Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint are both strong endpoint security solutions with different strengths. Cortex XDR offers advanced threat detection and investigation capabilities with a focus on extended detection and response (XDR). Microsoft Defender for Endpoint emphasizes robust security measures and leverages tight integration with other Microsoft products for a comprehensive security posture.
The summary above is based on 214 interviews we conducted recently with Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks and Microsoft Defender users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"Fortinet is very user-friendly for customers."
"This is stable and scalable."
"Fortinet FortiEDR's scalability is quite good, and you can add licenses to the solution."
"The product's initial setup phase is very easy."
"Having all monitoring, response, tracking, and mitigation tools in one dashboard provides our analysts and SOC team with a comprehensive view at a glance."
"Fortinet FortiEDR's firewalling, rule creation, monitoring, and inspection profiles are great."
"The main thing is that I feel safe. Because the processes that have been used to get a handle on the attackers are much better than other competitors"
"Exceptions are easy to create and the interface is easy to follow with a nice appearance."
"We can use Cortex XDR to get the entire graph of the incidents from source to destination, and we can take remedial action."
"I've found the solution to be highly scalable for enterprises."
"Has great threat detection capabilities."
"Traps has drastically reduced our endpoint attack surface via advanced detection capabilities, sandboxing of never before seen programs, and by drastically limiting where executables can launch in the first place."
"Cortex XDR is a simple platform that's easy for administrators and users. You have a lot of flexibility to change or customize the features."
"The information the dashboard provides is very clear."
"Best solution for avoiding security breaches, malware attacks, and other kinds of security issues."
"Stability is a primary factor, and then there's the ease of distribution and policy management."
"The antivirus is the most valuable feature."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint's most valuable feature is its ease of use."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint's WCS function, a content filtering solution, has proven to be the most useful, stable, and reliable option for our current needs."
"We had certain compliance and usage issues. For example, our company wanted to go with CIS, but we didn't have a proper way of measuring whether the endpoints have the right standards in place or whether they were compliant with CIS. Microsoft Defender was like a one-stop for most things because it gave us the vulnerability and patching scores so that our vulnerability management teams can focus on covering up the vulnerabilities and the patching team can check the vulnerable versions and deploy the right versions."
"The visibility into threats that the solution provides is pretty awesome... This is something that makes me think, "Wow, okay. If I had my own organization, I would probably get this too." It stops the threat before an employee gets phished or something gets downloaded to their computer."
"It's not really visible for the user - which is a benefit."
"The most valuable feature is that we can use the solution right out of the box without too much configuration."
"The whole bundle of the product, which is similar to other Microsoft products, is valuable. Ten years ago, you had third-party stuff for different things. You had one solution for email archiving and another third-party one for something else. Nowadays, Microsoft Office covers all the stuff that was formerly covered by third-party solutions. It is the same with antivirus. The functionality is just basic. You have the scanning, and then you also have a kind of cloud-based protection and reporting about your environment. With Microsoft Security Center, you have a complete overview of your environment. You know the software inventory, and you have security recommendations. You can not only see that the antivirus is up to date; you can also see where are the vulnerabilities in your system. Microsoft Security Center tells you where you have old, deprecated software and what kind of CVEs are addressed. It's really cool stuff."
"The solution is not stable."
"Making the portal mobile friendly would be helpful when I am out of office."
"Detections could be improved."
"The dashboard isn't easy to access and manage."
"We've had a lot of false positives; things incorrectly flagged that require manual configuration to allow. Even worse, after we allow a legitimate program, it sometimes gets flagged again after an update. This has caused a lot of extra work for my team."
"They can include the automation for the realtime updates. We have a network infrastructure with remote sites. Whenever they send updates, they are not automated. We have to go into the console and push those updates. I wish it was more automated. The update file is currently around 31 MB. It could be smaller."
"The only minor concern is occasional interference with desired programs."
"Cannot be used on mobile devices with a secure connection."
"Currently, we are monitoring all USB drives and ports but we would like to improve our device control capabilities."
"The setup is quite easy. We had appropriate support from the manager. One thing that was missing was the integration part."
"Previously, the endpoint would leave the environment, not being on our VPN, essentially unable to interact with the server to upload files. It was unable to retrieve new file verdicts. It was using a thing called "local analysis" to determine if something was a malicious file or not. There was no dynamic analysis."
