Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Wiz Unified Security: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Enterprise security teams already deep in Azure will extract the most value from Microsoft Defender for Cloud, where the integration with Sentinel and native Azure controls eliminates alert fatigue that multicloud deployments typically introduce. Its attack path analysis directly addresses NIST ID.RA risk assessment by surfacing exploitable chains rather than listing vulnerabilities in isolation, and the agentless scanning means you're protected before agents finish rolling out. Skip this if your cloud footprint is genuinely multicloud; AWS and GCP coverage exists but feels bolted on, and you'll spend cycles normalizing alerts across platforms when a pure multicloud CNAPP would save that effort.

Wiz Unified Security

Mid-market and enterprise teams managing infrastructure-as-code across multiple cloud providers will get the most from Wiz Unified Security because it actually maps risk from code commit through runtime drift, catching the misconfigurations that slip between your Terraform templates and what's actually deployed. The tool scans 1000+ IaC rules and traces findings back to the developer's pull request, which means your remediation conversations happen where the code lives instead of in a separate security tool. Skip this if your organization runs mostly managed services with minimal IaC; Wiz's value collapses when there's nothing to scan.