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 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."
"NGAV and EDR features are outstanding."
"The price is low and quite competitive with others."
"Fortinet FortiEDR's firewalling, rule creation, monitoring, and inspection profiles are great."
"It is very easy to set up. I would rate my experience with the initial setup a ten out of ten, with ten being very easy to set up."
"Fortinet FortiEDR's scalability is quite good, and you can add licenses to the solution."
"It is a scalable solution...The initial setup of Fortinet FortiEDR was straightforward."
"Forensics is a valuable feature of Fortinet FortiEDR."
"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 the solution is that it is easy to use and maintain while also being fully encrypted."
"ESET provides good protection."
"ESET Endpoint Security is stable, I did not have any issues with it."
"ESET is the fastest solution on the market. It's also highly reliable. On top of the base configuration, you can set it to respond to events such as ransomware detection with network isolation and other automatic tasks. Our customers prefer ESET because it's reliable, fast, and light on system resources."
"It's a very user-friendly product."
"I like the integration; it lets you see the product installed on a particular computer."
"It is pretty easy to deploy. Its update definition file is small, so it can dispatch very quickly within the enterprise. The product itself is very lightweight, so it won't delay your endpoint. You also don't have to do any difficult configuration because it comes with a very good default setting. So, you just install it and forget it."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is different from other security tools because we can configure it to use multiple types of scanning or archiving."
"The fact that it's from Microsoft, you don't have many false positives, unlike products from other vendors might have."
"It is a straightforward setup."
"I like the fact that it has the ransomware solution in there. I'm glad that the ransomware solution is built into it. That's probably the biggest thing that I see in Microsoft Defender."
"It does not make Windows slow, as compared to all of the third part antiviruses."
"The most valuable features are that it is flexible, and it is integrated with Microsoft products."
"Defender provides useful alerts and groups them. It sends an alert to your portal if it detects any malicious activity, and you can group multiple alerts to form an incident."
"Auto-remediation: When the product sees malware, it resolves the issue immediately. This protects the machine."
"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."
"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."
"We've encountered challenges during API deployment, occasionally resulting in unstable environments."
"We'd like to see more one-to-one product presentations for the distribution channels."
"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."
"There's room for improvement in the quick response time and technical support for integration issues, especially when dealing with multiple vendors."
"The security should be strong for the cloud. Some applications are on-prem and some are on the cloud. Fortinet should also have strong security for the cloud. There should be more security for the cloud."
"Making the portal mobile friendly would be helpful when I am out of office."
"The adware module could be improved."
"I used Avira previously and ESET lacks certain aspects in comparison to Avira."
"We have experienced some problems with the actualization of some endpoints. We then have to manually reinstall the version on these endpoints."
"Data Leak Protection is is what we are searching for at the moment. It is not included with ESET."
"I would like them to use AI features to do preventative virus protection."
"The migration between on-prem and cloud has room for improvement."
"On the solution's website, it is sometimes difficult to figure out how to download the exact product associated with your purchased license."
"It can be hard to set up if you need to customize it."
"Something that is unique to Microsoft is its licensing model. When you go out and you buy McAfee or Symantec, you know what you're getting out of the box, but with Microsoft, often, when you're looking to achieve a certain set of capabilities, those capabilities are spread across different products. You might try to do something you could do with CrowdStrike, but then find out that you also need to purchase Microsoft Defender for Identity or Microsoft Defender for Azure. You realize that when they talk about what they can offer within the Microsoft platform, it's really the suite of investments. So, sometimes, you may find yourself buying Defender for Endpoint thinking that it matches CrowdStrike, but then you find that Microsoft really needs to sell you something else. One plus one will equal three, but when you have a very concise platform, such as CrowdStrike, you know what you're going to get."
"Right now, the solution provides some recommendations on the dashboard but we don't have any priorities. It's a mix of all the vulnerabilities and all the security recommendations. I would like to see some priority or categorization of high, medium, and low so that we can fix the high ones first."
"Its price could be better."
"This solution needs to move beyond relying on virus definitions alone and protect the system using behavioral analysis of the processes that are running."
"The time it takes to implement policies has room for improvement."
"In the next release, I would like to see better management reporting."
"One thing that was lacking in Defender was web filtering. Its web filtering wasn't as comprehensive. Sophos was a little bit better than Defender for blocking URLs or installing programs."
"I would like to see the next generation of the tool improved to work with other operating systems, like Linux."
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ESET Endpoint Protection Platform is ranked 11th in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 99 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, Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks, Trellix Endpoint Security and Check Point Harmony Endpoint. 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.