We performed a comparison between Cortex XDR By Palo Alto Networks and Microsoft Defender for Cloud based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: The main difference between the two solutions is that Cortex XDR users say the solution is expensive while Microsoft Defender for Cloud users consider the solution to be fairly priced.
"Having all monitoring, response, tracking, and mitigation tools in one dashboard provides our analysts and SOC team with a comprehensive view at a glance."
"The most valuable feature is the analysis, because of the beta structure."
"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."
"The setup is pretty simple."
"The stability is very good."
"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 solution was relatively easy to deploy."
"The price is low and quite competitive with others."
"The initial setup is pretty easy."
"The live terminal is probably the best thing ever. It gives you the access to get straight onto any machine."
"Monitoring is most valuable."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks should be a stable solution."
"The management capabilities, allow an IT organization to get quite a good picture of attempted cyber attacks."
"We can use Cortex XDR to get the entire graph of the incidents from source to destination, and we can take remedial action."
"The solution allows control over the user and his machine through Cortex XDR security policies."
"It has pretty much everything we need and works well within the Palo Alto ecosystem."
"We saw improvement from a regulatory compliance perspective due to having a single dashboard."
"Microsoft Defender has a lot of features including regulatory compliance and attaching workbooks but the most valuable is the recommendations it provides for each and every resource when we open Microsoft Defender."
"The solution's robust security posture is the most valuable feature."
"Technical support is helpful."
"Provides a very good view of the entire security setup of your organization."
"When you have commissioned Defender, you have these things visible already on your dashboard. This gives the efficiency to the people to do their actual work rather than bothering about the email, sorting out the email, or looking at it through an ITSM solution, whey they have to look at the description and use cases. Efficiency increases with this optimized, ready-made solution since you don't need to invest in something externally. You can start using the dashboard and auditing capability provided from day one. Thus, you have fewer costs with a more optimized, easier-to-use solution, providing operational efficiency for your team."
"It helps you to identify the gaps in your solution and remediate them. It produces a compliance checklist against known standards such as ISO 27001, HIPAA, iTrust, etc."
"The dashboard is very good. It gives our clients a lot of information and allows them to have a complete overview of the system. Everything is visible in one glance."
"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."
"The dashboard isn't easy to access and manage."
"Detections could be improved."
"Integration with Azure and SaaS provisioning tools could improve Fortinet FortiEDR."
"The solution is not stable."
"We'd like to see more one-to-one product presentations for the distribution channels."
"ZTNA can improve latency."
"FortiEDR can be improved by providing more detailed reporting."
"Cortex does not offer an on-premises solution. However, some customers would prefer not to be on the cloud. It would be ideal if it could offer something on-prem as well."
"It would be good if they could make an exception for applications. Sometimes, it can be a bit of a challenge to make exceptions for certain applications that have been used as rogue."
"There are a large number of false positives."
"It is an enterprise-level solution. Its price could be less expensive."
"The tool needs to be improved in terms of integration and interface."
"The solution should force customers to integrate with network traffic to see the full benefits of XDR."
"Cortex XDR is trickier to configure than other Palo Alto products. This is one area where we are not so satisfied."
"It should support more mobile operating systems. That is one of the cons of their infrastructure right now."
"We would like to have better transparency as to how the security score is calculated because as it is now, it is difficult to understand."
"Microsoft can improve the pricing by offering a plan that is more cost-effective for small and medium organizations."
"You cannot create custom use cases."
"They could always work to make the pricing a bit lower."
"Consistency is the area where the most improvement is needed. For example, there are some areas where the UI is not uniform across the board."
"If a customer is already using Okta as an SSO in its entire environment, they will want to continue with it. But Security Center doesn't understand that and keeps making recommendations. It would help if it let us resolve a recommendation, even if it is not implemented."
"Defender is occasionally unreliable. It isn't 100% efficient in terms of antivirus detection, but it isn't an issue most of the time. It's also somewhat difficult to train new security analysts to use Defender."
"The solution could extend its capabilities to other cloud providers. Right now, if you want to monitor a virtual machine on another cloud, you can do that. However, this cannot be done with other cloud platform services. I hope once that is available then Defender for Cloud will be a unified solution for all cloud platform services."
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Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is ranked 4th in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 80 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 3rd in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) with 46 reviews. Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is rated 8.4, while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0. 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 Microsoft Defender for Cloud writes "Provides multi-cloud capability, is plug-and-play, and improves our security posture". Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, CrowdStrike Falcon, Darktrace, Symantec Endpoint Security and ESET Endpoint Protection Platform, whereas Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with AWS GuardDuty, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Defender XDR, Wiz and Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP. See our Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud report.
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