intelligence into the system would be a valuable addition."
"There should be cloud storage scanning. We would like to have cloud storage vulnerability and threat management on any cloud storage."
"The remediation process could be improved."
"Most of the time, when we log into the support, we don't get a chance to interact with Microsoft employees directly, except having it go to outsource employees of Microsoft. The initial interaction has not been that great because outsourced companies cannot provide the kind of quality or technical expertise that we look for. We have a technical manager from Microsoft, but they are kind of average unless we make noise and ask them to escalate. We then can get the right people and the right solution, but it definitely takes time."
"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."
"Azure's system could be more on point like AWS support. For example, if I have an issue with AWS, I create a support ticket, then I get a call or a message. With Azure support, you raise a ticket, and somebody calls back depending on their availability and the priority, which might not align with your business priority."
"Pricing could be improved. There are limited options based on pricing for the government."
"For Kubernetes, I was using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). To see that whatever is getting deployed into AKS goes through the correct checks and balances in terms of affinities and other similar aspects and follows all the policies, we had to use a product called Stackrox. At a granular level, the built-in policies were good for Kubernetes, but to protect our containers from a coding point of view, we had to use a few other products. For example, from a programming point of view, we were using Checkmarx for static code analysis. For CIS compliance, there are no CIS benchmarks for AKS. So, we had to use other plugins to see that the CIS benchmarks are compliant. There are CIS benchmarks for Kubernetes on AWS and GCP, but there are no CIS benchmarks for AKS. So, Azure Security Center fell short from the regulatory compliance point of view, and we had to use one more product. We ended up with two different dashboards. We had Azure Security Center, and we had Stackrox that had its own dashboard. The operations team and the security team had to look at two dashboards, and they couldn't get an integrated piece. That's a drawback of Azure Security Center. Azure Security Center should provide APIs so that we can integrate its dashboard within other enterprise dashboards, such as the PowerBI dashboard. We couldn't get through these aspects, and we ended up giving Reader security permission to too many people, which was okay to some extent, but when we had to administer the users for the Stackrox portal and Azure Security Center, it became painful."
"The documentation and implementation guides could be improved."
"The documentation could be much clearer."
More CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security Pricing and Cost Advice →
CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security is ranked 9th in Container Security with 13 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 3rd in Container Security with 46 reviews. CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security is rated 8.8, while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security writes "Enhances the overall safety of our company's environment from cyber threats". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Cloud writes "Provides multi-cloud capability, is plug-and-play, and improves our security posture". CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security is most compared with Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, AWS GuardDuty, Qualys VMDR, Sysdig Falco and Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, whereas Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with AWS GuardDuty, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Microsoft Sentinel. See our CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud report.
See our list of best Container Security vendors, best Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) vendors, and best Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) vendors.
We monitor all Container Security 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.