AWS GuardDuty vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft are both solutions in the Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.4, while Microsoft is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.1. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 11.9% mindshare in CWPP, compared to Microsoft’s 13.9% mindshare. Additionally, 91% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 2025

AWS GuardDuty and Microsoft Defender for Cloud are prominent players in cloud security, offering diverse features to improve security posture. AWS GuardDuty excels in integration with AWS environments, while Microsoft Defender for Cloud shines in compliance management and multi-cloud support.

Features: AWS GuardDuty provides robust threat detection by seamlessly integrating with AWS services like CloudTrail and VPC Flow Logs. Its emphasis on behavior analysis and ease of use make it a comprehensive security tool across AWS accounts. Meanwhile, Microsoft Defender for Cloud excels in compliance management with its ability to integrate with various Microsoft services. It offers a detailed security posture, regulatory compliance features, and security scores, which support multi-cloud and hybrid environments, ensuring extensive security.

Room for Improvement: AWS GuardDuty could enhance its offerings with improved security analytics, automatic alert patching, and better threat intelligence integration. Users suggest that more insightful dashboards and editable alerts could make the service more actionable. Microsoft Defender for Cloud would benefit from enhanced integration options, more granular alert control, and clearer cost structures, along with improved AI features and third-party documentation.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: AWS GuardDuty is praised for its straightforward deployment within AWS environments and responsive technical support, which simplifies the setup process. It primarily focuses on AWS cloud. In contrast, Microsoft Defender for Cloud offers extensive documentation and strong support through Microsoft’s enterprise channels, facilitating hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, which provide a seamless experience for users familiar with Azure products.

Pricing and ROI: AWS GuardDuty operates on a pay-as-you-go model, with costs based on data volume, which is cost-effective for smaller businesses but can grow expensive at scale. It offers ROI by enhancing security posture and customer trust. While seen as costly, Microsoft Defender for Cloud is competitively priced within Microsoft’s suite, offering pricing flexibility and appreciation for its comprehensive security and compliance features.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS GuardDuty vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

AWS GuardDuty vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud

March 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

SentinelOne Singularity Clo...

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) category, the mindshare of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is 2.5%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS GuardDuty is 11.9%, down from 13.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is 13.9%, down from 17.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)

Featured Reviews

Andrew W

VP - Information Technology at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

Tells us about vulnerabilities as well as their impact and helps to focus on real issues

Looking at all the different pieces, it has got everything we need. Some of the pieces we do not even use. For example, we do not have Kubernetes Security. We are not running any K8 clusters, so it is good for us. Overall, we find the solution to be fantastic. There can be additional education components. This may not be truly fair to them because of what the product is going for, but it would be great to see additional education for compliance. It is not a criticism of the tool per se, but anything to help non-development resources understand some of the complexities of the cloud is always appreciated. Any additional educational resources are always helpful for security teams, especially those without a development background.

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Terence Dube

AWS Cloud Engineer at Standard Telephones and Cables

Comprehensive threat detection simplifies security management

GuardDuty is limited to AWS environments. While incorporating Amazon Detective for detailed investigation can be useful, including more granular details in findings, such as specific user actions or historical comparisons, would be beneficial. Furthermore, managing global AWS environments requires setting up additional tools for viewing GuardDuty findings across multiple regions. A unified dashboard that aggregates findings across all regions without requiring manual aggregation could enhance convenience for users.

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Vibhor Goel

Senior Cloud Platform Engineer at Deutsche Börse

A single tool for complete visibility and addressing security gaps

Currently, issues are structured in Microsoft Defender for Cloud at severity levels of high, critical, or warning, but these severity levels are not always right. For example, Microsoft might consider a port being open as critical, but that might not be the case for our company. Similarly, it might suggest closing some management ports, but you might need them to be able to log in, so the severity levels for certain things can be improved. Even though Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides a way to temporarily disable certain alerts or notifications without affecting our security score, it would be better to have more granularized control over these recommendations. Currently, we cannot even disable certain alerts or notifications. There should be an automated mechanism to design Azure policies based on the recommendations, possibly with AI integration. Instead of an engineer having to write a policy to fix security gaps, which is very time-consuming, there should be an inbuilt capability to auto-remediate everything and have proper control in place. Additionally, enabling Defender for Cloud at the resource group level, rather than only at the subscription level, would be beneficial.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The dashboard is intuitive in terms of design and functionality. Additionally, it gives me an email for all the findings that are open."

"PingSafe's integration is smooth. They are highly customer-oriented, and the integration went well for us."

"The most valuable aspects of PingSafe are its alerting system and the remediation guidance it provides."

"The most valuable features of PingSafe are the asset inventory and issue indexing."

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security has significantly improved our risk posture."

"PingSafe provides email alerts and ranks issues based on severity, such as high, critical, etc., that help us prioritize issues."

