CrowdStrike Falcon and Microsoft Defender XDR are both Extended Detection and Response (XDR) solutions that offer endpoint protection and threat detection capabilities. CrowdStrike Falcon is a standalone platform, whereas Defender XDR integrates seamlessly with Microsoft security products. CrowdStrike Falcon offers customizable alert settings and machine-learning algorithms for proactive threat hunting. Microsoft Defender is highlighted for its efficient incident response system. Both products have flexible pricing options, with users noting positive ROI from both solutions.
The summary above is based on 207 interviews we conducted recently with CrowdStrike Falcon and Microsoft 365 Defender users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"The solution was relatively easy to deploy."
"The console is easy to read. I also like the scanning part and the ability to move assets from one to the other."
"The setup is pretty simple."
"The product's initial setup phase is very easy."
"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"
"Fortinet FortiEDR's scalability is quite good, and you can add licenses to the solution."
"This is stable and scalable."
"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."
"Overall, what I found most valuable in CrowdStrike Falcon is its good mechanism. It also has a good reporting feature. CrowdStrike Falcon is an invaluable tool because, through it, you can take quick action, for example, when an OS is missing specific patches."
"It's very easy to set up."
"I value the overall behavior analysis of CrowdStrike. The engine of this product is what drew us to this solution."
"I like the dashboard nature of it. Everything is clickable, linkable, and information is easy to obtain and find. How it presents that information is probably the biggest win as far as the information correlation aspect. The presentation of it is very good."
"The solution is silent and sits on your system as one single agent."
"Cyberattack detection is very good. We use it for detecting different vulnerabilities, such as ransomware, virus, and malware. It is a good product today when compared to Symantec that we used previously."
"The most valuable feature is the indicator of compromise, which show you what file was either quarantined or removed."
"I like the feature called RTC, the remote time connector."
"The most valuable feature is probably the aggregation and correlation of the different telemetry points with Defender for Identity, Defender for Endpoint, and Defender for Cloud Apps. All of these various things are part of that portal. We've wanted that single pane of glass for years."
"The advantage of Microsoft Defender XDR has over other XDRs in the market is that it's easy to use. You can quickly differentiate between alerts, incidents, devices, software, etc. It's easier to investigate an incident, and you have so many options. You can automate investigations and use playbooks. There's also the live response session, which is something you can't find in any other XDR."
"The attack simulation is excellent; initially, this feature wasn't very robust, but Microsoft improved what we could achieve with it. We can now customize our practice phishing emails and include our company logo, for example. Attack simulation also helps integrate with third-party solutions where applicable and provides an overview of our security architecture through testing. The summary includes areas for improvement in our protection and what steps we need to take to get there."
"Setting up Microsoft 365 Defender is easy. It's a user-friendly solution that provides threat protection. It has good stability and scalability."
"It provides a single pane of glass within the 365 admin interface, streamlining our experience by consolidating information in one place and eliminating the need to navigate through multiple interfaces."
"The unified view of the threat landscape on a central dashboard is the most valuable feature."
"The Endpoint Manager is incredible; it has a very straightforward interface and is exceedingly easy to use. Pulling out and deploying different tags or resources is a simple task across various departments with different levels of security. The notifications are also simple and satisfying; it's great to see the bubble informing us which devices are compliant and which are waiting to update."
"Having a single pane of glass for all Microsoft security services makes everything much easier. A security analyst can go to a single portal and see everything in one view. The integration of everything into one portal is a huge benefit."
"ZTNA can improve latency."
"The only minor concern is occasional interference with desired programs."
"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."
"The dashboard isn't easy to access and manage."
"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."
"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."
"We've encountered challenges during API deployment, occasionally resulting in unstable environments."
"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."
"In the future release of CrowdStrike Falcon, they should add a sandbox feature."
"The solution could improve by providing more types of reports because it's in the detection span you cannot re-export anything. If it could be exported to a CSV file directly there it would help a lot. I currently need to do this by API to get what I need."
"In a future release, I would like to see more integrations for data breaches and security features."
"The management reporting functionality needs to be improved."
"The dashboard area must be improved. We have integration with Splunk, and we are creating a dashboard there. Their dashboard area must be up to date. It should have more details and more options to create the reports and things like that."
"The biggest issue with Falcon as a standalone product is it doesn't have very much reporting."
"We can't do scanning audits or device blocking or application control."
"Dashboard creation is one of the areas for improvement in CrowdStrike Falcon. Sometimes, management asks for a custom dashboard, so my team has to collect data from CrowdStrike Falcon, integrate that in Splunk, then create the dashboard in Splunk. The Splunk dashboard is more elaborate, so the CrowdStrike Falcon dashboard needs improvement. Another area for improvement in the tool is the malware detection report, as it needs to be more detailed and include some graphics so that if you want to present that data in a nutshell, it's easier to do. For example, the report should consist of some graphical representation that shows a month's worth of data. In terms of an additional feature I'd like CrowdStrike Falcon to have, it's the device posture assessment feature that detects the device posture within the network. Whichever device connects to the corporate network, my company should be able to analyze the device posture. Then there should be communication with the network, which means that as soon as a device connects, CrowdStrike Falcon can assess the device posture, detect its corporate asset, and decide whether it should be allowed on the network."
"While the XDR platform offers valuable functionalities, it falls short of other solutions in its ability to deliver a cohesive identity experience."
"The abundance of sub-dashboards and sub-areas within the main dashboard can be confusing, even if it all technically makes sense."
"The message trace feature for investigating mail flow issues should add more detailed information to the summary report... if they could extend the summary report a little bit, make it more descriptive, ordinary administrators could understand what happened and that the emails failed at this or that point. That way they would know the location to go to try to correct it and to prevent it from occurring again."
"The logs could be better."
"Improving scalability, especially for very large tenants, could be beneficial for Microsoft Defender XDR."
"The console is missing some features that would be helpful for a managed services provider, like device and user management."
"For some scenarios, it provides good visibility into threats, and for some scenarios, it doesn't. For example, sometimes the URLs within the emails have destinations, and you do get a screenshot and all further details, but it's not always the case. It would be good if they did a better job of enabling that for all the emails that they identified as malicious. When you get an email threat, you can go into the email and see more details, but the URL destination feature doesn't always show you a screenshot of the URL in that email. It also doesn't always give you the characteristics relating to that URL. It would be quite good if the information is complete where it says that we identified this URL, and this is what it looks like. There should be some threat intel about it. It should give you more details."
"The price should be adjustable by region."
CrowdStrike Falcon is ranked 1st in Extended Detection and Response (XDR) with 107 reviews while Microsoft Defender XDR is ranked 5th in Extended Detection and Response (XDR) with 78 reviews. CrowdStrike Falcon is rated 8.8, while Microsoft Defender XDR is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of CrowdStrike Falcon writes "Easy to set up with good behavior-based analysis but needs a single-click recovery option". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Defender XDR writes "Includes four services and four products, which can help organizations a lot". CrowdStrike Falcon is most compared with Darktrace, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Trend Micro Deep Security, Trend Vision One and VMware Carbon Black Endpoint, whereas Microsoft Defender XDR is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager, Wazuh, Trend Vision One and Microsoft Entra ID. See our CrowdStrike Falcon 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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