We performed a comparison between Microsoft Defender for Identity and Palo Alto Networks VM-Series based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."This solution has advanced a lot over the last few years."
"Defender for Identity has not affected the end-user experience."
"It is easy to set up. Based on the number of devices you would like to set up, you can use scripts, Group Policy, etc. It takes five minutes to set up."
"All the integration it has with different Microsoft packages, like Teams and Office, is good."
"The feature I like most is that you can create your own customized detection rules. It has a lot of default alerts and rules, but you can customize them according to your business needs."
"The feature I like the most about Defender for Identity is the entity tags. They give you the ability to identify sensitive accounts, devices, and groups. You also have honeytoken entities, which are devices that are identified as "bait" for fraudulent actors."
"One of our users had the same password for every personal and company account. That was a problem because she started receiving phishing emails that could compromise all of her accounts. Defender told us that the user was not changing their password."
"The best feature is security monitoring, which detects and investigates suspicious user activities. It can easily detect advanced attacks based on the behavior. The credentials are securely stored, so it reduces the risk of compromise. It will monitor user behavior based on artificial intelligence to protect the identities in your organization. It will even help secure the on-premise Active Directory. It syncs from the cloud to on-premise, and on-premise modifications will be reflected in the cloud."
"Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is easy to maintain...From a security point of view, I find Palo Alto Networks VM-Series to be a better product compared to the other solutions in the market."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the zero-trust security architecture."
"It has the ability to create Palo Alto VM-series using software."
"The feature that I have found the most useful is that it meets all our requirements technically."
"The most valuable feature is that you can control your traffic flowing out and coming it, allowing you to apply malware and threat protection, as well as vulnerability checks."
"The Palo Alto VM-Series is nice because I can move the firewalls easily."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"The VM-Series reports how much bandwidth a particular IP is using. You don't need to regularly log into a website, like a Cisco command, to see what kind of ACL it's getting. There isn't an ACL use portal event. You can go there and see how much my ACL has been getting me."
"The solution could be better at using group-managed access and they could replace it with broad-based access controls."
"And when you are working in a priority IP address, Identity is not able to know that those IPs are from the company. It sees that the IPs are from Taiwan or from Hong Kong or from India, even though they are internal IPs, resulting in a lot of false positives."
"The impact of the sensors on the domain controllers can be quite high depending on your loads. I don't know if there's any room for improvement there, but that's one of the things that might be improved."
"When the data leaves the cloud, there are security issues."
"Defender for Identity gives us visibility, but we often get false positives from Azure that take us down the garden path. We go through 30 incidents each day and most of those are false positives or benign positive alerts. Occasionally, we get true positive alerts."
"There is no option to remedy an issue directly from the console. If we see an alert, we can't fix it from the console. Instead, we must depend on other Microsoft products, such as MDE. That is a significant drawback. It simply works as a scanner, which can sometimes put enough load on the sensors. Immediate actions should be possible from the dashboard because. It can prevent issues from spreading further."
"The technical support needs significant improvement. Documentation for more minor issues in the form of guides or walkthroughs could help to resolve this issue. The number of tickets raised would decrease, removing some pressure from the support team and making it easier to clear the remaining tickets."
"I would like to be able to do remediation from the platform because it is just a scanner right now. If you onboard a device, it shows you what is happening, but you can't use it to fix things. You need to go into the system to fix it instead."
"There could be dynamic DNS features similar to Fortinet in the product."
"The current licensing model can be a sore point as we're paying for features we're not fully utilizing."
"There's room for improvement in terms of integration with the load balancer. It isn't like Fortinet, which has a load balancer built into its firewall. It is effortless to integrate within the load balancer-plus-firewall solution."
"The solution must improve Zero Trust integration and use cases."
"It'll help if Palo Alto Networks provided better documentation."
"There are some delays that I have observed when my company communicates with Palo Alto's support engineers."
"Its web interface is a bit outdated, and it needs to be updated. They can also improve the NAT functionality. We have had issues with the NAT setup."
"The only minor issue we've faced is with the app's ID configuration, which requires specific matching for application filtering."
More Microsoft Defender for Identity Pricing and Cost Advice →
Microsoft Defender for Identity is ranked 6th in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) with 13 reviews while Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is ranked 10th in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) with 53 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Identity is rated 9.0, while Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Identity writes "Offers robust protection from insider threats, but the customer support is poor". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series writes "Many features are optimized for troubleshooting real-time scenarios, saving a lot of time". Microsoft Defender for Identity is most compared with Microsoft Entra ID Protection, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Microsoft Entra Verified ID, Splunk User Behavior Analytics and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, whereas Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is most compared with Azure Firewall, Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Fortinet FortiGate, Cisco Secure Firewall and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls. See our Microsoft Defender for Identity vs. Palo Alto Networks VM-Series report.
See our list of best Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) vendors.
We monitor all Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) 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.