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).
772,649 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
"They're responsive to feature requests. If I suggest a feature for Prisma, I will need to wait until the next release on their roadmap. Cloud Native Security will add it right away.""Cloud Native Security is a tool that has good monitoring features.""The offensive security feature is valuable because it publicly detects the offensive and vulnerable things present in our domain or applications. It checks any applications with public access. Some of the applications give public access to certain files or are present over a particular domain. It detects and lets us know with evidence. That is quite good. It is protecting our infrastructure quite well.""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 solution helped free other staff to work on other projects or other tasks. We basically just had to do a bunch of upfront configuring. With it, we do not have to spend as much time in the console.""We like the platform and its response time. We also like that its console is user-friendly as well as modern and sleek.""Our previous product took a lot of man hours to manage. Once we got Singularity Cloud Workload Security, it freed up our time to work on other tasks.""The UI is responsive and user-friendly."

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"Support is very helpful.""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.""From what I understand, the initial setup is simple.""Customers find it invaluable to have the ability to check for vulnerabilities in an image before deployment, similar to a sandbox environment.""Aqua Security helps us to check the vulnerability of image assurance and check for malware.""Their sandboxing service is also really good.""The most valuable feature is the security.""Valuable features include the ability to connect it to our Docker Hub where our images are stored, good integration with Slack, and the connection to the CV, to easily see which CVs are on each image."

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"The solution is very easy to deploy.""The product has given us more insight into potential avenues for attack paths.""The most valuable features are ransomware protection and access controls. The solution has helped us secure some folders on our systems from unauthorized modifications.""It isn't a highly complex solution. It's something that a lot of analysts can use. Defender gives you a broad overview of what's happening in your environment, and it's a great solution if you're a Microsoft shop.""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.""The dashboard is very good. It gives our clients a lot of information and allows them to have a complete overview of the system. Everything is visible in one glance.""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."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Pros →

Cons
"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.""We recently adopted a new ticket management solution, so we've asked them to include a connector to integrate that tool with Cloud Native Security directly. We'd also like to see Cloud Native Security add a scan for personally identifying information. We're looking at other tools for this capability, but having that functionality built into Cloud Native Security would be nice. Monitoring PII data is critical to us as an organization.""They can work on policies based on different compliance standards.""In some cases, the rules are strictly enforced but do not align with real-world use cases.""We wanted it to provide us with something like Claroty Hub in AWS for lateral movement. For example, if an EC2 instance or a virtual machine is compromised in a public subnet based on a particular vulnerability, such as Log4j, we want it to not be able to reach some of our databases. This kind of feature is not supported in PingSafe.""They need more experienced support personnel.""Bugs need to be disclosed quickly.""I'd like to see better onboarding documentation."

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"We would like to see an improvement in the overview visibility that this solution offers.""Aqua Security lacks a lot in reporting.""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.""The solution could improve user-friendliness.""I would like Aqua Security to look into is the development of a web security portal.""Sometimes I got stressed with the UI.""The user interface could be improved, especially in terms of organization and clarity.""They want to release improvements to their product to work with other servers because now there are more focused on the Kubernetes environment. They need to improve the normal servers. I would like to have more options."

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"Azure is a complex solution. You have so many moving parts.""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.""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.""The initial setup is not actually so complex but it feels complex because there are many add-ons. There are many options and my team needs to be aware of all of these changes happening on the backend which is a distraction.""I would like to have the ability to customize executive reporting.""One of the main challenges that we have been facing with Azure Security Center is the cost. The costs are really a complex calculation, e.g., to calculate the monthly costs. Azure is calculating on an hourly basis for use of the resource. Because of this, we found it really complex to promote what will be our costs for the next couple of months. I think if Azure could reduce the complex calculation and come up with straightforward cost mapping that would be very useful from a product point of view.""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.""There is no perfect product in the world and there are always features that can be added."

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 Company5%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company43%
    Insurance Company14%
    Financial Services Firm14%
    Manufacturing Company14%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm22%
    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.
    772,649 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 Sysdig Falco, 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.