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Bitdefender GravityZone XDR vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Bitdefender GravityZone XDR
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (21st)
Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (7th), Container Management (9th), Container Security (4th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (2nd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (4th), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (4th), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (3rd), Microsoft Security Suite (4th), Compliance Management (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Security Software solutions, they serve different purposes. Bitdefender GravityZone XDR is designed for Extended Detection and Response (XDR) and holds a mindshare of 0.6%, up 0.4% compared to last year.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud, on the other hand, focuses on Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP), holds 13.9% mindshare, down 17.0% since last year.
Extended Detection and Response (XDR)
Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
 

Featured Reviews

SimonClark - PeerSpot reviewer
Good quality ransomware antivirus that provides automatic patch management
Bitdefender GravityZone XDR is a good quality ransomware antivirus product. We like it because it's an industry-quality antivirus as opposed to some of the better-known ones like Symantec or Norton. Bitdefender has a better reputation for being up-to-date and picking up more threats. Patch management is important to keeping companies secure. The solution has an automatic patch management capability. Customers never find their software or operating systems vulnerable because Bitdefender would have automatically patched them. Bitdefender sells XDR and EDR products, but we tend to stop at the EDR level. BitDefender has lots of modules if people want to pay for them. We primarily push encryption patching and antivirus and integrate that into the security operations center.
Vibhor Goel - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution has an automatic patch management capability."
"The HyperDetect feature in GravityZone XDR is effective."
"I would rate GravityZone XDR more than nine out of ten."
"I appreciate the overall utilization of AI to enhance security posture."
"It provides an in-depth analysis and gives recommendations, along with a historical search capability."
"Scalability is pretty easy. It's easy to increase the capacity. You can just add on licenses to the existing license, and the duration of the license can be adjusted. For example, you've already bought a license for a year, and you want to add some more users. We can just add on licenses for the remaining period so that the entire organization can have the same expiry date. That makes renewal easier."
"I find that the auto-response capability is most valuable."
"The most valuable features are the security recommendations provided by Defender for Cloud."
"The most valuable feature for me is the variety of APIs available."
"One important security feature is the incident alerts. Now, with all these cyberattacks, there are a lot of incident alerts that get triggered. It is very difficult to keep monitoring everything automatically, instead our organization is utilizing the automated use case that we get from Microsoft. That has helped bring down the manual work for a lot of things."
"The product has given us more insight into potential avenues for attack paths."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is its ability to assess an environment and give us a clear idea of what security components are lacking and which are not."
"The most valuable feature for me is the variety of APIs available."
"The most valuable features are the monitoring of users, endpoint detection and response, and the adaptability of the AI threat intelligence engine, which quickly adapts to customizations."
 

Cons

"The product could be improved by offering a single panel for the management of all Bitdefender products."
"The solution’s pricing could be improved."
"The product could be improved by offering a single panel for the management of all Bitdefender products. Additionally, there might be a need to simplify the interface in the future."
"The resource consumption is high for Bitdefender GravityZone XDR, nearly using one gigabyte of RAM, especially on Windows 10 and 11."
"It's not very mature, and additional costs are involved."
"Another area of improvement is CPU utilization. CPU utilization could be improved."
"The resource consumption is high for Bitdefender GravityZone XDR, nearly using one gigabyte of RAM, especially on Windows 10 and 11."
"However, some Copilot features aren't available in the GCP environment. This is something we hope will be addressed in the future."
"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."
"Microsoft Graph needs improvement."
"Although Microsoft Defender for Cloud is based on security, I wish it went beyond providing assessments, reports, and generic steps. More detailed procedures would be helpful, especially for lower-level support staff."
"It's hard to reach someone who understands my problems. I haven't had many issues, so I haven't called them."
"From a compliance standpoint, they can include some more metrics and some specific compliances such as GDPR."
"The pricing could be improved, as it is somewhat high for smaller companies."
"The solution is quite complex. A lot of the different policies that actually get applied don't pertain to every client. If you need to have something open for a client application to work, then you get dinged for having a port open or having an older version of TLS available."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten."
"It's not the price of the software itself that makes it expensive. It's because you have to buy a VM; you have to buy additional hardware. All those things make it slightly costlier."
"It is bundled with our enterprise subscription, which makes it easy to go for it. It is available by default, and there is no extra cost for using the standard features."
"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."
"Understanding the costs of cloud services can be complicated at first. As with a lot of things in the cloud, it can be quite hard to understand the end cost, but it becomes clearer over time. Early on, the lack of transparency is a challenge. Microsoft does not tell you the cost when they launch something. It is clever marketing, and there is room for improvement there. There should be clarity from the start."
"We are using the free version of the Azure Security Center."
"The tool is pretty expensive."
"The licensing cost per server is $15 per month."
"Pricing depends on your workload size, but it is very cheap. If you're talking about virtual machines, it is $5 or something for each machine, which is minimal. If you go for some agent-based solution for every virtual machine, then you need to pay the same thing or more than that. For an on-premises solution like this, we were paying around $30 to $50 based on size. With Defender, Microsoft doesn't bother about the size. You pay based on the number of machines. So, if you have 10 virtual machines, and 10 virtual machines are being monitored, you are paying based on that rather than the size of the virtual machine. Thus, you are paying for the number of units rather than paying for the size of your units."
"I rate Microsoft Defender a three out of ten for affordability. The price could be a little lower."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
18%
Computer Software Company
14%
Hospitality Company
7%
Cloud Solution Provider
5%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Bitdefender GravityZone XDR?
Scalability is pretty easy. It's easy to increase the capacity. You can just add on licenses to the existing license, and the duration of the license can be adjusted. For example, you've already b...
What needs improvement with Bitdefender GravityZone XDR?
The product could be improved by offering a single panel for the management of all Bitdefender products. Additionally, there might be a need to simplify the interface in the future.
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 across your ecosystem. It also has great remote workforce capabilities and supports a...
What do you like most about Microsoft Defender for Cloud?
The entire Defender Suite is tightly coupled, integrated, and collaborative.
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 higher than expected.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Microsoft Azure Security Center, Azure Security Center, Microsoft ASC, Azure Defender
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is trusted by companies such as ASOS, Vatenfall, SWC Technology Partners, and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Wazuh and others in Extended Detection and Response (XDR). Updated: March 2025.
845,712 professionals have used our research since 2012.