Fortra's Alert Logic MDR vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud comparison

Fortra and Microsoft are both solutions in the Vulnerability Management category. Fortra is ranked #28 with an average rating of 10.0, while Microsoft is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.1. Fortra holds a 0.5% mindshare in VM, compared to Microsoft’s 5.5% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of Fortra users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 13, 2025

Fortra's Alert Logic MDR and Microsoft Defender for Cloud are competing solutions in the realm of cybersecurity management. Microsoft Defender for Cloud appears to have the upper hand largely due to its comprehensive features, despite Fortra's favorable pricing and support.

Features: Fortra's Alert Logic MDR offers robust threat detection, constant security monitoring, and an integrated dashboard for incident management. Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides comprehensive integration with Azure services, advanced security analytics, and a wide range of built-in compliance policies.

Room for Improvement: Fortra's Alert Logic MDR could enhance its cloud service integration, expand its advanced analytics features, and improve scalability options. Microsoft Defender for Cloud might focus on improving customer support consistency, optimizing deployment flexibility, and offering more detailed reporting features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Fortra's Alert Logic MDR is recognized for straightforward deployment and highly responsive customer service. Microsoft Defender for Cloud benefits from seamless integration into Microsoft environments, streamlining deployment, though customer service engagement may vary.

Pricing and ROI: Fortra's Alert Logic MDR boasts competitive pricing, providing good value. Microsoft Defender for Cloud, potentially higher in cost, is noted for its extensive feature set that yields a higher ROI through integration capabilities and security range.

To learn more, read our detailed Fortra's Alert Logic MDR vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Fortra's Alert Logic MDR vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud

July 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

Zafran Security

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Vulnerability Management category, the mindshare of Zafran Security is 0.9%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fortra's Alert Logic MDR is 0.5%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is 5.5%, up from 5.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Vulnerability Management

Featured Reviews

Israel Cavazos Landini

Associate Director IT Security Operations at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

Weekly insights and risk analysis facilitate informed security decisions

I appreciate the weekly insights Zafran provides, which include critical topics for networks and IT security, allowing us to evaluate which insights apply to our environment. The organization score feature is valuable to keep the leadership team updated on how our infrastructure fares security-wise. The applicable risk level versus base risk level feature is beneficial because prior to Zafran, we only used the base risk level, but now understand that risk depends on the asset itself. Zafran is an excellent tool.

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reviewer2191746

President at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

It's a highly mature, competitively priced solution that provides total visibility into your ecosystem. FORTRA's Alert Logic has the only Cybersecurity Platform that integrates XDR+WAF+VM+DLP in one.

Alert Logic offers total visibility into the client's IT ecosystem. The solution's intrusion detection system inspects 100 percent of the network packets and installs universal agents on all physical and virtual servers for log collection. Alert Logic also aggregates logs of the client's various 3rd Party security tools into a single pane of glass. All of the analytics from those data feeds got to a 24/7 SOC with sophisticated resources. Alert Logic has massive threat intelligence resources to provide additional context to the incident response declarations. They do all the heavy lifting for clients who lack the technology and resources to operate their own SOC. The client is solely responsible for the incident response component. The macro analytics resides on Alert Logic's cloud. You have the ECM response and business application team on the client side. Everything works in tandem, which is the only way you can deal with the advanced threats we face today, especially the ransomware families. If you don't respond in minutes, you're in trouble.

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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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Zafran has become an indispensable tool in our cybersecurity arsenal."

"We are able to see the real risk of a vulnerability on our environment with our security tools."

"Overall, we have seen about eighty-seven percent reduction of the number of vulnerabilities that require urgency to remediate, specifically the number of criticals."

"We saw benefits from Zafran Security almost immediately after deploying it."

"Zafran is an excellent tool."

"It has the ability to install agents. It is pretty straightforward. You can automate the process pretty easily."

"The most valuable aspect of Alert Logic is its technology platform. They have SOCs in the US and Europe, giving them global visibility of the threat landscape. They detect and respond to threats in minutes. Their biggest value is human expertise. You're being attacked by a human, and you cannot respond to it unless you have a human on the other side. They have the human and technological resources to respond."

"The quicker implementation of changes to our infrastructure from Alert Logic tell us if there are any problems."

"It is a very stable product."

"The installation and configuration were slick."

"The solution was consistently available, and I cannot recall any instances where it was down."

"Notifications and the detail of notifications are most valuable. It is a user-friendly solution."