"There is a severe gap in functionality between Windows, Linux, and Mac versions. For example all folder restriction settings are Windows only. Traps 5.0+ does not have SAML / LDAP integration."
"It is a complex solution to implement."
"If they had pulse rate detection, it would be better."
"It automatically detects security issues. It should be able to protect our network devices while operating autonomously."
"Traps doesn't work with McAfee. You need to remove McAfee to install Traps. This is very common, and its nothing that should be an issue. Some antivirus engines recognize Traps as an threat component, so maybe they need to shake hands somewhere."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint does not offer default templates for alerts, requiring us to configure everything ourselves to avoid numerous false positives."
"The product should reduce updates since it is hard to keep up."
"Sometimes the software doesn't work the way we expect it to, and in those cases, we can't communicate with a device because it may be infected."
"The onboarding and deployment could be more user-friendly, and there is room to grow in some of the reports. I don't want them to be oversimplified or overly complex, but there is room for improvement in the reporting it can do. It's relatively minor."
"I would like to see integrations with other products, such as Spunk and other CM solutions. That would create possibilities for me, and for a SOC, to consolidate all events in an older console, not one provided by Microsoft but provided by a third party, and use it to create more insights."
"The solution could use improvement on the interface."
"Defender could be more secure and stable."
"Notifications are always popping up — I hate that."
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Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is ranked 4th in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 80 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is ranked 1st in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 182 reviews. Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is rated 8.4, while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks writes "Perfect correlation and XDR capabilities for network traffic plus endpoint security". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint writes "Eliminates the need to look at multiple dashboards by automatically providing one XDR dashboard to show the security score of each subscription". Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is most compared with CrowdStrike Falcon, Darktrace, Symantec Endpoint Security, Trellix Endpoint Security and Check Point Harmony Endpoint, whereas Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is most compared with Symantec Endpoint Security, Intercept X Endpoint, SentinelOne Singularity Complete, CrowdStrike Falcon and Microsoft Intune. See our Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint report.
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I have not used Microsoft Defender and only used Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks. My experience with Cortex is not good as you need to whitelist each and every exe file of each adn every computer. My recommendation for you is to go for Cynet360 MDR which is far better than Cortex in terms of auto detection and remediation. You will get genuine alert.
Choosing Microsoft Defender makes the most sense if you already have a Microsoft ecosystem. But in reality, you need an endpoint security solution that is proactive and comes with built-in artificial intelligence capabilities.
I value in-depth visibility across the endpoints, so I prefer CrowdStrike Falcon EDR. It’s the best solution for simplified endpoint detection and response. CrowdStrike EDR comes with advanced features and easily integrates with popular third-party solutions like Splunk and Palo Alto Networks. An easy-to-use and navigate interface reduces the learning curve. Personally, I think CrowdStrike Falcon is easier to use than Microsoft Defender.
MSSPs like ACE Managed Security Services provide Managed CrowdStrike EDR. If you’re looking for hassle-free deployment and a fully-managed solution, you should look into ACE.
Unless you are using Palo Alto elsewhere in your architecture, I would go with Microsoft if that were the only choice.
However, if you are using another network security issue such as Fortinet or Sophos, I would also look to their endpoint solutions. They both have EDR and XDR capabilities and the endpoint solutions facilitate synchronization between the endpoint and the network control.
Microsoft has done lots of work in the endpoint space and the Zero Trust world over the past several months. Defender integrates tightly with the Microsoft Cloud and there is much synchronization that occurs between the physical endpoint and the cloud infrastructure. This means that regardless where the endpoint is physically located it stays connected and controlled by the policies set in the Microsoft cloud. Very much like the Group Policy Options we became accustomed to with the on premises domain controller.
I know that's a scratch on the surface and there are many other considerations, but you need to seek the solutions that promise management simplicity and the ability to control and protect the endpoints wherever they may be located.
I would go for the one with the best independent threat intelligence, a platform that allows you to change, add, move IT and Security infrastructure without impacting your security platform. I would also place a close attention to storage costs, service levels and the number of resources providing human intelligence on top of machine intelligence for investigation and incident response, all in one platform. But I am biased ;-)