Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps comparison

Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps are both solutions in the Microsoft Security Suite category. Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management is ranked #33 with an average rating of 7.5, while Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.5. Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management holds a 0.9% mindshare in Microsoft Security Suite, compared to Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps’s 3.2% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps users who would recommend it.

Microsoft Defender External...

Read 2 Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management reviews

1,284 Views
244 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Microsoft Defender for Clou...

Read 42 Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps reviews

6,224 Views
1,245 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Microsoft Defender External...

Microsoft Defender for Clou...

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Microsoft Security Suite solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

December 2025

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Helped 881,733 peers since 2012

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

Microsoft Defender External...

Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite

33rd

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Attack Surface Management (ASM) (12th)

Microsoft Defender for Clou...

Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite

12th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) (4th), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (14th)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Microsoft Security Suite category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management is 0.9%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is 3.2%, up from 2.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Microsoft Security Suite Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps	3.2%
Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management	0.9%
Other	95.9%

Microsoft Security Suite

Featured Reviews

AndyChan3

General manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Enhanced visibility and exposes vulnerabilities but needs more integration

I am currently in the pilot stage of implementing Microsoft External Attack Surface Management (EASM). My organization is transitioning to a comprehensive track of Microsoft solutions, and we will move to full-scale production in another year, maybe Microsoft External Attack Surface Management…

Read full review

Frank Van Der Spek

Security and Continuity Manager at Rolinco NV

Deployment has been seamless with insightful data categorization and enhanced control

The features of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps that I have found most valuable include the overall portal view, with bubble graphs which give us insight into what goes where in the categorization, nowadays with Generative AI but all kinds of categorization, collaboration, etc. That central view of the portal is very useful for us. The impact of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps on our organization's ability to assess and manage app related risks has been significant because we have more visibility. Therefore, we can add more control, and we have already done so. This was not possible in the old solution, in the old CASB solution with Netskope. We now can see on the spot, and we do that almost weekly, what the end users are utilizing, which cloud providers or cloud apps they're using. The visibility into OAuth apps provided by Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is very good. The visibility into risk and risk management of our organization's Generative AI apps is very nice, as you can choose the category Generative AI and then see exactly what traffic has been going to and from Generative AI in the cloud. This makes us very insightful on what is used within the company. We have some policies on blocking specific Generative AI, and we use within our company one particular AI part, which is CoPilot of Microsoft. In this way, we can see what the end users are using other than CoPilot, and that makes us more in control. The effectiveness of the integration of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps with Defender XDR and defending against SaaS attacks is very intuitive. It works immediately if we create a new policy or in Purview or in Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, or when we make an app unsanctioned by blocking it, then it is almost immediately, or at least within a couple of hours, effective on all the endpoints where the EDR is running. This gives us much better control over things than before.

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

"Microsoft External Attack Surface Management helps improve the visibility of my exposed vulnerabilities and provides an overview of my security posture across the globe."

"It seems to be better at protecting from cyberattacks."

"Microsoft External Attack Surface Management helps improve the visibility of my exposed vulnerabilities and provides an overview of my security posture across the globe."

"It does a great job of monitoring and maintaining a security baseline. For us, that is a key element. The notifications are pretty good."

"The favorite feature of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is the categorical blocking capability, which appears to be fed from Microsoft Security Intelligence feeds that seem to be better than other solutions and allows for dynamic configuration, cutting down on potential issues from manually managing block lists."

"Everything from Microsoft is integrated. You receive regular reports on them all. You can push your reports, logs, and security alerts, which are all integrated. It is crucial that these solutions work natively together to deliver coordinated detection and response across our environment."

"The solution does not affect a user's workflow."

"If your business requirements are relatively simple, it can get the job done."

"Shadow IT discovery is the feature I like the most."

"There are a lot of features with benefits, including discovery, investigation, and putting controls around things. You can't say that you like the investigation part but not the discovery. Everything is correlated; that's how the tool works."

"Threat detection is its key feature, and that's why we use this tool. It gives an alert if a PC is attacked or there is any kind of anomaly, such as there is a spike in sending emails or we see an unauthorized website being accessed. So, it keeps us on our toes. We get to know that there is something wrong, and we can isolate the user and find any issues with it. So, threat detection is very robust in this tool."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps pros

Cons

"Further integration across different Microsoft products would be an improvement."

"With Microsoft, support is always crazy, it's not easy to get support."

"The integration is not as seamless compared to competitors like Palo Alto."

"An area of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps that needs to be improved or enhanced is the reporting function. In the beginning, there was a good reporting function which gave us a sort of monthly overview report. But that has gone away."

"Defender for Cloud apps is primarily useful for Azure apps. It has limited capabilities for applications based on other cloud platforms."

"Sometimes, we'll get false positive alarms. For example, when a SharePoint path has no file sharing, but there is an external user, it will trigger an alarm that the file has been shared with an external user... the alerting mechanism should be more precise when giving you an alert about what activity has been done with the file..."

"The interface needs to be more user-friendly."

