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.
"The setup is pretty simple."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the ability to customize it and to reduce its size. It lets you run in a very small window in terms of memory and resources on legacy cash registers."
"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."
"Fortinet has helped free up around 20 percent of our staff's time to help us out."
"This is stable and scalable."
"I like FortiClient EMS. FortiEDR has a lot of great features like lockdown mode, remote wipes, and encryption. I can set malware outbreak policies and controls for detecting abnormalities. You can also simulate phishing attacks."
"The product detects and blocks threats and is more proactive than firewalls."
"Ability to get forensics details and also memory exfiltration."
"The stability of the solution is perfect. I believe it's the most stable solution on the market right now."
"I'm only using the AMP (advanced malware protection) which is protecting my file system from all the malicious things that might happen. It should protect all kinds of things that might happen on the servers, things that I cannot see."
"The console feature gives a centralized management of what's going on, and if something happens, it gives you an alert. So, that's the most important feature for me."
"Cisco has definitely improved our organization a lot. In terms of business, our company feels safer. We actually switched from legacy signature-based solutions to threat intelligence-based and machine learning-based solutions, which is Cisco Secure. This has improved our security significantly, from 10% of signature-based technology security to 99.9% of the current one which we are running. We were happy."
"Secure Endpoint has decreased our time to remediate by providing the tools and the integrations we need so we can quickly look across our entire network, look for those threats, and actually make good decisions."
"It used to take us a month to find out that something is infected, we now know that same day, as soon it is infected."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the IPS and the integration with ISE."
"The most valuable feature at this moment is that Cisco AMP or Cisco Secure Endpoint solution is delivering a lot of things, and I always say to a lot of customers that if we didn't have Cisco AMP, we probably would have had ransomware somewhere. So, it's protecting us very well from a lot of hackers, malware, and especially ransomware."
"Endpoint's most valuable feature is deep analysis."
"User-friendly, offering safety and security."
"It's really stable. I've used a lot of stuff, a lot of products, like ESET and Kaspersky. None of them are comparable with this one. This one is much better."
"It comes included with the Windows license."
"The technical support from Microsoft is very good. We are part of the Microsoft Suite, and from being part of this we have consistent news regarding Microsoft Defender for Endpoint."
"The whole bundle of the product, which is similar to other Microsoft products, is valuable. Ten years ago, you had third-party stuff for different things. You had one solution for email archiving and another third-party one for something else. Nowadays, Microsoft Office covers all the stuff that was formerly covered by third-party solutions. It is the same with antivirus. The functionality is just basic. You have the scanning, and then you also have a kind of cloud-based protection and reporting about your environment. With Microsoft Security Center, you have a complete overview of your environment. You know the software inventory, and you have security recommendations. You can not only see that the antivirus is up to date; you can also see where are the vulnerabilities in your system. Microsoft Security Center tells you where you have old, deprecated software and what kind of CVEs are addressed. It's really cool stuff."
"The solution integrates very well with Windows applications and Microsoft endpoint products."
"The most valuable features are that it's easy to use and the updates are very simple."
"Once, we had an event that was locked and blocked, but information about it came to us two or three days later."
"FortiEDR can be improved by providing more detailed reporting."
"The only minor concern is occasional interference with desired programs."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The SIEM could be improved."
"The solution is not stable."
"The user interface is dull."
"The thing I hate the most, which they have not fixed, is when it creates duplicate entries within a console. If you have a computer and you upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10, or you upgrade your agent from version 6 to 7, it creates a new instance in there instead of updating the information. Instead of paying a license for one computer, I have to license two computers until I manually go in, search for all the duplicate entries, and clean them out myself."
"The connector updates are very easily done now, and that's improving. Previously, the connector had an issue, where almost every time it needed to be updated, it required a machine reboot. This was always a bit of an inconvenience and a bug. Because with a lot of software now, you don't need to do that and shouldn't need to be rebooting all the time."
"It's pretty good as it is, but its cost could be improved."
"The pricing policy could be more competitive, similar to Cisco's offerings."
"It cannot currently block URLs over websites."
"I would like to see integration with Cisco Analytics."
"On the firewall level, they were lagging a little bit behind, but they are running up again. I have full trust in the new 3000 series of firewalls where we would also be able to look more into the traffic that we're monitoring and get more security layers in our services. That would definitely be a big step."
"With increase of cyber threats and cybersecurity issues, I would recommend that the product be developed like an AI product with more features which can counter any threat in the coming eras."
"I would like Microsoft to have some kind of direct integration for USB controls. They have GPO and other controls to control the access of the USB drives on devices, but if there is something that can be directly implemented into the portal, it would be good. There should be a way to control via a cloud portal or something like that in a dynamic way. USB control for data exfiltration would be a good feature to implement. Currently, there are ways to do it, but it involves too many different things. You have to implement it via GPOs and other stuff, and then you move or copy those big files via Defender ATP. If there is a simple way of implementing those features, it would be great."
"The central console needs improvement. Both McAfee and Symantec antivirus have dashboards. These integrate with a server and work on my antivirus or some other product. However, with Microsoft Defender, you use Microsoft Group Policy Object. Defender does not provide a central console. Therefore, if you implement Defender, then maybe use another tool for the central view."
"It is not very scalable from the eyes of an MSP because there is no dashboard that you can use to see all of your devices that have Windows Defender unless you have your own dashboard or an RMM tool to actually look at it. So, you might not get to know that a particular computer of a client is doing something, and it might have got a virus. That person might know that, but unless you set it up to actually send you the information, you won't get to know that. That's one of the things that is hard with Microsoft Defender. It is not made for the MSP world where you have one pane of glass to see all of your clients with Microsoft Defender on it unless your RMM tool already has that built-in and it can see the telemetry from Microsoft Defender."
"The GUI is very complex and could be more user friendly."
"It would be nice to have a paid upgrade that would provide additional screening of the day-to-day activities."
"I would like to see online updates for patches for this solution. I would also like to see online information about what is trending in the market in terms of spams, viruses, or trojans. It takes some time to understand how this solution works. A few things are unclear at the beginning, such as whether it actually restricts the virus or spam at the initial stage, or when there is a security update, how will we come to know and how will it get synchronized. It would be really helpful if there is some kind of knowledge base in the form of video, audio, or document that can explain in a user-friendly way the setup, features, risks, and process to mitigate the risks. Currently, I have installed endpoint security for every individual system. I could not install it like other endpoint solutions where we have a server and a client. It would be really helpful if Microsoft Windows Defender has a server-client based model so that I can save some bandwidth when it downloads or uploads features. It will be helpful if we have a LAN-based or WAN-based controlling system."
"Sometimes, there are different skews. In a basic skew, they should have basic log analysis without the need to integrate with any third-party or SIEM solutions, like Sentinel. This would make it so much easier for users who don't have log collection or log analysis."
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Cisco Secure Endpoint is ranked 9th in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 44 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 "Single dashboard management, quick infrastructure threat detection, and high level support". 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 Cisco Umbrella, whereas Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is most compared with Symantec Endpoint Security, Intercept X Endpoint, SentinelOne Singularity Complete, CrowdStrike Falcon and ESET Endpoint Protection Platform. 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.
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