Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs Rapid7 InsightIDR comparison

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6,000 views|4,488 comparisons
97% willing to recommend
Palo Alto Networks Logo
12,520 views|7,005 comparisons
94% willing to recommend
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1,476 views|759 comparisons
95% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks and Rapid7 InsightIDR based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Extended Detection and Response (XDR) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs. Rapid7 InsightIDR Report (Updated: May 2024).
772,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The most valuable features are spam filtering, attachment filtering, and antivirus protection.""Microsoft 365 Defender is simple to upgrade.""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.""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.""I like Defender XDR's automation capabilities. XDR isn't automated by default, but you can automate it to respond. If an attack is performed anywhere within the organization, you can isolate that instance from the network. This is what I can figure out for it. When integrated with Sentinel, you can set up playbooks to automate all the alerts gathered on Sentinel from different Microsoft solutions. Sentinel has a wider range of capabilities than XDR.""I have found the ability to delete unwanted threats beneficial.""We are able to consolidate licences and make use of many Microsoft products using this solution. If we have any Microsoft customers, we encourage them to use this solution for enterprise defence.""For me, the advanced hunting capabilities have been really great. It allowed querying the dataset with their own language, which is KQL or Kusto Query Language. That has allowed me to get much more insight into the events that have occurred. The whole power of 365 Defender is that you can get the whole story. It allows you to query an email-based activity and then correlate it with an endpoint-based activity."

More Microsoft Defender XDR Pros →

"The behavior-based detection feature is valuable.""After deploying Traps, we saw the performance of the network improve by 65 to 70 percent.""The most valuable for us is the correlation feature.""I've found the solution to be highly scalable for enterprises.""The dashboard is customizable.""When the pandemic started, Palo Alto came up with many solutions, which helped with the quick shift from on-premises to the cloud.""From a single pane of glass, you can easily manage all of your endpoints.""It has pretty much everything we need and works well within the Palo Alto ecosystem."

More Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks Pros →

"The biggest reason why we chose Rapid7 was to gain value in a really quick time. Its deployment doesn't take months. It just takes a few days.""Another very important part of insightIDR is the ability to collect data from endpoint devices via agent software. With a large remote workforce, this allows visibility into the endpoints that are connected to the internet, but not to the corporate network.""Rapid7's reporting is more robust than Tenable's.""The log aggregation and storage provided by InsightIDR has shown no issues with scalability; aggregating over one hundred millions events daily.""I like that it's a cloud-based solution.""Very intuitive and easy to set up.""Intelligent alerting to avoid the common problem of alert fatigue associated with traditional SIEMs.""InsightIDR has allowed us to find potential security issues that we did not know existed, and get remediation quickly."

More Rapid7 InsightIDR Pros →

Cons
"Microsoft Defender XDR is not a full-fledged EDR or XDR.""Because of the training model, Defender XDR's automatic response sometimes blocks legitimate users and activities. Also, the UI sometimes responds slowly.""Improving scalability, especially for very large tenants, could be beneficial for Microsoft Defender XDR.""The only problem I find is that the use cases are built-in. There is no template available that you can modify according to your organization's standards. What they give is very generic, the market standard, but that might not be applicable to every organization.""At times, when we have an incident email and we click on the link for that incident, it opens a pop-up, but there is nothing. It has happened a couple of times.""The console is missing some features that would be helpful for a managed services provider, like device and user management.""When discussing the secure score, which includes overviews and recommended actions, some of these recommended actions are not applicable to us, particularly those related to Microsoft Internet Explorer, which we do not use in any of our environments.""The Defender agent itself is more compatible with Windows 10 and Windows 11. Other than these two lines, there are so many compatibility issues. Security is not only about Microsoft. The core technical aspects of it are quite good, but it would be good if they can better support non-Microsoft solutions in terms of putting the agents directly into VMware and other virtualization solutions. There should be more emphasis on RHEL and other operating systems that we use, other than Windows, in the server category."

More Microsoft Defender XDR Cons →

"Cortex XDR should have a lightweight agent, and the agent size should not be heavy.""It tends to do 99.9% of things. The only thing I'd like is single sign-on authentication into their cloud platform so that my users can be properly authenticated against it.""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.""When it comes to core analysis, and security analysis, Cortex needs to provide more information.""It is a complex solution to implement.""In general, the price could be more competitive.""We would also like to have advanced tech protection and email scanning.""I would like to see better protection, specifically to protect email applications."