"We receive infrastructure security warnings from it. So, we know what is going on and what needs to be addressed."

More Fortra's Alert Logic MDR pros

"Provides a very good view of the entire security setup of your organization."

"Technical support is helpful."

"It's got a lot of great features."

"The integration with Logic Apps allows for automated responses to incidents."

"Using Security Center, you have a full view, at any given time, of what's deployed, and that is something that is very useful."

"The solution's robust security posture is the most valuable feature."

"Defender is user-friendly and provides decent visibility into threats."

"Microsoft Defender for Cloud has improved our security poster by at least 100 percent."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pros

Cons

"Initially, we were somewhat concerned about the scalability of Zafran due to our large asset count and the substantial amount of information we needed to process."

"The dashboarding and reporting functionality of Zafran Security is an area that definitely could use some improvements."

"I think the ability to have some enhanced reporting capabilities is something they can improve on, as they have good reports but we have asked for some specific reporting enhancements."

"We'd like to have triggered alerts sent to us so we see errors quicker."

"They have ideas and email you whatever they find, but they don't have a dedicated security team who will work on an attack or a specific security instance."

"As a user involved with the user interface, I believe there is a need to continue improving it based on feedback from our customers."

"This product needs to mature more. While it is a good product, there are some areas where it needs work."

"The setup process was complex."

"The product needs to mature. We don't want to be bombarded with unnecessary issues and have the real ones slip through."

"Alert Logic needs to expand its SOCs to serve more markets, such as the Middle East and Asia. There should be infrastructure that covers more time zones. The company should also develop an EDR that is natively integrated into their solution. Currently, a client must buy another EDR solution like CrowdStrike or Sophos. I think Alert Logic is developing this. Built-in email security could also be developed and integrated."

"I would like more data on the alert payload. It would be good to have the ability to customize the alert payload to add whatever data that we want on there. Right now, it is a bit limited."

More Fortra's Alert Logic MDR cons

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

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

"Microsoft sources most of their threat intelligence internally, but I think they should open themselves up to bodies that provide feel intelligence to build a better engine. There may be threats out there that they don't report because their team is not doing anything on that and they don't have arrangements with another party that is involved in that research."

"Most customer teams need more training on this type of product."

"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 pricing could be improved, as it is somewhat high for smaller companies."

"An area where Microsoft Defender for Cloud could be improved is in getting away from having multiple menus that do the same thing, which seems imposing when looking at it."

"The range of workloads is broad, but we'd love to add more workloads and make it a single security solution that covers all those workloads."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"Our ROI would probably be zero. We don't even use it. It sits in there. We get emails and just delete them. Around the world, we don't even use it."

"Almost any product that is on the AWS Marketplace is super easy to subscribe to."

"Price of the solution was very reasonable considering the size of our organization at the time, and so it worked out perfectly."

"Its pricing is very reasonable considering what you get for what you pay. There is quite a good value there. Its licensing is also very logical. They've got the licensing price points at a reasonable level. It is on a monthly license but a yearly contract. There are no additional costs to the standard licensing fees."

"Alert Logic has better competitive pricing than some of its competitors."

"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."

"This is a worldwide service and depending on the country, there will be different prices."

"Pricing is a consideration, but we strive to keep costs low by enabling only necessary services."

"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 much with the pricing but the bundle offering is good."

"The price of the solution is good for the features we receive and there is an additional cost for Microsoft premier support. However, some of my potential customers have found it to be expensive and have gone on to choose another solution."

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

"There is a helpful cost-reducing option that allows you to integrate production subscriptions with non-production subscriptions."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

23%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

Performing Arts

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zafran Security?

Since we stood Zafran Security up in our private cloud, we handle the maintenance on our side. As we opted not to use...

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What needs improvement with Zafran Security?

In terms of areas for improvement, Zafran Security is doing a really great job as a new and emerging company. Oftenti...

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What is your primary use case for Zafran Security?

My use cases for Zafran Security revolve around two primary areas. One is around vulnerability management and priorit...

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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...

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What do you like most about Microsoft Defender for Cloud?

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

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

The pricing is pretty standard.

