Organizations in the market for a Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) have many choices. However, according to Gartner Peer Insights, only four earned the Customers’ Choice label at the end of 2024: SentinelOne, Sysdig, Trend Micro and Wiz.
What customers think of a product or service is obviously very important to vendors. After all, they are the best ambassadors you can have. Hence, Gartner’s Peer Insights get quite a bit of attention from vendors. At least, if the so-called Voice of the Customer turns out in their favor of course.
To qualify for a spot in the annual Voice of the Customer rankings, vendors need more than 20 verified reviews within the Peer Insights program, from respondents who work at companies with revenue exceeding $50 million per year.
As usual with Gartner, the results are organized into four quadrants. The x-axis represents User Interest and Adoption, the y-axis represents Overall Experience. Those two components are then broken down into multiple parts, which individually can also be averages of other things. Finally, a separate result is also available for Willingness to Recommend, or how many respondents would recommend the solution to others. This percentage isn’t everything, by the way, because it is part of the x-axis. In other words, a score of 100 percent there does not automatically mean you get a Customers’ Choice label. For that, you have to score well in other areas as well. That might be a bit confusing.
You can find the full methodology for Voice of the Customer on Gartner’s website.
Which CNAPP solutions get the Customers’ Choice label?
As usual with Gartner, the upper right quadrant is where vendors prefer to see themselves. That’s the section Gartner designates as Customers’ Choice. And there, the Voice of the Customer for CNAPP is not very crowded. Only four of the 12 vendors are found here: SentinelOne, Sysdig, Trend Micro and Wiz.
As such, Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms are still relatively new, so it is not very surprising. In any case, it indicates that there is still something to be gained. Especially considering that the use of cloud-native applications is not necessarily going to decline. In fact, with the advent of more and more AI-driven applications, that will only start to accelerate, we expect. Many of those applications will at least initially run in the cloud, either as part of larger SaaS platforms or completely autonomously.
Securing AI will get a strong focus this year anyway, we expect. Until now, this topic hasn’t really received that much attention, as many security players were mainly concerned with fending off AI-driven attacks and integrating AI into their own solutions. However, with (Gen-)AI becoming more widely available, more emphasis must also be placed on protecting it.
We briefly go through some interesting data points from the Gartner Voice of the Customer for CNAPP below.
SentinelOne does well
Looking at Gartner’s Voice of the Customer results for CNAPP, a few things stand out. For example, SentinelOne seems to have done well with its acquisition of PingSafe early last year. After integrating it into its own platform, SentinelOne’s CNAPP is at the top of the rankings.
It is also notable that SentinelOne has received by far the most reviews, 188. The next highest is at 119 (Palo Alto Networks). Yet SentinelOne has a Willingness to Recommend of 98 percent. Wiz, which notes “only” 95 percent, does so based on only 94 responses, for example. Trend Micro scores 96 percent with 81 reviews, respectively. Sysdig achieves 99 percent with 110 reviews.
The spectrum of the number of respondents to the Voice of the Customer for CNAPP, by the way, is quite wide. It runs from a paltry 28 for Aqua Security Software to the aforementioned 188 for SentinelOne. One might wonder what such large differences do for the final results.
CrowdStrike suffers from recent events
As mentioned earlier, the Willingness to Recommend certainly doesn’t say it all. CrowStrike sets a perfect score of 100 percent here. It is also the only one to score a perfect score of 5 on its CNAPP’s capabilities, where SentinelOne and Sysdig score 4.8 and Trend Micro and Wiz score 4.7. On the y-axis, however, the company apparently has some problems. At least too many to be considered for the Customers’ Choice quadrant. In itself, after the events of last year, it is not so surprising that User Interest and Adoption are suffering a bit there of course.
Three negative outliers: Aqua Security Software, Lacework and Microsoft
Finally, we notice that there are a few companies that are doing rather badly. Aqua Security Software does not get beyond a Willingness to Recommend of 61 percent and Lacework, recently acquired by Fortinet, also does not do well with 67 percent. Microsoft is also a dissonant with 80 percent. In contrast, all of the other companies in the Voice of the Customer for CNAPP are above 90 percent. What exactly is going on with Aqua, Lacework and Microsoft’s solutions, by the way, is not clear, so again, perhaps we should not put too much value on the resistance to recommend these products. On the other hand, the difference from the rest is really substantial, so it can never be a good sign.
All in all, the world of Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms is not boring by any means. There are quite a few security companies to choose from, with a relatively wide variation in scores when it comes to what end users at large companies think of them. Of course, as with all rankings, the key is not to focus blindly on them. It is always important to be able to value outcomes like these for what they are really worth. But existing customers are generally a good indicator. Therefore, we would definitely recommend organizations currently looking for a CNAPP to at least take a look at the outcomes of this report from Gartner.