We performed a comparison between Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks and Microsoft 365 Defender based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Cortex XDR offers an intuitive interface, advanced identification of risks, expandability, and compatibility with various other solutions. Microsoft 365 Defender offers effortless integration with other Microsoft solutions. Users praised its flexibility and comprehensive protection against multiple threat types. Cortex XDR could use enhancements in hard disk encryption, security integration, and customer education. Microsoft 365 Defender could upgrade its machine learning and AI capabilities. Some users suggested adopting Zero Trust features.
Service and Support: Some customers were impressed with Palo Alto's support, while others reported mixed experiences. Some of our reviewers were satisfied with Microsoft's support, but others complained about slow responses and lackluster problem-solving capabilities.
Ease of Deployment: Some users thought Cortex XDR’s deployment was fast and straightforward, while others consider it to be a complex and time-consuming task that requires thorough planning. Setting up Microsoft 365 Defender is potentially complex and may involve integrating with existing policies. Some users reported longer deployment times.
Pricing: Some reviewers said Cortex XDR is expensive, but others said it was reasonable for the robust feature set Cortex offers. Some users say that Microsoft 365 Defender is good value, but other users perceive it as more expensive than similar competing products.
ROI: Cortex XDR creates value by ensuring system and data security rather than a financial return on investment. Microsoft 365 Defender offers savings, attack prevention, consolidation of security measures, and proactive threat detection.
Comparison Results: Our users prefer Cortex XDR over Microsoft 365 Defender. Cortex XDR offers a comprehensive platform with excellent visibility, protection, and control over network endpoints. Users appreciate the simplicity and efficiency of Cortex XDR's initial setup, as well as its ease of maintenance and updates. Microsoft 365 Defender receives mixed reviews about its initial setup, pricing, and customer support.
"Fortinet FortiEDR's scalability is quite good, and you can add licenses to the solution."
"The console is easy to read. I also like the scanning part and the ability to move assets from one to the other."
"The most valuable feature is the analysis, because of the beta structure."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the ability to customize it and to reduce its size. It lets you run in a very small window in terms of memory and resources on legacy cash registers."
"Exceptions are easy to create and the interface is easy to follow with a nice appearance."
"Having all monitoring, response, tracking, and mitigation tools in one dashboard provides our analysts and SOC team with a comprehensive view at a glance."
"The setup is pretty simple."
"It is very easy to set up. I would rate my experience with the initial setup a ten out of ten, with ten being very easy to set up."
"One of the main benefits of the solution is its intelligence to correlate the events into an incident."
"The most valuable for us is the correlation feature."
"The initial setup isn't too bad."
"From a single pane of glass, you can easily manage all of your endpoints."
"Cortex XDR can integrate the firewalls and determine the tendencies of the attacks. It's a new generation antivirus, with protection endpoints and detection response. It is very easy to use and everybody can operate the solution."
"The dashboard is customizable."
"The most valuable feature of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is the low consumption of system resources. The solution uses a lot of AI and machine learning."
"The protection offered by this product is good, as is the endpoint reporting."
"Within advanced threat hunting, the tables that have already been defined by Microsoft are helpful. In the advanced threat hunting tab, there were different tables, and one of the tables was related to device info, device alert, and device events. That was very helpful. Another feature that I liked but didn't have access to was deep analysis."
"Email protection is the most valuable feature of Microsoft Defender XDR."
"My clients like Defender's file integrity monitoring. They're monitoring Windows and Linux system files."
"Its most significant advantage lies in its affordability."
"Scanning, vulnerability reporting, and the dashboard are the most valuable features."
"The threat intelligence is excellent."
"Defender XDR has a feature called the timeline that lets you track all activities. It helps a lot with investigations."
"The portal is quite user-friendly. There is integration with Office, Intune, and other products from the same portal. From there, we can see which policies are installed on a particular machine. We also can manage devices, groups, and tagging."
"We find the solution to be a bit expensive."
"We'd like to see more one-to-one product presentations for the distribution channels."
"We've encountered challenges during API deployment, occasionally resulting in unstable environments."
"I think cloud security and SASE are areas of concern in the product where improvements are required. The tool's cloud version has to be improved in terms of the security it offers."
"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."
"The solution should address emerging threats like SQL injection."
"Detections could be improved."
"The support needs improvement."
"The playbooks could be improved to include more functionalities or actions."
"It is not very strong in terms of endpoint management. It should have additional features like DLP, encryption, or advanced device control. Currently, Cortex is good in terms of the security of the endpoints, but it is not as good as other vendors in terms of the management of the endpoint."
"We had a problem with getting our older endpoints up to date, but their newest updates have been really good. I've been pleased with it in terms of what our needs are. It's doing what we want it to do."
"It is not easy to sell Cortex XDR, not because it isn't a good tool. Its marketing needs to be improved."
"Palo Alto Networks Cortex XDR does not detect malicious activity like in other anti-virus solutions like Trend Micro and Windows with Cisco."
"There are some default policies which sometimes affect our applications and cause them to run around. In the hotel industry, we use a different type of data versus Oracle and SQL. By default, there are some policies which stop us from running properly. Because of this, the support level is also not that strong. We have to wait to get a results."
"Cortex XDR should have a lightweight agent, and the agent size should not be heavy."
"Cortex XDR could be improved with more GUI features."
"365 Defender has multiple subsets, including Defender for Cloud Apps. When integrating Defender for Cloud Apps with apps on third-party cloud platforms like AWS or GCP, there are limitations on our ability to control user activities. If Microsoft added more control over third-party products, that would be a game-changer and help us quite a lot."
"The solution could improve by having better machine learning and AI. Additionally, the interface, documentation, and integration could be better."
"When we do investigations, it would be better if Microsoft could populate the host dashboard more. When we open any host for investigation, we want the entire timeline of what is happening on the host, including all the users logging in, their hardware, Windows version, etc."
"Improving scalability, especially for very large tenants, could be beneficial for Microsoft Defender XDR."
"Sometimes, configurations take much longer than expected."
"Stability could be improved by avoiding frequent changes to the interface."
"The onboarding and offboarding need improvement. I work with other vendors as well, and they have an option to add a device or remove a device from the portal, whereas with Microsoft 365 Defender, we need to do that manually. However, once you do that, everything can be controlled through the portal, but getting the device onboarded and offboarded is currently manual. If we have an option to simply remove a device from the portal or get a device added from the portal, it would be more convenient. The rest of the features are similar. This is the only area where I found it different from others. I would also like to be able to simply filter with a few of the queries that are already there."
"Generally, antivirus products provide a central control to manage every device in terms of who is installing it or who is trying to disable it, but Microsoft doesn't have such a control center for the antivirus product it provides."
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Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is ranked 4th in Extended Detection and Response (XDR) with 80 reviews while Microsoft Defender XDR is ranked 5th in Extended Detection and Response (XDR) with 78 reviews. Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is rated 8.4, while Microsoft Defender XDR is rated 8.4. 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 XDR writes "Includes four services and four products, which can help organizations a lot". Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, CrowdStrike Falcon, Darktrace, Symantec Endpoint Security and Check Point Harmony Endpoint, whereas Microsoft Defender XDR is most compared with CrowdStrike Falcon, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager, Wazuh and Microsoft Entra ID. See our Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs. Microsoft Defender XDR report.
See our list of best Extended Detection and Response (XDR) vendors and best Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) vendors.
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