We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Endpoint vs 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: Cisco Secure Endpoint received more favorable ratings in every comparison category.
"We have FortiEDR installed on all our systems. This protects them from any threats."
"The stability is very good."
"The console is easy to read. I also like the scanning part and the ability to move assets from one to the other."
"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 is very user-friendly for customers."
"It notifies us if there's any suspicious file on any PC. If any execution or similar kind of thing is happening, it just alerts us. It doesn't only alert. It also blocks the execution until we allow it. We check whether the execution is legitimate or not, and then approve it or keep it blocked. This gives us a little bit of control over this mechanism. Fortinet FortiEDR is also very straightforward and easy to maintain."
"Having all monitoring, response, tracking, and mitigation tools in one dashboard provides our analysts and SOC team with a comprehensive view at a glance."
"Additionally, when it comes to EDR, there are more tools available to assist with client work."
"Among the most valuable features are the exclusions. And on the scalability side, we can integrate well with the SIEM orchestration engine and a number of applications that are proprietary or open source."
"The solution is easy to deploy and applies multi-factor authentication."
"The threat Grid with the ability to observe the sandboxing, analyze, and perform investigations of different malicious files has been great."
"Any alert that we get is an actionable alert. Immediately, there is information that we can just click through, see the point in time, what happened, what caused it, and what automatic actions were taken. We can then choose to take any manual actions, if we want, or start our investigation. We're no longer looking at digging into information or wading through hundreds of incidents. There's a list which says where the status is assigned, e.g., under investigation or investigation finished. That is all in the console. It has taken away a lot of the administration, which we would normally be doing, and integrated it into the console for us."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its technical support."
"The ability to detonate a particular problem in a sandbox environment and understand what the effects are, is helpful. We're trying, for example, to determine, when people send information in, if an attachment is legitimate or not. You just have to open it. If you can do that in a secure sandbox environment, that's an invaluable feature. What you would do otherwise would be very risky and tedious."
"The most valuable feature is signature-based malware detection."
"The best feature that we found most valuable, is actually the security product for the endpoint, formerly known as AMP. It has behavioral analytics, so you can be more proactive toward zero-day threats. I found that quite good."
"The intelligence mechanisms are good."
"Provides good security features and you can view it in the central console."
"It's effective against most types of infection, and the firewall is perfect for protection."
"The solution has an easy-to-use interface, is always updated, and is user-friendly."
"The threat hunting service is very useful for a security professional."
"Microsoft Defender can block some viruses or malware. So, it can protect my files. It can save files on Office 365 OneDrive. I use encryption for some files, then I can recover them from OneDrive."
"It is already integrated with Windows 10, so you don't need to worry about that."
"Auto-remediation: When the product sees malware, it resolves the issue immediately. This protects the machine."
"I haven't seen the use of AI in the solution."
"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."
"Making the portal mobile friendly would be helpful when I am out of office."
"The solution is not stable."
"I would like the solution to extend beyond endpoint protection and include other attack surfaces such as other network components."
"The EDR console should have more extensive reporting. You shouldn't need to purchase FortiAnalyzer. It should be included in the EDR part. The security adviser cloud platform could be improved with more options for exclusive or intensive rules for devices."
"There's room for improvement in the quick response time and technical support for integration issues, especially when dealing with multiple vendors."
"To improve Fortinet, we need to see more features and technology areas at the endpoint level introduced."
"I would like to see integration with Cisco Analytics."
"The pricing policy could be more competitive, similar to Cisco's offerings."
"The technical support is very slow."
"I would like more seamless integration."
"The product does not provide options like tunnel creation or virtual appliances."
"Due to the complexity of the technology that is used and its advanced threat detection capabilities, it is possible to encounter many delays in operation."
"We have had some problems with updates not playing nice with our environment. This is important, because if there is a new version, we need to test it thoroughly before it goes into production. We cannot just say, "There's a new version. It's not going to give us any problems." With the complexity of the solution using multiple engines for multiple tasks, it can sometimes cause performance issues on our endpoints. Therefore, we need to test it before we deploy. That takes one to three days before we can be certain that the new version plays nice with our environment."
"This product has issues with the number of false positives that it reports."
"There's a lot of manual effort involved to configure what we need."
"Microsoft Defender in the basic form is not very useful for managing the security environment. The free version is not capable of covering the needs of centralized management, EDR, and behavioral analysis. If you don't have the commercial version, you can't have centralized management and set up the policies and other things. Each client is a standalone installation, which is not useful for security in an enterprise model."
"I would like to have a dashboard that shows an overview of the results for the enterprise."
"The UI for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint needs to be better. Integration with client dashboards is also lacking in this product, e.g. client dashboards shouldn't just be viewable from the cloud, because when the client's computer is offline, you won't be able to see the client dashboard."
"We'd like the stability to be better."
"There is a lot of information to take in, and the portals tend to change quickly due to the fast-paced nature of the industry."
"More integration with different platforms is an area for improvement for this product, and should be included in its next release."
"The product should reduce updates since it is hard to keep up."
More Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Pricing and Cost Advice →
Cisco Secure Endpoint is ranked 9th in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 45 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is ranked 1st in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 182 reviews. Cisco Secure Endpoint is rated 8.6, while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Endpoint writes "Makes it possible to see a threat once and block it across all endpoints and your entire security platform". 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". Cisco Secure Endpoint is most compared with Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike Falcon, Check Point Harmony Endpoint, VMware Carbon Black Endpoint and SentinelOne Singularity Complete, whereas Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is most compared with Symantec Endpoint Security, Intercept X Endpoint, Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks, Trellix Endpoint Security and Fortinet FortiClient. See our Cisco Secure Endpoint vs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint report.
See our list of best Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) vendors and best Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) 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.