We performed a comparison between Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks and SentinelOne based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Both products receive high marks from reviewers. However, SentinelOne comes out on top in this comparison due to its impressive security and EDR features, attractive price, and impressive ROI.
"The most valuable features are spam filtering, attachment filtering, and antivirus protection."
"Another noteworthy feature that I find appealing in Microsoft Defender is the credit-backed simulation. This feature enables organizations to train their users on effectively responding to phishing emails through a simulated training environment."
"Advanced hunting is good. I like that. We can drill down to lots of details."
"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."
"Microsoft 365 Defender's most valuable feature is the ability to control the shadow IP."
"There is also one dashboard that shows us the status of many controls at once and the details I can get... It gives a great overview of many areas, such as files, emails, chats, and links. Even with the apps, it gives you a great overview. In one place you can see where you should look into things more deeply..."
"The most valuable feature depends on the scenario. For compliance, I like Microsoft Purview Information Protection and Data Loss Prevention. Sentinel is the most helpful feature for security. 365 Defender helps us prioritize threats across an enterprise. It's a crucial feature for the managed services team."
"Email protection is the most valuable feature of Microsoft Defender XDR."
"It's a nice product that's stable and scalable."
"The user interface of the solution is sophisticated and straightforward."
"The integrations are out-of-the-box, as are the playbooks."
"The ability to kind of stitch everything together and see the actual complete picture is very useful. I guess you'd call it a playbook. Some people call it the forensics analysis of what was happening on particular endpoints when they detected some malicious behavior, and what transpired before that to cause that. It is also very user friendly. The way they have done everything and integrated all the solutions that they've purchased over the years to make it a very seamless, effective product is very good. One thing about Palo Alto is that they take the products or services that they purchase and make them seamless for the end user as compared to some companies that purchase other companies and then just kind of have their products off to the side or keep different interfaces. Palo Alto doesn't do that."
"The stability of this product is very good."
"Cortex XDR lets us manage several clients from the same console, and its endpoint defense is more advanced than traditional antivirus."
"The stability of the solution is very good. We have about 100 users on it right now, and we use it twice a week."
"The anti-exploit is impenetrable. We chose Traps because it is the only product that we were not able to get anything past."
"I really like deep visibility. Deep visibility is one of the coolest features of almost any tool that we use. The breadth of data that is collected there is valuable, and it gives us the ability to search back through literally tons of data going back a specific period of time."
"The best feature of SentinelOne Singularity Complete is that you don't need to configure a lot with it because it provides an unmatched layer of protection out of the box."
"I appreciate the network control as well as the device control."
"Sentinel One has improved our organization by protecting the environment we are working in."
"The Ranger feature is valuable."
"The visibility component is the most valuable feature."
"The hunting feature is most valuable for detecting malicious or suspicious activity."
"The most valuable aspects of SentinelOne Singularity Complete are the ease of deployment with the Sentinel Agent and the enhanced visibility with Skylight, which provides correlation of logs and all endpoint data in a centralized location."
"The cost can be high if you want to build custom license packages. Another area for improvement is the policies. In Azure, we need to implement policies in JSON format, but in 365 Defender 365, it would be helpful to use a different format so we can customize the platform."
"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 tool gives inconsistent answers and crashes a lot."
"While the XDR platform offers valuable functionalities, it falls short of other solutions in its ability to deliver a cohesive identity experience."
"The mobile app support for Android and iOS is difficult and needs improvement."
"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 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."
"Advanced attacks could use an improvement."
"The product's pricing needs improvement. They could provide more discounts. Additionally, the dashboard and control panel could be enhanced."
"It is a complex solution to implement."
"The product's pricing could be better."
"The solution lacks real-time, on-demand antivirus."
"Every 30 or 40 days, there's a new version and we need to go and make sure our customer's laptops are upgraded."
"If they had pulse rate detection, it would be better."
"I would like to see some additional features related to email protection included."
"It's more focused on network communication. If a customer wants to increase the level of protection and start working with documents, it's impossible to integrate these features into the system. It's more of a communication-oriented system than a content security-oriented system."
"There should be more integration models with different security operations tools or soft tools."
"Managing the alerts is a challenge. Singularity generates a lot of alerts and false positives."
"Having an additional logic layer could improve the solution, mainly because I run multiple systems with different layers. For example, if I'm running a very important server with this agent, and that server gets infected, I may not necessarily be sure that I want to shut it down right away. Maybe I want to isolate some of the connectivity but not do the entire security remediation automatedly or curtail network access type of activity."
"The role-based access is in dire need of improvement. We actually discussed this on a roadmap call and were informed that it was coming, but then it was delayed. It limits the roles that you can have in the platform, and we require several custom roles. We work with a lot of third-parties whom we rely on for some of our IT services. Part of those are an external SOC function where they are over-provisioned in the solution because there isn't anything relevant for the level of work that they do."
"They should train their own people so that they can train us better. The theory is good."
"SentinelOne can improve by having better integration with Active Directory."
"Singularity Complete needs to improve its ability to granularly select and extract the executable files that I want to run."
"As a cloud-based product, there is a minimum number of licenses that need to be purchased, which is unfortunate."
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Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is ranked 4th in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 80 reviews while SentinelOne Singularity Complete is ranked 2nd in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 177 reviews. Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is rated 8.4, while SentinelOne Singularity Complete is rated 8.8. 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 SentinelOne Singularity Complete writes "Provides peace of mind and is good at ingesting data and correlating". Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, CrowdStrike Falcon, Darktrace, Symantec Endpoint Security and Microsoft Defender for Cloud, whereas SentinelOne Singularity Complete is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Darktrace, CrowdStrike Falcon, ThreatLocker Protect and Intercept X Endpoint. See our Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs. SentinelOne Singularity Complete report.
See our list of best Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) vendors, best Extended Detection and Response (XDR) vendors, and best Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) vendors.
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I haven't used Cortex. My worry with it and every other solution is how well does it perform when disconnected from the cloud/ the internet?
S1 - I have been using it for a couple of years now without an issue. I had been using Cylance prior. I've been very happy with the S1 solution. Works with or without the Internet.
Depends on the size, scope and needs of your environment.
XDR is an ok monitoring/alerting tool, especially if you have a Palo Alto firewall already and everything can integrate well together. However, S1 is a superior tool IMHO and can catch and fix things automatically if you so choose (magic quadrant agrees).
Cost-wise XDR is probably cheaper but I don't know specifics on-prem vs cloud. S1 is a cloud tool but is extremely fast and responsive compared to some other tools we POC'd and can support legacy devices w2k8 and below or Linux or VDI without having to special of workarounds. So again, it depends on your needs, environment and cost.
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto vs. SentinelOne
SentinelOne offers very detailed specifics with regard to risks or attacks. The ability to reverse damage caused by ransomware with minimal interruptions to the environment is note-worthy. Sentinel One works inconspicuously in the background, continually providing protection. It has an automated active EDR that will not only find issues but can fix them. I don’t know that any other solution does that.
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto has a nice console and is easy to use. One of my favorite things about it is that it will automatically connect and log various kinds of suspicious behavior - you don’t need to do it manually. Cortex XDR is very secure but it is missing some basic features. It doesn’t offer an on-prem solution and it doesn’t integrate so well with some third-party solutions.
SentinelOne can be challenging to set up and there seem to be some applications that do not function properly when SentinelOne is installed. I would like to be able to make the reporting more specific to my needs. It would be a more attractive option if the cost was lower.
Conclusions
The find-and-fix option that SentinalOne provides was a huge win for us. We feel it provides a deeper and more thorough level of security.