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Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps vs Morphisec comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

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 for Clou...
Ranking in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)
17th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) (4th), Microsoft Security Suite (8th)
Morphisec
Ranking in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)
30th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (57th), Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (45th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (59th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (34th), Threat Deception Platforms (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is 2.2%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Morphisec is 2.3%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps2.2%
Morphisec2.3%
Other95.5%
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)
 

Featured Reviews

Abdulrahman Muhammadi - PeerSpot reviewer
information Security and IT Manager at Discover Dollar Technologies Pvt Ltd.
Integration with existing cloud workflows has simplified compliance and threat detection
Licensing cost is a significant concern. With Defender Plan 1, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps comes with a pay-per-use model. Each feature has its own pricing when activated on VMs. For example, the vulnerability assessment has separate pricing, the base model including encryptions has separate pricing, and the compliance features have separate pricing. This applies to each VM and Azure resource individually. It is not straightforward where you can take one license and apply it to everything. Each feature has its own pricing model which can be tedious, as the costs keep accumulating. The only lacking feature currently is XDR (extended detection and response). Apart from that, I have only positive experiences with the whole Microsoft suite, except for the pricing structure.
Rick Schibler - PeerSpot reviewer
VP of Information Technology at Kentucky Trailer
Offers in-memory protection at a lower price than competitors
Morphisec's in-memory protection is probably the most valuable feature because it stops malicious activity from occurring. If something tries to install or act as a sleeper agent, Morphisec will detect and stop it. Morphisec's Moving Target Defense is critical to hardening our attack surface. If it detects something, it indicates whether it's valid. That means you've got a breach requiring investigation. It detects anomalies but doesn't necessarily point to what caused them. You still need to do that work. The solution is reasonably easy to administer. They made some changes last year, adding a cloud-based monitoring solution that makes deploying and monitoring our endpoints easy.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"In Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, there is an option to enable files. Once you enable that, it will give you all the files in your organization and where they are located in the cloud... That feature is very useful for investigation purposes."
"From what I've seen, it's a good product."
"It's very easy to install and it includes the Intune portal from Microsoft where I can control all the devices from one place."
"I would rate it a ten because I have not experienced any stability issues so far with Defender for Cloud Apps."
"One of the most valuable features is auditing. Some of the other protection services have issues with auditing. Microsoft Defender for Cloud has an excellent auditing technique that helps us avoid the risk of filtering or information loss. You can use different tools to guarantee these things. It allows you to conduct an in-depth exploration of applications, users, and files that are harmful or suspicious. You can also enhance your security setup by creating personalized rules or policies that help you better control traffic in the cloud."
"Defender's integration with our identity solutions is critical in our current setup."
"I like the alert policies because they are quite robust. It has some built-in templates that we can easily pick up. One of them is the alert for mass downloads, when a particular user is running a massive download on your SharePoint site."
"The solution is bundled with E3 and E5 licenses; that's the reason it's most commonly deployed, as it's part of the bundle and not a separate cost, and if your business requirements are relatively simple, it can get the job done."
"Since using Morphisec we have seen a downturn in attacks because Morphisec protects us versus Defenders and whatnot that are signature-based. I know we have not had any issues with ransomware or other zero-day attacks that we've seen with machines that, all of a sudden, have become before we instituted the product. Now the machine had to be re-imaged and there was a loss of data because something was on the machine. You couldn't really determine what was on the machine because nothing was picking it up. The products we were using weren't picking it up."
"Morphisec has enabled us to become a lot less paranoid when it comes to staff clicking on things or accessing things that they shouldn't that could infect the whole system. Our original ransomware attack that happened came from someone's Google drive and then just filtered on through that. It has put our minds at ease a lot more in running it. It's also another layer of security that has been proven to be effective for us."
"Morphisec makes use of deterministic attack prevention that doesn’t require investigation of security alerts. It changes the memory locations of where certain applications run. If you think of Excel, opening a PDF, running an Excel macro, or opening a webpage and clicking on a link, all of those actions run in a certain area of memory. Morphisec changes the memory locations of where those run."
"Morphisec Guard enables us to see at a glance whether our users have device control and disk encryption enabled properly. This is important because we are a global company operating with multiple entities. Previously, we didn't have that visibility. Now, we have visibility so we can pinpoint some locations where there are machines that are not really protected, offline, etc. It gives us visibility, which is good."
"Morphisec makes it very easy for IT teams of any size to prevent breaches of critical systems because of the design of their tool. When we evaluated Morphisec, the CIO and I sat and listened. What attracted us to them is the fact that it stops activity at the point of detection. That saves a lot of time because now we are not investigating and trying to trace down what to turn off. We have already prevented it, which makes it very much safer and more secure."
"Morphisec makes it very easy for IT teams of any size to prevent breaches of critical systems because of the design of their tool."
"It's simple, it's easy, and it works."
"We have not had one machine that has been taken down due to malware now in almost four and a half years, with 600 machines that we don't have routine infections on because nothing can execute."
 

