We performed a comparison between ESET Endpoint Security and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: ESET Endpoint Security ultimately won out in this comparison. Our reviewers agree that ESET Endpoint Security is easy to install and easy to use. In addition, it has excellent customer support.
"Fortinet FortiEDR's scalability is quite good, and you can add licenses to the solution."
"The solution was relatively easy to deploy."
"he solution is an anti-malware product that integrates well with other vendor products such as firewalls, SIEM, etc. It captures threat intelligence and gives you better visibility. The product also has sandboxing features."
"Fortinet FortiEDR made our clients feel secure and more at ease, knowing that they had an EDR solution that would close the gap in their security posture."
"The price is low and quite competitive with others."
"Ability to get forensics details and also memory exfiltration."
"This is stable and scalable."
"Having all monitoring, response, tracking, and mitigation tools in one dashboard provides our analysts and SOC team with a comprehensive view at a glance."
"There are some great features in ESET Endpoint Antivirus when you are browsing on the internet. For example, they have a notification if within your LAN network something is suspected to be a threat. Additionally, the malware features are very good."
"Technical support has been very good. They are helpful and responsive."
"The most valuable features of ESET Endpoint Antivirus are that it is lightweight, it will not take up too much CPU and memory of the server or workstation. The detection is good and easy to use."
"The most valuable feature of ESET Endpoint Security is that it is light on resources. It has a very low impact on the system. It uses low memory and the setup size is very low."
"The solution has a very good endpoint feature."
"The solution provides good accessibility and is not heavy on resources when there are updates or when it is in operation."
"The solution is stable."
"A feature we like is setting the GUI of ESET Endpoint Security/ESET File Security to silent mode because some servers and clients can have performance issues."
"Defender for Endpoint has one dashboard with security-related information, vulnerability-related information, and basic recommendations from Microsoft, all in different tabs. That's helpful because if we want to fix only the recommended ones, we can go fix all of them..."
"We had Norton Antivirus before, and with Norton, we didn't have a way to centrally manage a lot of features. Defender allowed us to deploy it from our Office 365 admin console. That is probably the biggest thing that made us go with Defender."
"We can run the virus scan across our entire environment."
"Microsoft Defender is always running. It is doing its job, so it is fine. I don't have any issues with the way it was implemented or how we are running it. We have been upgrading IT throughout the years, but there have been no issues."
"I like the process visibility. This ability to visualize how something was executed is valuable, and the fact that Defender ATP is also linked to the threat intelligence that they have is also valuable. So, even if you have something that doesn't have a conventional signature, the fact that you get this strange execution means that you can detect things that are normally not visible."
"The features I have found most valuable are the ransomware and malware protection. The solution detects malware live and whenever it detects suspicious activity, it quarantines it."
"You have endpoint security to keep your devices safe. That's the feature that we're interested in."
"It is a very advanced system based on AI. It has a very large database of places or sites on the internet where you should not go. It is continuously online."
"Everything with Fortinet having to do with their cloud services. They need to invest more in their internal infrastructure that they are running in the cloud. One of the things I find with their cloud environment compared to others' is that they go cheap on the equipment. So it causes some performance degradation."
"To improve Fortinet, we need to see more features and technology areas at the endpoint level introduced."
"Making the portal mobile friendly would be helpful when I am out of office."
"The solution is not stable."
"We find the solution to be a bit expensive."
"The solution's installation from a central installation server could be improved because the engineers had a little bit of trouble getting it installed from a central location."
"The only minor concern is occasional interference with desired programs."
"FortiEDR could add a separate scanning dashboard. In incident management, we prefer to remove the endpoint system from the environment and scan the system. We typically use Symantec for that, but if we want to use FortiEDR for that, then we need a scanning tab to clarify things."
"When users renew licenses, they should offer a discount."
"It would be useful if they could automate the deployment more."
"The solution could improve by having higher-level security and reporting."
"The new versions only support no operative systems in Mac and do not support operative systems."
"ESET should consider giving it application control."
"The user interface of ESET Endpoint Security could be more user-friendly and more features could be added."
"The solution lacks the automation I need."
"The interface is good. However, it could always be better. It could be more user-friendly."
"In terms of improvement, they update the platform it seems quite a bit. Every month something is in a new spot or something changed somewhere. There should be less of that."
"I would like to have additional features such as DNS lookup, which would help for detecting malicious sites."
"I have accounts for administrators and corporate employees, but I also have accounts for students. I can't split these types of accounts. I need a separate configuration for both... I need to research how I can get alerts for only the administrative machines."
"The central management console should be improved because it provides limited options to configure Windows Defender."
"Monitoring can always be better, onboarding can be a little bit faster, log collection could be easier, they could streamline the dashboard. They could maybe split it up into different workspaces and have the ability to segment groups a little bit more."
"It can get a bit laggy sometimes. Other than that, we don't have any issues. They constantly tweak it and fix it up based on users' feedback. It has improved a lot over the past four years. Defender for Endpoint never really used to be a good endpoint security solution, but over the past couple of years, Microsoft has invested heavily in it. So, it has come a long way in all aspects of endpoint security. If they want to make it better, they should just continue investing in the current path of what they've been doing over the past couple of years."
"The solution should be updated by Microsoft with new features from time to time."
"The scanning is slow when it is working with incoming emails."
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ESET Endpoint Protection Platform is ranked 11th in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 97 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is ranked 1st in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 182 reviews. ESET Endpoint Protection Platform is rated 8.2, while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of ESET Endpoint Protection Platform writes "Easy to set up with good security and rapidly improving capabilities". 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". ESET Endpoint Protection Platform is most compared with Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business, CrowdStrike Falcon, SentinelOne Singularity Complete, Check Point Harmony Endpoint and Fortinet FortiClient, whereas Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is most compared with Symantec Endpoint Security, Intercept X Endpoint, SentinelOne Singularity Complete, CrowdStrike Falcon and Fortinet FortiClient. See our ESET Endpoint Protection Platform vs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint report.
See our list of best Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) vendors, best Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) vendors, and best Anti-Malware Tools vendors.
We monitor all Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) 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.