We performed a comparison between Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Orca Security based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Microsoft Defender for Cloud focuses on regulatory compliance, ransomware protection, and incident alerts. On the other hand, Orca Security excels in container posture and cloud security posture management, ranking gaps and tasks, and non-intrusive vulnerability management and attack detection. Microsoft Defender for Cloud could improve in consistency, customization, integration, collaboration, and resource usage. On the other hand, Orca Security could improve in risk assessment, coverage, and dashboard descriptions.
Service and Support: The customer service for Microsoft Defender for Cloud has received mixed feedback, including reports of outsourced support, lengthy wait times, and difficulty in reaching the appropriate level of assistance. Conversely, Orca Security has garnered positive reviews for its customer service, which has been described as highly responsive and competent.
Ease of Deployment: Microsoft Defender for Cloud's setup is straightforward but may require some knowledge prerequisites, while Orca Security's setup is incredibly easy and agentless, taking only a few minutes to deploy. Both require minimal maintenance, but Orca Security's agentless nature reduces overhead and saves time.
Pricing: Microsoft's pricing varies depending on the license type and metrics used, while Orca's pricing includes standard licensing fees with no additional costs for networking or computing. Orca's pricing is aligned with market demand and discounts are available, but it may be expensive for smaller organizations. On the other hand, Microsoft Defender for Cloud is usually packaged with other Microsoft solutions, while Orca's licensing is per-VM and offers discounts for potential strategic partners.
ROI: Microsoft Defender for Cloud has basic security features and its ROI varies depending on the company's context. On the other hand, Orca Security provides significant ROI, replaces multiple solutions, and requires minimal IT knowledge to use.
Comparison Results: Users prefer Orca Security over Microsoft Defender for Cloud due to its agentless approach, simple setup, and thorough visibility into cloud environments, particularly container posture and cloud security posture management. Microsoft Defender for Cloud offers important features like regulatory compliance and ransomware protection but has mixed reviews for customer support and requires more technical expertise.
"With Wiz, we get timely alerts for leaked data or any vulnerabilities already existing in our environment."
"Our most important features are those around entitlement, external exposure, vulnerabilities, and container security."
"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."
"The security baseline and vulnerability assessments is the valuable feature."
"The solution is very user-friendly."
"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 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."
"Out of all the features, the one item that has been most valuable is the fact that Wiz puts into context all the pieces that create an issue, and applies a particular risk evaluation that helps us prioritize when we need to address a misconfiguration, vulnerability, or any issue that would put our environment into risk."
"The vulnerability reporting is helpful. When we initially deployed Defender, it reported many more threats than we currently see. It gave us insight into areas we had not previously considered, so we knew where we needed to act."
"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."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the remote workforce capabilities and the general experience of the remote workforce."
"We can create alerts that trigger if there is any malicious activity happening in the workflow and these alerts can be retrieved using the query language."
"The main feature is the security posture assessment through the security score. I find that to be very helpful because it gives us guidance on what needs to be secured and recommendations on how to secure the workloads that have been onboarded."
"Defender is user-friendly and provides decent visibility into threats."
"It's got a lot of great features."
"Threat protection is comprehensive and simple."
"Orca provides X-ray vision into everything within the cloud properties, whereas normally, this would require multiple tools."
"Orca's platform provides an agentless data collection facility that collects information directly from the cloud using APIs, with zero impact on performance."
"The initial setup is very easy."
"Another valuable feature with Orca, something that's not talked about enough, is its ability to rank your gaps and your tasks... You can get visibility with agents and there are a lot of ways to do that. But the ranking and the context across the entire environment, that is what is unique about Orca."
"It's for protection. It's an agentless tool. We don't need to install anything at a customer's premises. We can just scan the entire assets in the cloud."
"There are so many valuable features that I could list, but one that I appreciate is the PCI DSS compliance report."
"The vulnerability management does not require network scanning or agent technology, so I don't need to modify any of my products in order to do vulnerability assessments."
