Microsoft Defender users appreciated its threat protection and integration capabilities, some requested better third-party integration and customization options. Wiz users praised its data security, exposure prevention, and actionable insights. Overall, both products offer value, but differ in areas like integration options, customization, and UI.
The summary above is based on 41 interviews we conducted recently with Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Wiz users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"The most valuable features are ransomware protection and access controls. The solution has helped us secure some folders on our systems from unauthorized modifications."
"One of the features that I like about the solution is it is both a hybrid cloud and also multi-cloud. We never know what company we're going to buy, and therefore we are ready to go. If they have GCP or AWS, we have support for that as well. It offers a single-panel blast across multiple clouds."
"It's got a lot of great features."
"Defender for Cloud is a plug-and-play solution that provides continuous posture management once enabled."
"DSPM is the most valuable feature."
"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."
"Provides a very good view of the entire security setup of your organization."
"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 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."
"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 solution is very user-friendly."
"The security baseline and vulnerability assessments is the valuable feature."
"The product supports out-of-the-box reporting with context about the asset and allows us to perform complex custom queries on UI."
"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."
"With Wiz, we get timely alerts for leaked data or any vulnerabilities already existing in our environment."
"The documentation and implementation guides could be improved."
"Microsoft Defender could be more centralized. For example, I still need to go to another console to do policy management."
"I felt that there was disconnection in terms of understanding the UI. The communication for moving from the old UI to the new UI could be improved. It was a bit awkward."
"We would like to have better transparency as to how the security score is calculated because as it is now, it is difficult to understand."
"The most significant areas for improvement are in the security of our identity and endpoints and the posture of the cloud environment. Better protection for our cloud users and cloud apps is always welcome."
"Azure Security Center takes a long time to update, compared to the on-premises version of Microsoft Defender."
"As an analyst, there is no way to configure or create a playbook to automate the process of flagging suspicious domains."
"The product must improve its UI."
"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."
"The remediation workflow within the Wiz could be improved."
"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."
"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 thing that needs to be improved is the number of scans per day."
"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."
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 2nd in Compliance Management with 46 reviews while Wiz is ranked 1st in Compliance Management with 11 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0, while Wiz is rated 9.2. 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 Wiz writes "Multiple features help us prioritize remediation, and agentless implementation reduces overhead". 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, whereas Wiz is most compared with Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Orca Security, AWS Security Hub, Lacework and Aqua Cloud Security Platform. See our Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Wiz report.
See our list of best Vulnerability Management vendors, best Container Security vendors, and best Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) vendors.
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