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"They should add more configuration and security features to it.""The ability to tune the collector for custom logs would greatly help.""Needs a better ability to customize the check within the console.""The integration capabilities of the solution have certain shortcomings where improvements are required.""InsightIDR's integration with other solutions could be improved. Also, I'd like more control from the portal over what's happening on the endpoint side. For example, when I see an attack on an endpoint, I want to be able to stop it from the portal.""The searching feature in Rapid7 InsightIDR needs to evolve""Rapid7 InsightIDR is not intuitive to search for logs. It should be more user-friendly and improve the dashboards. We should be able to use ready-made templates instead of having to build one.""Tenable Nessus is easier to deal with. It's more efficient and accurate. InsightIDR is heavier than Tenable in terms of performance and scanning. Rapid7 would be much easier to use if it had a network connector like Tenable. Tenable's connector allows continuous monitoring over the B caps."

More Rapid7 InsightIDR Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The solutions price is fair for what they offer."
  • "The price could be better. Normally, the costs depend on the country you're located in for the license. When we were in the initial stage, we went with the E5 license they call premium standard. It cost us around $5.20 per month for four users."
  • "The price of the solution is high compared to others and we have lost some customers because of it."
  • "Microsoft is not competitive with the pricing of the solution. The competitors are able to offer lower discounts. The price of the solution is higher."
  • "We have a lot of problems in Latin America regarding the price of Microsoft 365 Defender, because the relationship between dollars and the money of the different countries, it's is a lot. Many customers that have small businesses say that they would like the solution but it is too expensive. However, large companies do not find the cost an issue."
  • "The most valuable licensing option is expensive, so pricing could be improved. Licensing options for this solution also need to be consolidated, because they frequently change."
  • "Microsoft should provide lower-level licensing options. They should do it in such a way that even an individual could purchase a license, and it should be entirely flexible."
  • "They have moved from a licensing model to pay-per-use... The question is: What happens if, for any reason, there's not enough budget to accept this model? That could be a great problem."
  • More Microsoft Defender XDR Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "I feel it is fairly priced."
  • "The pricing seems fair, and I do like the licensing model. You use wherever they are, and it is elastic."
  • "We didn't have to pay any additional fee for the cloud instance. It just came with the renewal, which was nice."
  • "It is "expensive" and flexible."
  • "Traps pays for itself within the first 16 months of a three-year subscription. This is attributed to OPEX savings, as security teams spent less time trying to identify and isolate malware for analysis as a result of a reduction in malware incidents, false positives, and breach avoidance."
  • "I did PoCs on products called Cylance and CrowdStrike. Although, I consider these products and they were also good, when it come to cost and budgetary factors, Traps has been proven to be better than the other two products. It is quite cost-effective and delivers all the entire solution which we require."
  • "It is cost-effective compared to similar solutions. It fits for the small businesses through to the big businesses."
  • "The return on investment is from the user side because we have seen the performance of it increase the delivery time of the product if we are using too many web-based and on-premise applications. In indirect ways, we saw the return of investment in terms of performance and user satisfaction increase."
  • More Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "​I am sure that there are cheaper products out there, but none that meet so many of our needs whilst maintaining stability and usability.​"
  • "The team is very willing to work with companies. My suggestion is to call the Rapid7 sales department and see how they can help.​"
  • "Licensing is straightforward. If, for some reason, you don’t meet the minimum licensing requirements, there is a third-party managed service that can help."
  • "​Accurately predict your licensing counts as this is a subscription based product.​"
  • "The pricing and licensing are competitive."
  • "Licensing is by endpoint and amount of retention time (at least ours is). Default retention was one year, but we are able to push the retention further if needed. There's also a provide-your-own-S3 option for longer retention if you don't want to pay for the additional retention years in your Rapid7 agreement."
  • "It is a reasonably priced solution."
  • "It is on a yearly basis. For our own company, for about 250 users, it was 16,000 euros a year."
  • More Rapid7 InsightIDR Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Microsoft Defender XDR provides strong identity protection with comprehensive insights into risky user behavior and… more »
    Top Answer:Microsoft Defender XDR is expensive, especially for the full suite functionality. However, when compared to buying… more »
    Top Answer:Improving scalability, especially for very large tenants, could be beneficial for Microsoft Defender XDR. Additionally… more »
    Top Answer:Cortex XDR by Palo Alto vs. SentinelOne SentinelOne offers very detailed specifics with regard to risks or attacks.… more »
    Top Answer:Cortex XDR by Palo Alto vs. CrowdStrike Falcon Both Cortex XDR and Crowd Strike Falcon offer cloud-based solutions that… more »
    Top Answer:Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a cloud-delivered endpoint security solution. The tool reduces the attack surface… more »
    Top Answer:For tools I’d recommend:  -SIEM- LogRhythm -SOAR- Palo Alto XSOAR Doing commercial w/o both (or at least an XDR) is… more »
    Top Answer:During simulations or demonstrations, the tool generates alerts, providing details such as the specific application, its… more »
    Top Answer:We chose Rapid7 because of its price. IBM QRadar charges us based on data storage. Rapid7 InsightIDR charges us based on… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Microsoft 365 Defender, Microsoft Threat Protection, MS 365 Defender
    Cyvera, Cortex XDR, Palo Alto Networks Traps
    InsightIDR
    Learn More
    Overview

    Microsoft Defender XDR is a comprehensive security solution designed to protect against threats in the Microsoft 365 environment. 