"PingSafe can integrate all your cloud accounts and resources you create in the AWS account, We have set it up to scan the AWS transfer services, EC2, security groups, and GitHub."

"The UI is responsive and user-friendly."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pros

"GuardDuty is extensive in terms of configuration and security compliance."

"The solution provides AWS GuardDuty S3 protection, EKS runtime protection, and malware protection."

"With anomaly detection, active threat monitoring, and set correlation, GuardDuty alerts me to any unusual user behavior or traffic patterns right away, which is great for staying on top of potential security risks."

"The way it monitors accounts is definitely a very important feature."

"We have over 1,000 employees, and we monitor their activity through AWS GuardDuty."

"The solution is easy to use."

"Since our environment is cloud based and accessible from the internet, we like the ability to check where the user has logged in from and what kind of API calls that user is doing."

"It is a highly scalable solution since it is a service by AWS. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."

More AWS GuardDuty pros

"The solution is quite good and addresses many security gaps."

"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."

"Some of the most valuable features of Microsoft Defender for Cloud include its effectiveness in threat detection through unsupervised machine learning, CTI, and advanced sandboxing."

"Defender for Cloud is a plug-and-play solution that provides continuous posture management once enabled."

"It helps you to identify the gaps in your solution and remediate them. It produces a compliance checklist against known standards such as ISO 27001, HIPAA, iTrust, etc."

"Microsoft Defender for Cloud has significantly enhanced our overall security posture by approximately 20 to 25 percent."

"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 scalability of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is very good."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pros

Cons

"The categorization of the results from the vulnerability assessment could be improved."

"The cost has the potential for improvement."

"There should be more documentation about the product."

"PingSafe is an excellent CSPM tool, but the CWPP features need to improve, and there is a scope for more application security posture management features. There aren't many ASPM solutions on the market, and existing ones are costly. I would like to see PingSafe develop into a single pane of glass for ASPM, CSPM, and CWPP. Another feature I'd like to see is runtime protection."

"The documentation could be better."

"In terms of ease of use, initially, it is a bit confusing to navigate around, but once you get used to it, it becomes easier."

"While it is good, I think the solution's console could be improved."

"We repeatedly get alerts on the tool dashboard that we've already solved on our end, but they still appear. That is somewhat irritating."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security cons

"I would like to see more integration with other AWS provided services."

"Improvement-wise, Amazon GuardDuty should have an overall dashboard analytics function so we could see what's in the current environment, and then in addition to that, provide best practices and recommendations, particularly to provide some type of observability, and then figure out the login side of it, based on our current environment, in terms of what we're not monitoring and what we should monitor. The solution should also give us a sample code configuration to implement that added feature or feature request. What I'd like to see in the next release of Amazon GuardDuty are more security analytics, reporting, and monitoring. They should provide recommendations and additional options that answer questions such as "Hey, what can we see in our environment?", "What should we implement within the environment?", What's recommended?" We know that cost will always be associated with that, but Amazon GuardDuty should show us the increased costs or decreased costs if we implement it or don't implement it, and that would be a good feature request, particularly with all products within AWS, just for cloud products in general because there are times features are implemented, but once they're deployed, they don't tell you about costs that would be generated along with those features. After features are deployed, there should a summary of the costs that would be generated, and projected based on current usage, so they would give us the option to figure out how long we're going to use those features and the option to keep those on or turn those off. If more services were like that, a lot more people would use those on the cloud."

"For me, I would say just the presentation of findings, like the dashboards and other stuff, could be improved a bit."

"GuardDuty is limited to AWS environments."

"We currently find Lacework to be much better at detecting vulnerabilities than AWS GuardDuty. The engines of AWS GuardDuty have to be improved."

"I work in a bank, and it would be good if AWS GuardDuty could be integrated with other monitoring and detection tools we use."

"It would be great if the solution had some automation capabilities."

"An improvement would be to have a mobile version where remote workers can log in and monitor and fix issues."

More AWS GuardDuty cons

"The product's advanced analytics and reporting features could be improved."

"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."

"The documentation could be much clearer."

"With the new Copilot functionality available everywhere, it is challenging to pinpoint areas for improvement. If I put in a lot of thought, I might identify things, but right now, nothing significant pops into my mind, but there is always room for more transparency, especially in pricing."

"Defender could improve how data is represented. It can be unstructured or slow to load."

"My experience with Microsoft Defender for Cloud has been largely negative due to a poor user experience."

"It's hard to reach someone who understands my problems. I haven't had many issues, so I haven't called them."

"Microsoft Defender could be more centralized. For example, I still need to go to another console to do policy management."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is cost-effective."

"SentinelOne provided competitive pricing compared to other vendors, and we are satisfied with the deal."

"The pricing is somewhat high compared to other market tools."

"It is cheap."