"The most valuable feature of Orca Security is the automated scanning tool, user-friendliness, and ease of use."
"The only thing that needs to be improved is the number of scans per day."
"One significant issue is that the searches are case-sensitive, so finding a misconfigured resource can become very challenging."
"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."
"The only small pain point has been around some of the logging integrations. Some of the complexities of the script integrations aren't supported with some of the more automated infrastructure components. So, it's not as universal. For example, they have great support for cloud formation and other services, but if you're using another type of management utility or governance language for your infrastructure-as-code automation components, it becomes a little bit trickier to navigate that."
"The solution's container security could be improved."
"We wish there were a way, beyond providing visibility and automated remediation, to wait on a given remediation, due to a critical aspect, such as the cost associated with a particular upgrade... We would like to see preventive controls that can be applied through Wiz to protect against vulnerabilities that we're not going to be able to remediate immediately."
"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."
"The remediation workflow within the Wiz could be improved."
"Agent features need to be improved. They support agents through Azure Arc or Workbench. Sometimes, we are not able to get correct signals from the machines on which we have installed these agents. We are not able to see how many are currently reporting to Azure Security Center, and how many are currently not reporting. For example, we have 1,000 machines, and we have enrolled 1,000 OMS agents on these machines to collect the log. When I look at the status, even though at some places, it shows that it is connected, but when I actually go and check, I'm not getting any alerts from those. There are some discrepancies on the agent, and the agent features are not up to the mark."
"From a compliance standpoint, they can include some more metrics and some specific compliances such as GDPR."
"The product must improve its UI."
"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."
"After getting a recommendation, it takes time for the solution to refresh properly to show that the problem has been eliminated."
"Azure Security Center takes a long time to update, compared to the on-premises version of Microsoft Defender."
"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."
"I would like to see better automation when it comes to pushing out security features to the recommendations, and better documentation on the step-by-step procedures for enabling certain features."
"They can expand a little bit in anti-malware detection. While we have pretty good confidence that it's going to detect some of the static malware, some of the detections are heuristics. There could be a growth in the library from where they're pulling their information, but we don't get a lot of those alerts based on the design of our products. In general, that might be an area that needs to be filled since they offer it as a service within it."
"As with all software, the user interface can always be made simpler to use. It would be helpful for people with very little knowledge, like somebody sitting behind the SOC, to allow them to be able to drill down into things a little bit easier than it is currently."
"I would be happy if they offered more automatic remediation options. They're working on that, but the more the better. For example, if they want you to harden a server, they would offer a hardening script that would be more aware of what's going on."
"We are PCI DSS compliant, so we need to scan our environment externally with tools vetted by the PCI DSS organization. Orca doesn't scan the environment externally. It only scans what's currently in the cloud."
"The main drawback in an agentless approach is that if the solution detects a virus or malware in the environment, we need to manually remove it. But from my experience with other production environments, it's not straightforward to install agents in the hope they will automatically remediate viruses, even from production environments... Ultimately, the ability to auto-remediate is something that I would like to see."
"The interface can be a bit cranky and sometimes takes a lot of time to load."
"I would like to see an option to do security checks on a code level. This is possible because they have access to all of the code running in the cloud provider, and combining their site-scanning solution with that would be a nice add-on."
"Another improvement would be that, in addition to focusing on endpoint compliance, they would focus on general compliance."
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 7th in Vulnerability Management with 46 reviews while Orca Security is ranked 8th in Vulnerability Management with 14 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0, while Orca Security is rated 9.4. The top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Cloud writes "Provides multi-cloud capability, is plug-and-play, and improves our security posture". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Orca Security writes "Allows agentless data collection directly from the cloud". Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with AWS GuardDuty, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration, whereas Orca Security is most compared with Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Tenable Vulnerability Management, CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security, AWS Security Hub and Tenable Cloud Security. See our Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Orca Security report.
See our list of best Vulnerability Management vendors, best Container Security vendors, and best Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) vendors.
We monitor all Vulnerability Management 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.