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Comparisons

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ServiceNow Security Operations vs Zafran Security

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Qualys VMDR vs Zafran Security

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Rapid7 InsightIDR vs Fortra's Alert Logic MDR

Compared 14% of the time

Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response vs Fortra's Alert Logic MDR

Compared 13% of the time

SentinelOne Vigilance vs Fortra's Alert Logic MDR

Compared 12% of the time

CrowdStrike Falcon Complete MDR vs Fortra's Alert Logic MDR

Compared 11% of the time

Qualys VMDR vs Fortra's Alert Logic MDR

Compared 8% of the time

More Fortra's Alert Logic MDR Competitors

AWS GuardDuty vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 24% of the time

Wiz vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 12% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 8% of the time

Microsoft Defender XDR vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 5% of the time

Orca Security vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 3% of the time

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Zafran Security

July 2025

Download Zafran Security product report

Buyer's Guide

Fortra's Alert Logic MDR

August 2025

Download Fortra's Alert Logic MDR product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

August 2025

Download Microsoft Defender for Cloud product report

Also Known As

No data available

Alert Logic MDR, Alert Logic Managed Detection and ResponseAlert Logic Threat Manager, Alert Logic Cloud Defender, Critical Watch FusionVM

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

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

Zafran Security

Demo not available

Fortra

Microsoft

Overview

Zafran Security integrates with existing security tools to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities effectively, proving that most critical vulnerabilities are not exploitable, optimizing threat management.

Zafran Security introduces an innovative operating model for managing security threats and vulnerabilities. By leveraging the threat exposure management platform, it pinpoints and prioritizes exploitable vulnerabilities, reducing risk through immediate remediation. This platform enhances your hybrid cloud security by normalizing vulnerability signals and integrating specific IT context data, such as CVE runtime presence and internet asset reachability, into its analysis. No longer reliant on patch windows, Zafran Security allows you to manage risks actively.

What are the key features of Zafran Security?

Threat Exposure Management: Utilizes existing tools to prioritize vulnerabilities and manage threats.
Integrative Analysis: Combines security data with IT context for precise vulnerability management.
Real-time Risk Reduction: Enables immediate risk management without waiting for patches.
Hybrid Cloud Compatibility: Functions across diverse cloud environments for comprehensive security.

What benefits can users expect from Zafran Security?

Improved Security: Enhances protection by efficiently identifying and mitigating risks.
Cost Efficiency: Reduces unnecessary patching expenses by confirming non-exploitable vulnerabilities.
Time Savings: Frees developers to focus on root causes by handling immediate threats.
Comprehensive Insight: Offers a holistic view of security threats and vulnerabilities.

In industries where security is paramount, such as finance and healthcare, Zafran Security provides invaluable protection by ensuring that only exploitable vulnerabilities are addressed. It allows entities to maintain robust security measures while allocating resources efficiently, fitting seamlessly into existing security strategies.

Zafran Security

Fortra's Alert Logic MDR specializes in threat detection and response with features like log access and user-friendly notifications. It is used primarily in extensive e-commerce deployments for network protection.

Fortra's Alert Logic MDR provides a unified interface with comprehensive search capabilities, immediate log access, and efficient reporting tools. Users benefit from accurate scanning, automated security warnings, and rapid response times, supported by SOCs for global visibility. The technology employs human expertise for enhanced threat detection and prevention, with a hardware setup designed to avoid virtual environment issues. However, there's a need for improved error tracing, intuitive navigation, and stronger analytical automation within the platform. Enhancements in setup documentation and user interfaces are desired, alongside demands for a built-in EDR and better alert management systems.

What are the key features of Fortra's Alert Logic MDR?

Comprehensive Searching: Enables detailed investigations.
Immediate Log Access: Provides quick insight into system activities.
User-Friendly Notifications: Enhances alert effectiveness.
Automated Security Warnings: Offers proactive security measures.
Optimized Platform: Delivers efficient functionality across services.
Heuristic Monitoring: Guards against complex threats.

What benefits and ROI should users seek in reviews?

Quick Response Times: Minimizes downtime and improves efficiency.
Global Visibility: Extends threat management reach through SOCs.
Human Expertise: Enhances detection and intervention accuracy.
Streamlined Deployment: Facilitates smoother hardware integration.

Fortra's Alert Logic MDR is widely implemented across public and private sectors for robust network protection. It supports large-scale e-commerce operations, offering advanced detection capabilities with AI and machine learning. Security scanning, intrusion detection, and vulnerability analysis in Kubernetes are key applications.

Fortra

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

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

Buyer's Guide

Fortra's Alert Logic MDR vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud

July 2025

Free Report: Fortra's Alert Logic MDR vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Find out what your peers are saying about Fortra's Alert Logic MDR vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.

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