BigFix vs Symantec Endpoint Security comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between BigFix and Symantec Endpoint Security based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed BigFix vs. Symantec Endpoint Security Report (Updated: May 2024).
786,957 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 solution was relatively easy to deploy.""NGAV and EDR features are outstanding.""Additionally, when it comes to EDR, there are more tools available to assist with client work.""Fortinet FortiEDR's scalability is quite good, and you can add licenses to the solution.""The stability is very good.""It is a scalable solution...The initial setup of Fortinet FortiEDR was straightforward.""The most valuable feature is the analysis, because of the beta structure.""We have FortiEDR installed on all our systems. This protects them from any threats."

More Fortinet FortiEDR Pros →

"DOWNLOADING-PATCHES; It has also helped to reduce network traffic when it comes to downloading patches. By only having to download the patch once to the central location and then utilizing the relay structure to then download the patch to a specific site and then everything gathering at local, it greatly reduces the bandwidth of multiple endpoints.""BigFix has always been easier to use when managing servers, especially when you deal with so many servers. We have 7,000. That's a lot of services to manage, and it's convenient to patch them all at once.""BigFix has drastically reduced the maintenance window period to patch and reboot servers.""One of the biggest benefits BigFix has had for our organization is the ease and efficiency to perform many different tasks, across pillars and platforms, all from one pane of glass.""The most valuable features of the solution are Windows patching and the hardware and software inventory.""Having higher visibility on patching level, on patching successful, and non-successful has been a way that BigFix has improved my organization. Also, the ability to customize the content to do what we need it to do is very powerful and very flexible for us. Finally, in the area of custom interfaces like REST API really gives us the ability to provide for our external customers.""The technical support for BigFix is really amazing.""The best feature of BigFix is its multi-platform support."

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"It's good at detecting signature-based stuff and stopping that.""It is a scalable product and is average stability-wise.""Symantec Endpoint Security is easy to use, fast, and good for small and medium-sized businesses.""I find it is the most reliable solution on the market.""The product blocks computer viruses.""The features are very nice. We are getting updates continuously from the Symantec side regarding any attacks, such as zero-day attacks. Symantec helps us in mitigating any attacks or threats early.""One of the most valuable features is its antivirus database, which is current and updated daily. Another valuable feature is its capacity to be managed by a single server. The solution is managed by a secure server, so all the endpoints are managed from a central point.""Symantec have everything – documentation, videos, data sheets."

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Cons
"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.""Once, we had an event that was locked and blocked, but information about it came to us two or three days later.""The only minor concern is occasional interference with desired programs.""The solution should address emerging threats like SQL injection.""I would like the solution to extend beyond endpoint protection and include other attack surfaces such as other network components.""The solution is not stable.""We've encountered challenges during API deployment, occasionally resulting in unstable environments.""We've had a lot of false positives; things incorrectly flagged that require manual configuration to allow. Even worse, after we allow a legitimate program, it sometimes gets flagged again after an update. This has caused a lot of extra work for my team."

More Fortinet FortiEDR Cons →

"I'm looking for them to make big web UI improvements.""Around the scalability concern, I would like to see the ability to run teamed, clustered, or hierarchical root servers, in order to provide a more robust, high availability system. The single monolithic root server model does somewhat bother me.""The console interface is not friendly, and requires training before using it in production.""I would like to see the integration of user security between the different products to be improved. There's separate security for compliance, separate security for web reports, and the console, and you have to manage those things separately.""The new EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) feature, Detect, is new and still needs a few updates.""Sometimes the workstations communicate back to the BigFix server two or three days in a week or something similar. Sometimes there can be a delay reporting back to the server for a variety of reasons, such as users turning their computer off when they go home. When the user comes back and turns the computer back on BigFix needs to synchronize and sometimes it can take some time, approximately one week. The communication between the agent and the server should be faster, there is room for improvement in this area.""The product lacks AI, ML, and IIT.""The deployment has room for improvement and can be more streamlined."

