Aqua Cloud Security Platform vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jul 5, 2023

We performed a comparison between Aqua Security Platform and Microsoft Defender for Cloud based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Features: Aqua Security Platform is praised for its image scanning, malware detection, and container security features. Users also liked the automated patching and sandboxing service. Microsoft Defender for Cloud was lauded for its automation, threat analysis, incident alerts, ransomware protection, and compliance capabilities. Aqua Security Platform could make reporting and log forwarding more automated. Some users mentioned resource consumption and integration as another area of improvement. Microsoft Defender for Cloud could be better integrated with older systems and leverage collaboration for improved threat intelligence.
  • Service and Support: Reviewers said the customer service for Aqua Security Platform is usually prompt and supportive, but some users have had to resolve problems themselves. Microsoft Defender for Cloud users with enterprise SLAs generally expressed satisfaction, but other users were unhappy with initial interactions and response times.
  • Ease of Deployment:  Some users said Aqua Security Platform was simple to set up, but it presented challenges for others. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is generally considered easy to deploy and configure. 
  • Pricing: Aqua Security Platform is moderately priced compared to other options. Some users found Microsoft Defender for Cloud pricey. However, other users said the licensing cost per server for Microsoft Defender is fair.

Comparison Results: Aqua Security Platform is generally preferred over Microsoft Defender for Cloud. Users value Aqua Security's ability to identify security threats in images, detect malware, and scan containers. Additionally, they praise the user-friendly interface, on-demand patching, and sandboxing. Although Microsoft Defender for Cloud offers automation and threat analysis capabilities, the Aqua Security Platform stands out due to its extensive features and excellent customer support.

To learn more, read our detailed Aqua Cloud Security Platform vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Report (Updated: May 2024).
772,679 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The most valuable aspects of PingSafe are its alerting system and the remediation guidance it provides.""Cloud Native Security's best feature is its ability to identify hard-coded secrets during pull request reviews.""Cloud Native Security helps us discover vulnerabilities in a cloud environment like open ports that allow people to attack our environment. If someone unintentionally opens a port, we are exposed. Cloud Native Security alerts us so we can remediate the problem. We can also automate it so that Cloud Native Security will fix it.""Cloud Native Security is user-friendly. Everything in the Cloud Native Security tool is straightforward, including detections, integration, reporting, etc. They are constantly improving their UI by adding plugins and other features.""The most valuable feature of the solution is its storyline, which helps trace an event back to its source, like an email or someone clicking on a link.""The UI is very good.""The dashboard gives me an overview of all the things happening in the product, making it one of the tool's best features.""We really appreciate the Slack integration. When we have an incident, we get an instant notification. We also use Joe Sandbox, which Singularity can integrate with, so we can verify if a threat is legitimate."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security Pros →

"The most valuable feature of Aqua Security is the scanner.""We use Aqua Security for the container security features.""The most helpful feature of Aqua Security is Drift Prevention, which is a feature that allows images to be immutable. In addition, one of the main reasons we went with Aqua Security is because it provides strong protection when it comes to runtime security.""The CSPM product is great at securing our cloud accounts and I really like the runtime protection for containers and functions too.""Aqua Security helps us to check the vulnerability of image assurance and check for malware.""The most valuable features are that it's easy to use and manage.""Support is very helpful.""Their sandboxing service is also really good."

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"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 a robust platform for dealing with many kinds of threats. We're protected from various threats, like viruses. Attacks can be easily minimized with this solution defending our infrastructure.""The product has given us more insight into potential avenues for attack paths.""It works seamlessly on the Azure platform because it's a Microsoft app. Its setup is similar, so if you already have a Microsoft account, it just flows into it.""The solution's robust security posture is the most valuable feature.""It is very intuitive when it comes to policy administration, alerts and notifications, and ease of setting up roles at different hierarchies. It has also been good in terms of the network technology maps. It provides a good overview, but it also depends on the complexity of your network.""The integration with Logic Apps allows for automated responses to incidents.""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."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Pros →

Cons
"They need more experienced support personnel.""The could improve their mean time to detect.""While PingSafe offers real-time response, there is room for improvement in alert accuracy.""There's room for improvement in the graphic explorer.""PingSafe can improve by eliminating 100 percent of the false positives.""They could generally give us better comprehensive rules.""Implementing single sign-on requires a pre-class account feature, which is currently not available.""The alerting system of the product is an area that I look at and sometimes get confused about. I feel the alerting feature needs improvement."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security Cons →

"Sometimes I got stressed with the UI.""Aqua Security could provide more open documentation so that their learning resources can be more easily accessed and searched through online. Right now, a lot of the documentation is closed and not available to the public.""Aqua Security lacks a lot in reporting.""The user interface could be improved, especially in terms of organization and clarity.""It's a bit hard to use the user roles. That was a bit confusing.""There's room for improvement, particularly in management capabilities as it may not be comprehensive enough for all customers, and it has been lacking in the realm of cloud security posture management.""In the next release, Aqua Security should add the ability to automatically send reports to customers.""The integrations on CICD could be improved. If Aqua had more plugins or container images to integrate and automate more easily on CICD, it would be better."