    It offers robust security measures, comprehensive threat detection capabilities, and an efficient incident response system. With seamless integration with other Microsoft products and a user-friendly interface, it simplifies security management tasks. 

    Users have found it effective in detecting and preventing various types of attacks, such as phishing attempts, malware infections, and data breaches.

    Watch the Microsoft demo video here: Microsoft Defender XDR demo video.

    Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is the first threat detection and response software to combine both visibility across all types of data as well as autonomous machine learning analytics. Threat detection very often requires analysts to divide their attention among many different data streams. This platform unifies a vast variety of data flows, which allows analysts to assess threats from a single location. Users can now maintain a level of visibility that other threat detection programs simply cannot offer. This level of transparency lends itself to both quick identification of problems that arise and the equally quick development of a potential solution.

    Cortex XDR’s machine learning works on many different levels to detect and prevent threats. It is constantly scanning for threats and vulnerabilities. The solution can scan up to 5.4 billion IP addresses in three-quarters of an hour. This allows it to spot weak points in the system and notify administrators long before hackers can take advantage of vulnerabilities. Once the Artificial Intelligence (AI) discovers an issue or an area where an issue could potentially take place the system creates a log of the information and subsequently sends an alert to system administrators. The AI takes the information that it has gathered and uses it to assign threat levels to the issues that it detects. Following this, a human analyst will be assigned to manually assess the issue and deal with it accordingly. You can set it to automatically respond to the threat by isolating the issue while analysts investigate it.

    Benefits of Cortex XDR

    Some of Cortex XDR’s benefits include:

    • The use of advanced AI analytics, behavior analytics, and custom-made detection to detect advanced threats before they occur.
    • The ability to group similar threat alerts, reducing incoming alerts by as much as 98%. This allows analysts to avoid being overwhelmed by the volume of incoming alerts.
    • The ability to investigate threats as much as 8 times faster than would be possible with other software. The machine learning, when coupled with the unified data stream that Cortex XDR collects, significantly increases the ability to more quickly discover the root cause of a threat.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks software stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its ability to isolate threats while enabling them to be studied and the way that the software combines all of the data that it gathers into a single, more complete picture than other solutions offer.

    PeerSpot users note the effectiveness of these features. A network designer at a computer software company wrote, “The solution has a very helpful isolation feature. If any system gets compromised, with one click I can access the system and isolate it from other networks, and then go into further forensic investigation of the current threat without compromising anything else.”

    Jeff W., Vice President/CTO at Sinnott Wolach Technology Group, noted, “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.”



    Parsing hundreds of trivial alerts. Managing a mountain of data. Manually forwarding info from your endpoints. Forget that. InsightIDR instantly arms you with the insight you need to make better decisions across the incident detection and response lifecycle, faster.

    Sample Customers
    Accenture, Deloitte, ExxonMobil, General Electric, IBM, Johnson & Johnson and many others.
    CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
    Liberty Wines, Pioneer Telephone, Visier
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company16%
    Computer Software Company16%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Government9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Government8%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Security Firm9%
    Consumer Goods Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company15%
    Government8%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider27%
    Computer Software Company20%
    Non Tech Company13%
    Security Firm13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company15%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Government6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business40%
    Midsize Enterprise24%
    Large Enterprise36%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise56%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business41%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise37%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise56%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business63%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise17%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise53%
    Buyer's Guide
    Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs. Rapid7 InsightIDR
    May 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs. Rapid7 InsightIDR and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.
    772,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is ranked 4th in Extended Detection and Response (XDR) with 80 reviews while Rapid7 InsightIDR is ranked 13th in Extended Detection and Response (XDR) with 30 reviews. Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is rated 8.4, while Rapid7 InsightIDR is rated 8.4. 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 Rapid7 InsightIDR writes "Helps in the management of compliance, secret events and information". Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, CrowdStrike Falcon, Darktrace, Symantec Endpoint Security and Trellix Endpoint Security, whereas Rapid7 InsightIDR is most compared with Darktrace, Microsoft Sentinel, Splunk Enterprise Security, Rapid7 InsightVM and IBM Security QRadar. See our Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs. Rapid7 InsightIDR report.

    See our list of best Extended Detection and Response (XDR) vendors and best Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) vendors.

    We monitor all Extended Detection and Response (XDR) 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.