"SentinelOne offers excellent pricing and licensing options."

"Their pricing appears to be based simply on the number of accounts we have, which is common for cloud-based products."

"Singularity Cloud Workload Security's pricing is good."

"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

"The pricing model is pay as you go and is based on the number of events per month."

"The tool has no subscription charges."

"I don't have all the details in terms of licensing for Amazon GuardDuty, but my organization does have a license set up for it."

"It can get very expensive. If you turn on every feature, it can turn into hundreds of thousands of dollars."

"I prefer to have something on demand for myself. That's why I haven't been paying for GuardDuty specifically. AWS provides a wide range of offerings, especially in the security area."

"GuardDuty only enables accounts in regions where you have an active workload. If there are places where you don't have an active workload, you wouldn't even enable them. That's one area where they could allow you to cut down your cost."

"80 percent of the customers are using AWS GuardDuty, and we recommend it due to its low cost, especially for small customers, ranging from five to ten dollars a month. In our policies, we enforce the usage of this service, making it a recommended practice for security."

"We use a pay-as-you-use license, which is competitively priced in the market."

More AWS GuardDuty pricing and cost advice

"The cost of the license is based on the subscriptions that you have."

"Defender for Cloud is pretty costly for a single line. It's incredibly high to pay monthly for security per server. The cost is considerable for an enterprise with 500-plus virtual machines, and the monthly bill can spike."

"The licensing cost per server is $15 per month."

"We are using the free version of the Azure Security Center."

"I am not involved much with the pricing but the bundle offering is good."

"Microsoft's licensing and pricing are sometimes complicated. If someone is new to Microsoft's licensing, they might have difficulty with it."

"There are improvements that have to be made to the licensing. Currently, for servers, it has to be done by grouping the servers on a single subscription... We don't have an option whereby, if all those resources are in one subscription, we can have each of the individual servers subject to different planning."

"Azure Defender is definitely pricey, but their competitors cost about the same. For example, a Palo Alto solution is the same price per endpoint, but the ground strikes cost a bit more than Azure Defender. Still, it's pricey for a company like ours. Maybe well-established organizations can afford it, but it might be too costly for a startup."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about PingSafe?

The dashboard gives me an overview of all the things happening in the product, making it one of the tool's best featu...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PingSafe?

It is cost-effective compared to other solutions in the market.

See all answers

What needs improvement with PingSafe?

In version 2, a lot of rules have been deployed for Kubernetes security and CDR, which makes a lot of issues of criti...

See all answers

What do you like most about Amazon GuardDuty?

With anomaly detection, active threat monitoring, and set correlation, GuardDuty alerts me to any unusual user behavi...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon GuardDuty?

GuardDuty is very cheap and operates on a pay-as-you-go basis. It's priced around a dollar per million requests, maki...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon GuardDuty?

GuardDuty is limited to AWS environments. While incorporating Amazon Detective for detailed investigation can be usef...

See all answers

How is Prisma Cloud vs Azure Security Center for security?

Azure Security Center is very easy to use, integrates well, and gives very good visibility on what is happening acros...

See all answers

What do you like most about Microsoft Defender for Cloud?

The entire Defender Suite is tightly coupled, integrated, and collaborative.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Defender for Cloud?

Initially, the cost was reasonable, but additional services from Microsoft sometimes incur extra expenses that seem h...

See all answers

Comparisons

Wiz vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 24% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 20% of the time

Orca Security vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 5% of the time

Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 5% of the time

Aqua Cloud Security Platform vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 4% of the time

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security Competitors

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security vs AWS GuardDuty

Compared 14% of the time

Wiz vs AWS GuardDuty

Compared 11% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs AWS GuardDuty

Compared 6% of the time

Trend Vision One - Cloud Security vs AWS GuardDuty

Compared 4% of the time

Orca Security vs AWS GuardDuty

Compared 2% of the time

More AWS GuardDuty Competitors

Wiz vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 13% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 12% of the time

Microsoft Defender XDR vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 4% of the time

Orca Security vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 3% of the time

Wazuh vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 3% of the time

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

March 2025

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security report

Download SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security product report

Buyer's Guide

AWS GuardDuty

March 2025

Download AWS GuardDuty product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

March 2025

Download Microsoft Defender for Cloud product report

Also Known As

PingSafe

No data available

Microsoft Azure Security Center, Azure Security Center, Microsoft ASC, Azure Defender

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

SentinelOne

Demo not available

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Microsoft

Overview

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security protects cloud workloads, offering advanced threat detection and automated response. It integrates seamlessly with cloud environments and secures containerized applications and virtual machines against vulnerabilities.