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"The product must improve its UI.""The product was a bit complex to set up earlier, however, it is a bit streamlined now.""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.""They could always work to make the pricing a bit lower.""From a compliance standpoint, they can include some more metrics and some specific compliances such as GDPR.""Consistency is the area where the most improvement is needed. For example, there are some areas where the UI is not uniform across the board.""Sometimes, it's very difficult to determine when I need Microsoft Defender for Cloud for a special resource group or certain kinds of products. That's not an issue directly with the product, though.""Customizing some of the compliance requirements based on individual needs seems like the biggest area of improvement. There should be an option to turn specific controls on and off based on how your solution is configured."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "As a partner, we receive a discount on the licenses."
  • "It's a fair price for what you get. We are happy with the price as it stands."
  • "I wasn't sure what to expect from the pricing, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was a little less than I thought."
  • "Singularity Cloud Workload Security's pricing is good."
  • "Singularity Cloud Workload Security's licensing and price were cheaper than the other solutions we looked at."
  • "I understand that SentinelOne is a market leader, but the bill we received was astronomical."
  • "It's not expensive. The product is in its initial growth stages and appears more competitive compared to others. It comes in different variants, and I believe the enterprise version costs around $55 per user per year. I would rate it a five, somewhere fairly moderate."
  • "The pricing is fair. It is not inexpensive, and it is also not expensive. When managing a large organization, it is going to be costly, but it meets the business needs. In terms of what is out there on the market, it is fair and comparable to what I have seen, so I do not have any complaints about the cost"
  • More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "They were reasonable with their pricing. They were pretty down-to-earth about the way they pitched their product and the way they tried to close the deal. They were one of the rare companies that approached the whole valuation in a way that made sense for our company, for our needs, and for their own requirements as well... They will accommodate your needs if they are able to understand them and they're stated clearly."
  • "Aqua Security is not cheap, and it's not very expensive, such as Splunk, they are in the middle."
  • "Dealing with licensing costs isn't my responsibility, but I know that the licenses don't depend on the number of users, but instead are priced according to your workload."
  • "The pricing of this solution could be improved."
  • "It comes at a reasonable cost."
  • More Aqua Cloud Security Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "I'm not privy to that information, but I know it's probably close to a million dollars a year."
  • "We are using the free version of the Azure Security Center."
  • "Azure Defender is a bit pricey. The price could be lower."
  • "This is a worldwide service and depending on the country, there will be different prices."
  • "Security Center charges $15 per resource for any workload that you onboard into it. They charge per VM or per data-base server or per application. It's not like Microsoft 365 licensing, where there are levels like E3 and E5. Security Center is pretty straightforward."
  • "There is a helpful cost-reducing option that allows you to integrate production subscriptions with non-production subscriptions."
  • "Its pricing is a little bit high in terms of Azure Security Center, but the good thing is that we don't need to maintain and deploy it. So, while the pricing is high, it is native to Azure which is why we prefer using this tool."
  • "I am not involved in this area. However, I believe its price is okay because even small customers are using Azure Security Center. I don't think it is very expensive."
  • More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The dashboard gives me an overview of all the things happening in the product, making it one of the tool's best… more »
    Top Answer:When I joined my organization, I saw that PingSafe was already implemented. I started to use the tool's alerting… more »
    Top Answer:Aqua Security is easy to use and very manageable. Its main focus is on Kubernetes and Docker. Security is a very… more »
    Top Answer:Customers find it invaluable to have the ability to check for vulnerabilities in an image before deployment, similar to… more »
    Top Answer:It comes at a reasonable cost. When compared to Prisma Cloud, it is more budget-friendly.
    Top Answer:Azure Security Center is very easy to use, integrates well, and gives very good visibility on what is happening across… more »
    Top Answer:The entire Defender Suite is tightly coupled, integrated, and collaborative.
    Top Answer:Our clients complain about the cost of Microsoft Defender for Cloud. Microsoft needs to bring the cost down. What we're… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    PingSafe
    Aqua Security Platform, CloudSploit, Argon
    Microsoft Azure Security Center, Azure Security Center, Microsoft ASC, Azure Defender
    Learn More
    Interactive Demo
    SentinelOne
    Demo Not Available
    Aqua Security
    Demo Not Available
    Overview

    Singularity Cloud Security is SentinelOne’s comprehensive, cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP). It combines the best of agentless insights with AI-powered threat protection, to secure and protect your multi-cloud infrastructure, services, and containers from build time to runtime. SentinelOne’s CNAPP applies an attacker’s mindset to help security practitioners better prioritize their  remediation tasks with evidence-backed Verified Exploit Paths™. The efficient and scalable runtime protection, proven over 5 years and trusted by many of the world’s leading cloud enterprises, harnesses local, autonomous AI engines to detect and thwart runtime threats in real-time. CNAPP data and workload telemetry is recorded to SentinelOne’s unified security lake, for easy access and investigation.