"I would like more customization of notifications. Currently, you either get everything or you get limited information. I would like to have something in between where we can customize the data that is included in notifications."

"This service would be better if it had a separate license, only for this service, that could be used to track usage."

"There are certain areas where the product could improve, such as some functionalities that did not work as expected."

"Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps’s technical support services needs improvement."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"Microsoft offers bundle discounts and a pay-as-you-go option."

"It has pretty good pricing."

"I'm not totally involved in the pricing part, but I think its pricing is quite aggressive, and its price is quite similar to Netskope. Netskope has separate licensing fees or additional charges if you want to monitor certain SaaS services, whereas, with MCAS, you get 5,000 applications with their Office 365. It is all bundled, and there's no cost for using that. You only have the operational costs. In the country I am in, it is a bit difficult to get people with the required skill sets."

"It has fair pricing. You pay for what you get. As far as I know, there are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fee."

"Where we are right now, this is an acceptable pricing. I would like to see more transparency given to the end user. The end user given to us is via the cloud service provider. There are different programs and license models. Some include this, and some include that. It is all over the place. There can be a little more consistency or simplification in the pricing so that your parts list is not ten pages long, and you are not trying to determine, "If I have an E3, does this cover that?", or "Do I need to pay separately for the license?" Simplification would probably be better."

"Its pricing is on the higher side. Its price is definitely very high for a small-scale company. As an enterprise client, we do get benefits from Microsoft. We get a discounted price because of the number of users we have in our company. We have a premier package, and with that, we do get a lot of discounts. There are no additional costs. It only comes in the top-tier packages. Generally, the top-tier license is the best license that you can get for your organization. If you want, you can buy it separately, but that's not a good idea."

"The product's pricing seems fair."

"We utilize the Microsoft E5 licensing, which encompasses the entire Microsoft suite; however, it is costly."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Outsourcing Company

Energy/Utilities Company

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	15
Midsize Enterprise	10
Large Enterprise	19

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management?

I rate the pricing of the solution as eight out of ten.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management?

Further integration across different Microsoft products would be an improvement. Introduction of more AI automation into the products would also be beneficial. The integration is not as seamless co...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management?

See all answers

Which is the better security solution - Cisco Umbrella or Microsoft Cloud App Security?

Cisco Umbrella is an integral component of the Cisco SASE architecture. It integrates security in a single, cloud-native solution, unifying multiple features like DNS-layer security, threat intelli...

See all answers

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

At the time of implementation, when the size of our organization was small, it was a more affordable product. Since all our productivity applications were on O365, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Microsoft Cloud App Security?

The fidelity of the signal in Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps has been a challenge in some areas. There have been instances where the alerts generated have been false positives. A lot of work has...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 13% of the time

Cisco Umbrella vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

Compared 11% of the time

Netskope vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

Compared 10% of the time

Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

Compared 7% of the time

Skyhigh Security vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Attack Surface Management (ASM)

February 2026

Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management report

Download Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

January 2026

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps report

Download Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps product report

Also Known As

No data available

MS Cloud App Security, Microsoft Cloud App Security

Overview

In this era of hybrid work, shadow IT creates an increasingly serious security risk. Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management helps cloud security teams see unknown and unmanaged resources outside the firewall.

Microsoft

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is a comprehensive security solution that provides protection for cloud-based applications and services. It offers real-time threat detection and response, as well as advanced analytics and reporting capabilities. With Defender for Cloud Apps, organizations can ensure the security of their cloud environments and safeguard against cyber threats. Whether you're running SaaS applications, IaaS workloads, or PaaS services, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps can help you secure your cloud environment and protect your business from cyber threats.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Benefits:

Provides comprehensive security for cloud applications
Integrates with other Microsoft security tools
Easy to use and deploy
Provides real-time threat detection and response
Strong protection against phishing attacks and other common threats
Highly customizable to meet specific needs of different organizations

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Use Cases:

Governance, authentication, security, and compliance.
Detects shadow IT and anomalous user behavior
Controls access to applications
Provides auditing and filtering setups
Used for end-user compute devices, file monitoring, user investigation, and activity
Used for data governance, threat detection, and getting visibility over cloud applications
Used to identify information about applications beyond organizational boundaries
Prevent exfiltration and data filtration of corporate data
Used to deal with spam emails and detect shadow IT

Reviews from Real Users

Ram-Krish, Cloud Security & Governance at a financial services firm, says that Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps "Integrates well and helps us in protecting sensitive information, but takes time to scan and apply the policies and cannot detect everything we need".

PeerSpot user, Senior Cloud & Security Consultant at a tech services, writes that Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps "Great for monitoring user activity and protecting data while integrating well with other applications".

Simon Burgess,Infrastructure Engineer at SBITSC, states that Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is "A fluid, intelligent product for great visibility, centralized management, and increased uptime".

Microsoft

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Customers for Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps include Accenture, St. Luke’s University Health Network, Ansell, and Nakilat.

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

December 2025

Free Report: Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.

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