Cons

"There are certain areas where the product could improve, such as some functionalities that did not work as expected."
"We sometimes get errors when we create policies, which is somewhat annoying because some policies stop working due to misconfigurations. We find this challenging because it limits our options for troubleshooting an issue."
"I want them to enhance in-session policy."
"It doesn't actually decrease the time to respond. This has been an issue with Microsoft recently. Sometimes, there is a delay when it comes to getting an alert policy email... Sometimes it takes two or three hours for that email to be sent."
"The technical support team has room for improvement."
"The insights could be improved, especially in reporting. While it is possible for me to see the usage from different cloud apps, determining if critical data has been uploaded or if it is just normal transport data is difficult."
"They need to improve the attack surface reduction (ASR) rules. In the latest version, you can implement ASR rules, which are quite useful, but you have to enable those because if they're not enabled, they flag false positives. In the Defender portal, it logs a block for WMI processes and PowerShell. Apparently, it's because ASR rules are not configured. So, you generally have to enable them to exclude, for example, WMI queries or PowerShell because they have a habit of blocking your security scanners. It's a bit weird that they have to be enabled to be configured, and it's not the other way around."
"Generally, the pricing can always be improved along with the management system."
"Overall, I don't know 100% if it's increasing our security posture, but it does give us a nice peace of mind."
"I haven't been able to get the cloud deployment to work."
"Right now, it's just their auto-update feature. I know they are currently working on that. When they release a new version of the threat prevention platform, I do have to update that, rolling out to every computer. They have said, "From version 5, you would be able to do an auto-update." While this is very minor, that is the only thing that I would say needs to be upgraded. It would just make life a lot easier for other IT teams. However, I have simplified the process, so all I need to do is just download one file."
"We started in the Linux platform and we deployed to Linux. The licensing of that has been kind of confusing between Linux licensing and Windows licensing. The overall simplicity of licensing or offering an enterprise license to just cover everything and then we don't have to count needs improvement."
"We have only had four attacks in the last year, "attacks" being some benign PDF from a vendor that, for some reason, were triggered. There were no actual attacks. They were just four false positives, or something lowly like adware. There have been false positives with both the on-premises solution and the cloud solution."
"Some of the filters for the console need improvement. There are alerts that show up and just being able to acknowledge that we've seen those and not turn them off, but dismiss them, would be a huge benefit."
"Automating reports needs improvement. I would like to have better reporting capabilities within it or automated reporting to be a little bit more dynamic. That's something I know they're working on. We literally are in the process. We started the process a week and a half ago of going to their latest version, so I've not seen their latest one up and running yet."
"Those are some of the features that I was looking for on my on-prem platform that they've already instituted in the cloud and that I'm sure will be instituting on their on-prem platform as well. Having to have an on-prem server required a lot of administration. Being able to push that to the cloud and have it managed up there for us is a real nice addition."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It has pretty good pricing."
"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."
"The price could be better and should be reconsidered."
"The pricing is in the middle. It isn't too cheap or expensive compared to other antivirus or security products. It is priced according to industry standards."
"The pricing is fair."
"We are an MST and we do not pay for the solution. However, the price of the solution could be better."
"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."
"The cost could be improved when you need to pay for anything. For example, refreshing files takes time to load, though it may be my Internet. To improve the refresh time, Microsoft says that we need to pay for a Premium license, and I don't like paying for things that help make a solution better."
"The pricing is definitely fair for what it does."
"It is an annual subscription basis per device. For the devices that we have in scope right now, it is about $25,000 a year."
"We are still using a separate tool. I know for our 600 or I think we're actually licensed for up to 700 users, it runs me 23 or $24,000 a year. When you're talking to that many users plus servers being protected, that's well worth the investment for that dollar amount."
"Compared to their competitors, the price of Morphisec is not that high. You can easily deploy it on a large-scale or small-scale network."
"Price-wise, it's on the higher side. A traditional antivirus solution is cheaper, but in terms of security and manageability, its ROI is better than a traditional antivirus. I would recommend it to anybody evaluating or considering an antivirus solution. If your system gets compromised, the cost of ransom would be a lot more. This way, it saves a lot of cost."
"Morphisec is reasonably priced because our parent company's other subsidiaries use different products like CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike is four or five times more expensive than Morphisec. The competitive pricing saves us money in our overall security stack."
"It is priced correctly for what it does. They end up doing a good deal of discounting, but I think it is priced appropriately."
"Licenses are per endpoint, and that's true for the cloud version as well. The only difference is that there is a little extra charge for the cloud version."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Outsourcing Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Construction Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise19
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

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...
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...
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...
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Also Known As

MS Cloud App Security, Microsoft Cloud App Security
Morphisec, Morphisec Moving Target Defense
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Customers for Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps include Accenture, St. Luke’s University Health Network, Ansell, and Nakilat.
Lenovo/Motorola, TruGreen, Covenant Health, Citizens Medical Center
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps vs. Morphisec and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.