Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention vs Varonis Platform comparison

Microsoft and Varonis are both solutions in the Data Loss Prevention (DLP) category. Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 7.7, while Varonis is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.0. Additionally, 92% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Varonis users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention and Varonis Platform both compete in the data protection and compliance category. While Microsoft Purview stands out with strong integration into the Microsoft ecosystem, Varonis excels in data governance and comprehensive threat management.

Features: Microsoft Purview focuses on auto-labeling, integration with Microsoft services, and real-time compliance insights. It supports education on data handling and achieves broad platform compatibility. In contrast, Varonis emphasizes robust data governance, threat management, and access monitoring with a focus on identifying behavioral anomalies within unstructured data sources. It offers a comprehensive reporting system.

Room for Improvement: Microsoft Purview needs enhancements in label setup, endpoint coverage, and third-party system integration, facing issues with stability and scalability. Varonis requires improvement in cloud migration and licensing costs, along with document interface enhancements and better IAM tool integration.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Microsoft Purview offers multi-cloud support with reliable technical documentation, though it struggles with delays in support and lacks a robust ticketing system. Varonis provides superior technical support, promptly addressing setup issues, supported by well-regarded documentation, though it faces challenges with licensing complexity.

Pricing and ROI: Microsoft Purview pricing is tied to the E5 bundle, making it competitive and cost-effective for large enterprises, though potentially expensive for smaller ones. Varonis has high licensing costs, justified for Fortune 500 companies by its feature set. Both platforms demonstrate ROI, especially when leveraging existing licenses to minimize additional costs.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention vs. Varonis Platform Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention vs. Varonis Platform

April 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 851,604 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

Cloudflare

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes

Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.

Read full review

Roby Skariah

Solution Architect : Corporate wide systems at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Automation has given us consistent analytics and improved quality of insights into user activity

One of the valuable features of Purview is the ability to create a legal hold on a user's account within the compliance portal. That's pretty useful when it comes to any litigation or if you want to redeem the content within a mailbox, OneDrive, or a generic public SharePoint site. If you want to retain the user's data until the case is resolved, you can use the legal hold feature. Also, it's important that Purview can connect to iOS, Mac, and Android devices. With smartphone involvement, so many applications can now be accessed through them and it is important to apply Purview across operating systems and platforms. Purview's natively integrated compliance across Azure Dynamics and Office 365 is also significant because within Microsoft 365 there are multiple applications. Irrespective of whether it's Dynamics or Azure, it's very important that it has native support. The data connectivity should be efficient enough to support and secure their own platform's data. In addition, with varying regulations in different industries and matters, Purview lets you create rules and conditions based on industry standards around the world. That is important. Our company is in pharmaceuticals and the rules and conditions are different from other industries. It is important to be able to keep track of all these regulations and have a tool that is flexible enough to create the regulatory rules and conditions we need. And when it comes to data loss protection, Purview has features that can recognize patterns and detect any sort of data loss, where the data is being transferred from its platform to a different one. The default settings that come with it are pretty nice for identifying data transfer or data loss across the platform. It also comes with a lot of training materials, with use cases and examples, to help educate users and make them familiar with the tool.

Read full review

Frederic Delos

Senior Cloud Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Offers the ability to identify sensitive areas, allowing you to drill down into the sensitive data

The most effective feature for me is its ability to identify sensitive areas, allowing you to drill down into the sensitive data, provided you have access, to determine whether it's a false positive or a true positive. That's the best thing for me, out of all of it. It's got everything, like other ones, but I like to be able to look at something if I'm doing forensics on the alert and say, "Okay, do I really need to do something with this?" For example, we don't want sensitive data in our OneDrive. So it identifies the sensitive data that's possibly in the OneDrive. And what I can do is look at it and identify whether it's actually sensitive data in Datalert or whether it looks like sensitive data, but I know it's a false positive. If it is a false positive, I can basically say ignore this pattern based on X, Y, and Z, you know, whether it's Redjax or keyword proximity. So I like that. With other tools, I gotta go through a whole process because it's a little bit more complex. Here, I can tag it and bag it in one shot. And the next good time I scan, it slips over it. So it helps in that.

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

"What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering, so it's a valuable tool."

"Cloudflare has many features."

"The features of Cloudflare were found to be more beneficial and led to the decision to utilize it over other options."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is external DNS. It is also very secure. They have their own main server and once you configure it, the product takes care of everything. There are no issues in resolving IPs and low latency is also present."

"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"

"The DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."