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"When it was directly with Symantec, the technical support was perfect. After Broadcom acquired Symantec, the level of technical support dropped.""After selling this product, what we have observed is that the system gets slower, which is a major issue.""It's not cheap.""I would like to see even more customization, the possibility to do whitelisting. It needs to be a little bit more liberal on whitelisting, even to use the name if needed, instead of hashes.""We are not satisfied with this solution. It needs a lot of improvements. It doesn't detect the most recent malware and unknown threats. With most of the users working from home these days, there is also a need for some extra security layer. That's why we are thinking of going for a better solution that will take care of all of our endpoints and work from home situation. Symantec also has to work on EDI technology. Vendors like Palo Alto and Cisco are coming with their own intelligence and cloud infrastructure in which unknown threats are regularly watched and monitored, and they are reported to the admin.""If there is a suspicious file, it is put into a sandbox where Symantec does an analysis. After the analysis, Symantec marks the file as a risk, but it doesn't blacklist or block the file. If a file is already known to be harmful, I would like them to automatically block or blacklist it to reduce the damage.""Difficult to set up on older systems.""It would be helpful if this product provided patch management functionality."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "I know it is tough to get big budget additions up front, but I highly recommend deploying environment wide and adding the forensic service."
  • "There are no issues with the pricing."
  • "The price is comprable to other endpoint security solutions."
  • "The pricing is typical for enterprises and fairly priced."
  • "I'm not familiar with pricing, but it looks a bit costly compared to other vendors I think."
  • "The pricing is good."
  • "I would rate the solution's pricing an eight out of ten."
  • "The hardware costs about €100,000 and about €20,000 annually for access."
  • More Fortinet FortiEDR Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "I can estimate the reduced cost of servers maintenance to approximatively $500,000."
  • "When purchasing, buying with other IBM tools provided us with a very good discount in pricing."
  • "I would stay with the Managed Virtual Server license model, which is a 1-to-1 license per OS whether it is virtual or physical."
  • "The product is less costly when compared to other solutions, and this is a good solid solution for what we have paid."
  • "Compliance, inventory, and licensing are really pricey. They should lower the price. It discourages users from getting onboard."
  • "You get what we call the Platform Edition, which you get for free. The patch service is maybe $0.50 per workstation per month. Then there's the basic server cost, which is about $1.50 per server per month. You also get into Lifecycle which does power management, OSD remote control, and those types of things, and that might be about 10 times the price - which works out to about $13 per server and, maybe $5 per workstation per month."
  • "The price is very fair."
  • "The price is reasonable, but our customers find it expensive."
  • More BigFix Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "I’d say SEP deserves the money."
  • "Regarding the licensing, it was important negotiate a long contract to get a more attractive price, including advanced support in case of crisis."
  • "What we have paid for this product is good value for the work and the services that they are providing to us."
  • "Licensing is per user. Therefore, it makes it easy to do licensing."
  • "It is the better product, even if it is a little on the higher side."
  • "It's not cheap."
  • "Pricing and licensing are important to us when choosing a product."
  • "Pricing and licensing for our country is very good. It's not that expensive and the endpoint security is very good. It's not as cheap as some others, but they are not as good."
  • More Symantec Endpoint Security Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:I suggest Fortinet’s FortiEDR over FortiClient for several reasons. For starters, FortiEDR guarantees solid protection… more »
    Top Answer:We have FortiEDR installed on all our systems. This protects them from any threats.
    Top Answer:We license it per employee, so as long as the employee count remains the same, the licensing won't change. We have it… more »
    Top Answer:The most valuable features of the solution are Windows patching and the hardware and software inventory.
    Top Answer:On a scale from one to ten, where one is expensive and ten is cheap, I rate the solution's pricing one out of ten.
    Top Answer:The solution’s pricing could be improved.
    Top Answer:Aqua Security is easy to use and very manageable. Its main focus is on Kubernetes and Docker. Security is a very… more »
    Top Answer:We use Symantec because we do not use MS Enterprise products, but in my opinion, Microsoft Defender is a superior… more »
    Top Answer:Symantec have everything – documentation, videos, data sheets.
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    enSilo, FortiEDR
    Tivoli Endpoint Manager
    Symantec EPP, Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP)
    Learn More
    Overview

    Fortinet FortiEDR is a real-time endpoint protection, detection, and automated response solution. Its primary purpose is to detect advanced threats to stop breaches and ransomware damage. It is designed to do so in real time, even on an already compromised device, allowing you to respond and remediate incidents automatically so your data can remain protected.