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is renowned for its efficiency in mitigating threats in real-time. The platform integrates effortlessly with existing cloud environments, ensuring robust cloud security management with minimal manual intervention. Securing containerized applications and virtual machines, it excels in threat intelligence and endpoint protection. However, improvements are needed in performance during high workload periods, and more integrations with third-party tools and better documentation would be beneficial. Users often find the installation process complex, support response times slow, and the dashboard's navigation unintuitive.

What are the key features of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security?

Real-time Threat Detection: Identifies and mitigates threats as they occur.
Automated Response: Automatically responds to threats to minimize impact.
Ease of Deployment: Simple setup process with scalable options.
Machine Learning Insights: AI-driven insights enhance threat prevention.
Seamless Integration: Integrates with cloud environments for unified security management.

What are the primary benefits or ROI to expect from SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security?

Enhanced Threat Mitigation: Improved security against real-time threats.
Reduced Manual Intervention: Automated processes save time and resources.
Scalability: Easily adapts to growing security requirements.
Centralized Management: Manage security across platforms from a single console.
Advanced Threat Intelligence: Provides in-depth analysis and protection.

In specific industries, SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is implemented to safeguard critical data and infrastructure. Organizations in finance, healthcare, and technology depend on its real-time threat detection and automated response to protect sensitive information. Its ability to secure containerized applications and virtual machines is particularly valuable in dynamic environments where rapid scaling is necessary.

SentinelOne

Amazon Guard Duty is a continuous cloud security monitoring service that consistently monitors and administers several data sources. These include AWS CloudTrail data events for EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) audit logs, VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) flow logs, DNS (Domain Name System) logs, S3 (Simple Cloud Storage), and AWS CloudTrail event logs.

Amazon GuardDuty intuitively uses threat intelligence data - such as lists of malicious domains and IP addresses - and ML (machine learning) to quickly discover suspicious and problematic activity in a user's AWS ecosystem. Activities may include concerns such as interactions with malicious IP addresses or domains, exposed credentials usage, or changes and/or escalation of privileges.

GuardDuty is able to easily determine problematic AWS EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances delivering malware or mining bitcoin. It is also able to trace AWS account access history for evidence of destabilization. such as suspicious API calls resulting in changing password policies to minimize password strength or anomalous infrastructure deployments in new or different never-used regions.

GuardDuty will continually alert users regarding their AWS environment status and will send the security discoveries to the GuardDuty dashboard or Amazon CloudWatch events for users to view.

Users can access GuardDuty via:

AWS SDKs: Amazon provides users with several software development kits (SDKs) that are made up of libraries and sample code of numerous popular programming languages and platforms, such as Android, iOS, Java, .Net, Python, and Ruby. The SDKs make it easier to develop programmatic access to GuardDuty.
GuardDuty HTTPS API: This allows users to issue HTTPS requests directly to the service.
GuardDuty Console: This is a browser-based intuitive dashboard interface where users can access and use GuardDuty.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)

Kubernetes protection is an optional add-on in Amazon GuardDuty. This tool is able to discover malicious behavior and possible destabilization of an organization's Kubernetes clusters inside of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS).

When Amazon EKS is activated, GuardDuty will actively use various data sources to discover potential risks against Kubernetes API. When Kubernetes protection is enabled, GuardDuty uses optional data sources to detect threats against Kubernetes API.

Kubernetes audit logs are a Kubernetes feature that captures historical API activity from applications, the control plane, users, and endpoints. GuardDuty collates these logs from Amazon EKS to create Kubernetes discoveries for the organization's Amazon EKS assets; there is no need to store or turn on the logs.

As long as Kubernetes protection remains activated, GuardDuty will continuously dissect Kubernetes data sources from the Amazon EKS clusters to ensure no suspicious or anomalous behavior is taking place.

Amazon Simple Cloud Storage (S3) Protection

Amazon S3 allows Amazon GuardDuty to actively audit object-level API processes to discover possible security threats to data inside an organization's S3 buckets. GuardDuty continually audits risk to the organization’s S3 assets by carefully dissecting AWS CloudTrail management events and AWS CloudTrail S3 data events. These tools are continually auditing various CloudTrail management events for potential suspicious activities that affect S3 buckets, such as PutBucketReplication, DeleteBucket, ListBucket, and data events for S3 object-level API processes, such as PutObject, GetObject, ListObject, and DeleteObject.

Reviews from Real Users

“The most valuable features are the single system for data collection and the alert mechanisms. Prior to using GuardDuty, we had multiple systems to collect data and put it in a centralized location so we could look into it. Now we don't need to do that anymore as GuardDuty does it for us.” - Arunkumar A., Information Security Manager at Tata Consultancy Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

autodesk, mapbox, fico, webroot

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is trusted by companies such as ASOS, Vatenfall, SWC Technology Partners, and more.

Buyer's Guide

AWS GuardDuty vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud

March 2025

Free Report: AWS GuardDuty vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Find out what your peers are saying about AWS GuardDuty vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.

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