"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."

"Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications."

More Cloudflare pros

"The tool's most valuable feature is in the area of OCR."

"Insider risk management and data retention are beneficial."

"We can use Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention to manage devices and site policies."

"Because everything is on Microsoft and we use Azure, integration with the product is easier. That's the most important thing when you use many Microsoft products. It's easier to integrate everything in one place."

"Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention's responses are faster. Its installation is also reliable. The security score helps with the security part."

"It has helped our clients to reduce the time to action on insider threats because it can be integrated."

"We can triage based on quick and sometimes constant alerts."

"It's secure and can be integrated with an existing Forcepoint DLP setup."

More Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention pros

"Varonis Platform is transparent and captures everything in the environment without impacting the performance. The tool helps us unify data feeds into a single reporting system."

"On the Varonis side, technical support is phenomenal. Their ability to explain is very good, and they seem to be very knowledgeable. When I get an alert that doesn't quite make sense, they dive in there and kind of take me through it. That's very useful and very good. There are some false alerts, but it is better to have a false alert than no alert at all."

"I also appreciate the reporting feature, which allows for the extraction of various reports based on specific needs. These reports can be used for audit purposes, such as tracking changes in file locations or deletions."

"It can easily identify unusual behavior or access patterns that may pose a potential threat, while operating as a unified reporting system."

"There's also a 90-day policy where if a user is not using the warehouse, it will automatically delete that username."

"The most important feature is remediation. In remediation support, there is no group permission. We'll go ahead and remediate the access from the Dell folder to the parent folder."

"That alerting and reporting service is great."

"Varonis offers robust data access governance, allowing us to understand which sensitive data exists and who has access to it."

More Varonis Platform pros

Cons

"Areas like how assessment, discovery, and payload are dealt with and how it all comes into your organization can be considered when trying to make suggestions to Cloudflare for improvements."

"The analytics, basically the dashboard, doesn't have much to it."

"Cloudflare does not have an on-premise solution. If they had different approaches they could be better suited to accommodate more customers, such as on-premise and hybrid deployments. For example, hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud."

"I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution."

"There are some issues with the CDN services."

"The pricing could be improved."

"The tool needs to improve caching of servers. The product needs to include PFX certificate as well."

"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."

More Cloudflare cons

"There is a need for improvements, particularly in ensuring that file-based recognition is more reliable and comprehensive."

"The AI advancements can improve the false positives."

"They do not provide language options beyond the ones already available, so our language option is missing."

"A site can have different containers where you store data. We have always wanted to apply compliance, labels, and policies at the container level, rather than to an outer shell or at the site level. That is something we have been looking forward to and I believe Microsoft is already planning something like that."

"I would like Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention to be on the source code or SQL databases. It is difficult to do classification and labeling when you have a third-party source code or a third-party Oracle database. It is seamless when it comes to Microsoft documents but is not so with third-party source codes. Microsoft needs to work on it a little bit more."

"Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention's licensing is expensive."

"Some main features are limited in comparison to other solutions."

"All the security operations are better defined in Forcepoint, while in Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention, you will have to use a specific workflow and then an application to release blocked emails."

More Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention cons

"The remediation process can be improved. There will be no existing permission group for the McAfee channel domains. We can create a new permissions group for the required folder."

"I would like it to have cloud integration."

"I'd like to see automatic updates for this solution. Currently, it's a manual process to update all the keywords"

"The solution's interface is a little complicated with regard to setting up filters and reports."

"The GUI should be more functional. There should be a process for connecting through Chrome, Internet Explorer, etc."

"It is significantly complex."

"Varonis requires more access permissions for its core functions compared to competitors, which can be a concern for companies about data safety."

"We have Microsoft Office 365. I just saw an article today which says that they're actually getting integrated with Microsoft Office 365, which would be a useful feature. For user-based reports, log on activity, and stuff like that, it doesn't seem to really be present like Log360. That could just be my inexperience with it. I've been dealing with it for only about two and a half months."

More Varonis Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."

"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."

"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."

"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."

"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."

"I give the price a five out of ten."

"We are using the free tier of the solution."

"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"If one is very cheap and ten is very expensive, I rate the price as one out of ten."

"You get the solution in a bundle if you get the E5 suite."

"Though I am not a specialist, the tool is quite expensive."

"The product has the best price-to-performance ratio."

"The pricing is reasonable."

"The cost works out to about $15 per user per month."

"I am satisfied with the tool's pricing."

"The solution’s pricing is reasonable."

More Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention pricing and cost advice

"Varonis Platform wasn't certainly the cheapest solution."

"You could do a subscription, where you pay yearly, or you could purchase it outright. The licensing cost is based on the number of users on the system that you are monitoring."

"Licensing is on an annual basis. Maintenance and renewal fees are separate. Varonis Datalert is quite expensive."

"It's expensive, kind of, really expensive."

"The platform is expensive. I rate the pricing a nine out of ten."

"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, with ten being the most expensive."

"The pricing is good. It neither expensive nor cheap. It is average."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

15%

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?

Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GR...

See all answers

Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?

Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service...

See all answers

What do you like most about Cloudflare?

Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.

See all answers

What do you like most about Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention?

The most valuable features are identifying sensitive data and issuing alerts.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention?

It is quite expensive for us as the shift to E5 licenses represents a significant increase in cost. The cost works ou...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention?

Endpoint Data Loss Prevention needs to be improved as it is not up to expectations. Auto labeling and Data Loss Preve...

See all answers

What do you like most about Varonis Platform?

The solution has significantly improved data security and compliance posture by allowing us to track and monitor acti...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Varonis Platform?

Varonis started as an on-premises solution and is transitioning to cloud. It hasn't fully moved yet, which is an area...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Varonis Platform?

The primary use case for Varonis Platform is data discovery, specifically for discovering sensitive data in our organ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Imperva DDoS vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Symantec Data Loss Prevention vs Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention

Compared 13% of the time

Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform vs Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention

Compared 13% of the time

Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention vs Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention

Compared 12% of the time

Amazon Macie vs Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention

Compared 10% of the time

Google Cloud Data Loss Prevention vs Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention

Compared 3% of the time

More Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention Competitors

Microsoft Purview Data Governance vs Varonis Platform

Compared 18% of the time

Cyera vs Varonis Platform

Compared 12% of the time

BigID vs Varonis Platform

Compared 12% of the time

Wiz vs Varonis Platform

Compared 6% of the time

Securiti vs Varonis Platform

Compared 2% of the time

More Varonis Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

May 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention

May 2025

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention report

Download Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention product report

Buyer's Guide

Varonis Platform

April 2025

Download Varonis Platform product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

Microsoft Endpoint Data Loss Prevention, MS Endpoint DLP, Microsoft Endpoint DLP

No data available

Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

Cloudflare

At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our mission is grounded in both the world in which we live and the future we strive to create. Today, we live in a mobile-first, cloud-first world, and the transformation we are driving across our businesses is designed to enable Microsoft and our customers to thrive in this world.

Microsoft

Varonis Platform specializes in network security and data monitoring with modules for alerting, data classification, and access management, benefiting environments like Microsoft 365.

Varonis is designed to secure data by auditing and tracking data movement. It leverages data alert and classification modules to identify and manage sensitive information. The platform enhances network security by alerting users to unexpected data modifications and deletions, crucial for effective data loss prevention. It supports unstructured data management, ensuring proper data access and permission controls. Known for its 24/7 support, Varonis offers comprehensive analytics and unified reporting, helping prevent data overexposure and facilitating compliance efforts.

What are the key features of Varonis Platform?

24/7 Support: Provides round-the-clock assistance.
Data Monitoring: Tracks data activities efficiently.
Unified Reporting: Consolidates data access reports.
Data Classification: Identifies sensitive data effectively.
Permission Management: Simplifies managing access rights.
Behavior Analytics: Detects abnormal behavior patterns.

What benefits should be highlighted in user reviews?

Enhanced Security: Improves data protection measures.
Compliance Support: Assists in meeting compliance standards.
Data Transparency: Offers clarity in data access activities.
Access Control: Ensures proper access to data.
Centralized Remediation: Eases remediation procedures.

Varonis Platform is widely utilized in industries needing stringent data confidentiality and management, such as finance and healthcare, for tracking data modifications and unauthorized access. Enterprises deploy it to manage permissions within large datasets, benefiting Microsoft 365 environments. While Varonis requires enhancements in cloud integration, the current deployment is often based on-premises, with attention to addressing the security needs and effective data handling for critical infrastructure.

Varonis

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

Information Not Available

Nottingham Building Society

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention vs. Varonis Platform

April 2025

Free Report: Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention vs. Varonis Platform

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention vs. Varonis Platform and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention vs. Varonis Platform report.

See our list of best Data Loss Prevention (DLP) vendors.

We monitor all Data Loss Prevention (DLP) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.