    Fortinet FortiEDR Features

    Fortinet FortiEDR has many valuable key features, including:

    • Easily customizable
    • Real-time proactive risk mitigation & IoT security
    • Pre-infection protection
    • Post-infection protection
    • Track applications and ratings
    • Reduce the attack surface with risk-based proactive policies
    • Achieve analysis of entire log history
    • Optional managed detection and response (MDR) service

    Fortinet FortiEDR Benefits

    Some of the key benefits of using Fortinet FortiEDR include:

    • Protection: Fortinet FortiEDR provides proactive, real-time, automated endpoint protection with the orchestrated incident response across platforms. It stops the breach with real-time postinfection blocking to protect data from exfiltration and ransomware encryption.

    • Single unified console: Fortinet FortiEDR has a single unified console with an intuitive interface, which makes management easier. The solution automates mundane endpoint security tasks so your employees don’t need to do it.

    • Cost savings: With Fortinet FortiEDR you can eliminate post-breach operational expenses and breach damage costs.

    • Flexibility: Fortinet FortiEDR can be deployed on premises or on a secure cloud instance. With Fortinet FortiEDR, endpoints are protected both on- and off-line.

    • Scalability: Because Fortinet can be deployed quickly and has a small footprint, it is easy to scale up to protect hundreds of thousand endpoints.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Fortinet FortiEDR users.

    An Owner at a security firm says, "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 customer has literally about 800 cash registers. That was the use case for Fortinet FortiEDR - to get that down into a tiny space. The only way to do that was to use this product because it had that ability to unbundle services that were a surplus.”

    Chandan M., Chief Technical Officer at Provision Technologies LLP, mentions, “The ease of deployment and configuration is valuable. It's very easy compared to other vendors like Sophos. Sophos' configuration is complex. Fortinet is a lot easier to understand. You don't need a lot of admin knowledge to do the configuration.” He also adds, “The security is also very good and the firewall response is good.”

    Harpreet S., Information Technology Support Specialist at Chemtrade Logistics, explains, "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."

    DeAndre V., Senior Network Administrator at a financial services firm, states, “The dashboard is easy to follow and use. The deployment and uninstalling were easy. I like the detailed information about the path of a file that might be suspicious. Being able to check that out was easy to follow. Exceptions are easy to create and the interface is easy to follow with a nice appearance.

    HCL BigFix is a powerful patch management tool that enables organizations to simply control their patch management operations. It is designed so that IT security and operations teams can collaborate in the most effective way possible. Users that employ BigFix can find and fix issues with their endpoints faster than those that employ its competitors. It comes with thousands of security checks that can be deployed quickly and easily. These enable users to safeguard themselves from a wide variety of digital threats.

    HCL BigFix Benefits

    Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by choosing to deploy HCL BigFix include:

    • Total visibility and simplified control. BigFix provides users with total system visibility while simultaneously enabling administrators to easily manage their networks. It enables organizations to run all of their patch management operations from a single user interface. This UI contains all of BigFix’s system controls. It also contains all of an organization’s network data. Users will never have to search for the features or information that they need as everything is centrally located.
    • Maximum benefit for reduced overhead. BigFix enables businesses to integrate with more than 100 different operating systems. Users can utilize the operating system of their choice without multiplying their overhead costs. They can keep costs down while still achieving their goals. 
    • Flexibility. BigFix is highly flexible. Users can integrate it with the top vulnerability management solutions on the market. This enables users to maximize their protective coverage and minimize the amount of time that they have to spend resolving issues. 