    Singularity Cloud Security includes both agentless and AI-powered cloud security controls, which represent two halves of our strategy to keep public cloud and container environments safe. Radically reduce your cloud attack surface with Singularity Cloud Native Security, formerly PingSafe, with agentless insights and evidence-based prioritization; protect runtime compute and container with Singularity Cloud Workload Security, SentinelOne’s real-time CWPP, with AI-powered machine-speed blocking of threats.

    Aqua Security stops cloud native attacks, preventing them before they happen and stopping them when they happen. Dedicated cloud native threat research and the most loved cloud native security open source community in the world put innovation at your fingertips so you can transform your business. Born cloud native, The Aqua Platform is the most integrated Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP), securing from day one and protecting in real-time. Aqua has been stopping real cloud native attacks on hundreds of thousands of production nodes across the world since 2015.

    Aqua Security Features

    Aqua Security has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Vulnerability scanning
    • Dynamic threat analysis
    • Automates DevSecOps
    • CI/CD integrations
    • Cloud security posture management
    • Kubernetes security
    • Hybrid and multi-cloud
    • Container security
    • Serverless security
    • VM security
    • Cloud workloads protection

    Aqua Security Benefits

    There are many benefits to implementing Aqua Security. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Designed for scale and performance: The Aqua Security platform was designed to scale to the largest environments in order to protect huge clusters and massive DevOps pipelines.
    • Empowers DevOps to detect issues early and fix them fast: The solution was designed to help you solve issues immediately - before they cause greater damage to your organization. It helps you gain insight into your vulnerability posture and prioritize remediation and mitigation according to contextual risk.
    • Automated compliance and security posture: Aqua Security checks your cloud services, Infrastructure-as-code templates, and Kubernetes setup against best practices and standards. This way, you can ensure the infrastructure you run your applications on is securely configured and in compliance.
    • Artifact scanning: The Aqua Security platform scans artifacts for vulnerabilities, malware, and other risks during development and staging. It allows you to set flexible and dynamic policies to control deployment into your runtime environments.
    • Minimizes false positives: Aqua Security relies on a variety of sources and proprietary research to curate and present vulnerabilities in the most accurate way, which helps to minimize false positives and unnecessary noise in the pipeline.
    • Automated security testing: The Aqua Security platform automates security testing in your CI/CD pipeline, and continuously scans registries and serverless function stores to detect emerging risks. By implementing the platform, you can get actionable feedback within your CI environments to empower your organization’s developers to fix issues rapidly.
    • Granular controls: The solution provides protection for your VM, container, and serverless workloads using granular controls with instant visibility and real-time detection and response.
    • Sandboxed environment: With Aqua Security, you can run images in a secure sandboxed environment that traces indicators of compromise (IOCs) such as container escapes, reverse shell backdoors, malware drops, code injection backdoors, and network anomalies.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Lizeth Z., Cloud Security Specialist at Telstra, says, “Aqua Security is the most advanced solution in the market for container security. Aqua Security allows us to check for vulnerabilities in the CI/CD pipeline, so application teams can remediate issues before going into production. Aqua Security helps us to check the vulnerability of image assurance and check for malware.”

    Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a comprehensive security solution that provides advanced threat protection for cloud workloads. It offers real-time visibility into the security posture of cloud environments, enabling organizations to quickly identify and respond to potential threats. With its advanced machine learning capabilities, Microsoft Defender for Cloud can detect and block sophisticated attacks, including zero-day exploits and fileless malware.

    The solution also provides automated remediation capabilities, allowing security teams to quickly and easily respond to security incidents. With Microsoft Defender for Cloud, organizations can ensure the security and compliance of their cloud workloads, while reducing the burden on their security teams.

    Sample Customers
    Information Not Available
    HPE Salesforce Telstra Ellie Mae Cathay Pacific HomeAway
    Microsoft Defender for Cloud is trusted by companies such as ASOS, Vatenfall, SWC Technology Partners, and more.
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company27%
    Construction Company13%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Insurance Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company21%
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Insurance Company4%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company43%
    Insurance Company14%
    Financial Services Firm14%
    Manufacturing Company14%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm23%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Manufacturing Company11%
    Government6%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company24%
    Agriculture10%
    Recruiting/Hr Firm10%
    Consumer Goods Company10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Government7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business39%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise41%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise61%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business38%
    Midsize Enterprise6%
    Large Enterprise56%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise70%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business27%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise62%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business20%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise65%
    Buyer's Guide
    Aqua Cloud Security Platform vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud
    May 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Aqua Cloud Security Platform vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.
    772,679 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Aqua Cloud Security Platform is ranked 11th in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) with 16 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 3rd in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) with 46 reviews. Aqua Cloud Security Platform is rated 8.0, while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Aqua Cloud Security Platform writes "Reliable with good container scanning and a straightforward setup". 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". Aqua Cloud Security Platform is most compared with Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Wiz, Snyk, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes and Tenable.io Container Security, whereas Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with AWS GuardDuty, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Defender XDR, Wiz and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. See our Aqua Cloud Security Platform vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud report.

    See our list of best Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) vendors, best Container Security vendors, and best Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) vendors.

    We monitor all Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) 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.