    BigFix Features

    • BigFix Insights. The BigFix insights feature gives users access to a powerful deep analysis tool. This tool enables organizations to gather data from all of their endpoints and compile them into reports that can aid administrators in their work. It can centralize an organization’s data and also enable it to import data from other sources so that it can make more informed decisions.
    • Task automation. BigFix has the ability to automate rudimentary tasks so that users can focus on tasks that require a greater level of attention. This can include tasks such as event remediation and data collection. This feature enables users to focus their attention on other more critical tasks.
    • Data loss prevention tool. This tool enables users to prevent critical data from being leaked or leaking accidentally. It creates policies that limit or prevent sensitive data from being transmitted. It also enforces the privacy protocols that are already in place. Organizations can leverage this tool to bolster the security protecting their data from malicious actors.
    • Web reputation tool. This tool proactively protects networks from malicious websites. It scans for potentially dangerous websites and opens a blocking page when one is detected. Users are also given the ability to set proxy server credentials for the system to recognize and authenticate. Users can use this to ensure that suspicious websites are unable to infect their networks.
    • Centralized UI. BigFix comes with a built-in UI that centralizes all of the solution’s features so that they can be accessed from a single location. It enables administrators to target specific portions of the network when issues arise without requiring them to take actions that will affect the entire network.

    Reviews from Real Users

    HCL BigFix is a highly effective solution that stands out when compared to most of its competitors. Two major advantages it offers are its auto-patching capability and its user-friendly tools.

    Santhosh K., the chief executive officer of Catnip Infotech Private Limited, writes, “The second valuable feature is, BigFix also has an auto patch updating feature, where the latest patches, and what is required for my system are automatically downloaded and kept ready for me. The solution applies the patch and notifies me after applying the patch. BigFix also gives me a ping saying that I should reset my system within a certain period of time, while the patch is being applied. Let's say, the patch is being applied and if there's an issue, the solution can revoke the applied patch, and revert back to the old state.”


    Benedikt S., an application administrator, says, “It's very straightforward. The usability is very close to everyday technical tools that you use as a systems administrator. So it's quite user-friendly.”

    Symantec Endpoint Security is a robust and reliable product that provides complete protection against viruses, malware, Trojans, and malicious files. It offers application and device control, ease of use in deploying and updating, a central control console, stability, scalability, auto-discovery capabilities, patch management, endpoint detection and response capabilities, intrusion detection module. 

    The Symantec Global Intelligence Network (GIN) provides threat intelligence and detection across endpoints, email, and web traffic. It has helped organizations reduce downtime, increase productivity, and improve security posture. Symantec Endpoint Security is easy to use, has a flexible administration, and offers more value than expected.

    Sample Customers
    Financial, Healthcare, Legal, Technology, Enterprise, Manufacturing ... 
    US Foods, Penn State, St Vincent's Health US Foods, Sabadell Bank, SunTrust, Australia Sydney, Stemac, Capgemini, WNS Global Services, Jebsen & Jessen, CenterBeam, Strauss, Christian Hospital Centre, Brit Insurance, Career Education Corporation
    Audio Visual Dynamics, Red Deer Advocate, Asia Pacific Telecom Co. Ltd., Kibbutz Ein Gedi, and AMETEK, Inc.
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm21%
    Comms Service Provider11%
    Manufacturing Company11%
    Educational Organization5%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Government8%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Retailer12%
    Healthcare Company10%
    University10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization45%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    Computer Software Company7%
    Government7%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm17%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    University5%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    Government8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business53%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise32%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business31%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise50%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise64%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business11%
    Midsize Enterprise50%
    Large Enterprise39%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business43%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise38%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise59%
    Buyer's Guide
    BigFix vs. Symantec Endpoint Security
    May 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about BigFix vs. Symantec Endpoint Security and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.
    786,957 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    BigFix is ranked 15th in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 91 reviews while Symantec Endpoint Security is ranked 5th in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 140 reviews. BigFix is rated 8.6, while Symantec Endpoint Security is rated 7.6. The top reviewer of BigFix writes "Very stable and easy to deploy with excellent patch compliance". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Symantec Endpoint Security writes "The solution has given us visibility into compliance within our whole system and helped us ensure everything is updated". BigFix is most compared with Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Configuration Manager, Microsoft Windows Server Update Services, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Tanium, whereas Symantec Endpoint Security is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, CrowdStrike Falcon, Trend Micro Deep Security and Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks. See our BigFix vs. Symantec Endpoint Security report.

    See our list of best Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) 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.