We performed a comparison between Microsoft Defender For Endpoint and Sophos Intercept X based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Sophos Intercept X comes out on top. While the Microsoft Defender For Endpoint solution is good, it lacks in certain areas that Sophos Intercept X don’t have to worry about. Overall, users of Sophos Intercept X have mainly positive feedback on the product, agreeing that its set of features is excellent.
"It is stable and scalable."
"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."
"It is a scalable solution...The initial setup of Fortinet FortiEDR was straightforward."
"We have FortiEDR installed on all our systems. This protects them from any threats."
"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."
"Ability to get forensics details and also memory exfiltration."
"Forensics is a valuable feature of Fortinet FortiEDR."
"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."
"The solution is scalable."
"I consider the heuristics to be most valuable, the fact that the solution does not work solely on signatures."
"The deployment is quick. It just depends on the environment and what you may be replacing."
"Technical support is responsive and adept."
"There are products that are technically stronger. However, this product has everything in one solution, which makes it a strong endpoint option."
"Since it's cloud-managed, the solution is easy to administer, especially if the person using it is in a different geophysical location."
"It is easy to interact with, and its cost is also good."
"The Managed Detection and Response service provided by Intercept X Endpoint is highly valuable. With a team of 600-700 individuals monitoring systems, they swiftly respond to attacks, either informing us to isolate or directly removing threats. This full MDR service is especially recommended for sectors like finance, where data security is critical. The deep learning technology within Intercept X Endpoint enhances our security posture by analyzing behaviors and algorithms to differentiate between legitimate users and threats, effectively preventing attacks on our network infrastructure."
"It's free. There is no additional cost. It's part of Windows."
"Its real-time security is the most valuable."
"We are able to productively integrate with existing on-prem, hybrid, or cloud applications."
"The features I have found most valuable are the ransomware and malware protection. The solution detects malware live and whenever it detects suspicious activity, it quarantines it."
"Endpoint's most valuable feature is deep analysis."
"This product is flexible, and it is very easy to get updates from the Microsoft website."
"Coming from an organization where the EDR wasn't strong, it has always been a case of basically searching through the information you already have and looking for something. It was basically trying to find the needle in a haystack. What the Defender platform does is that it reduces the size of the haystack, and it'll say that the needle is over here. Minutes matter, and it certainly zeros you in on the events that are concerning. It also simplifies the effort of trying to get some kind of correlation of behaviors or actions you see in the environment and confirming if something is benign or a threat."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is free and part of the licensing stack of other Microsoft products."
"The SIEM could be improved."
"I think cloud security and SASE are areas of concern in the product where improvements are required. The tool's cloud version has to be improved in terms of the security it offers."
"The amount of usage, the number of details we get, or the number of options that can be tweaked is limited in comparison to that with other EDR solutions"
"Making the portal mobile friendly would be helpful when I am out of office."
"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."
"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."
"There's room for improvement in the quick response time and technical support for integration issues, especially when dealing with multiple vendors."
"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."
"Sophos has a lot of different features. Some of them are tied to different clients, which may mean that different prices or licenses have to be added on. It can be a little bit confusing if you're not familiar with the logic of how they work. They can make it a little bit clearer."
"They should work on the logs and events. Sophos Intercept X needs to increase the interface test so that it can export to a live event."
"When I use a proxy, I can bypass Sophos, which is an area that needs improvement."
"The majority of our systems are MacBooks and their solution release cycle is slow to endorsing or support the MacBook's latest OS or hardware platform. For example, when Sophos macOS Big Sur version 11 was released, it took them a while to support this version of OS. A similar situation occurred when the MacBook M1 hardware CPU was released. They have not fully supported the native M1 CPU to this day. They need to speed up the solutions release cycle."
"Technical support is too slow to schedule meetings."
"The price of this solution can be improved."
"This product does not handle USB drives well."
"Integration with firewall solutions could be better."
"With the XDR dashboard, when you're doing an investigation and you're drilling down to obtain further details it tends to open many different tabs that take you away from your main tabs. You can end up having 10 tabs open for one investigation. This is another area for improvement because you can end up getting lost in the multiple tabs. Therefore, the central console can be improved so that it does not take you to several different pages for each investigation."
"I would like to see improvements made to how it secures activities on web pages."
"It should support non-Windows products better. Microsoft is now one of the leading vendors in the security area. So, they should be product-independent."
"Lowering the price would be an improvement."
"In active mode, it's great that it gives you so much information, but it does record every keystroke so you have a lot of logs... that amount of data logging started to add up in the cost."
"Its user interface (UI) can be improved. Currently, in the console, you have to dig down for certain things. They've got many different layers to get to things instead of having it all on the surface. You have to go three folds lower to get to specific functionality or click a particular option. It would be good if we can manage the console through menus and instead of three clicks, we can do things in one click. They need to change the UI and work on it in terms of a better user experience."
"The application control feature requires improvement."
"Microsoft should improve support for third-party platforms, because not all functionality is available for all of them. It's a good product, but they should just extend the functionality for all platforms."
More Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Pricing and Cost Advice →
Intercept X Endpoint is ranked 7th in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 99 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is ranked 1st in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 182 reviews. Intercept X Endpoint is rated 8.4, while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Intercept X Endpoint writes "A standard offering with good threat analysis but reduces machine performance". 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". Intercept X Endpoint is most compared with CrowdStrike Falcon, Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business, SentinelOne Singularity Complete, Fortinet FortiClient and Seqrite Endpoint Security, whereas Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is most compared with Symantec Endpoint Security, CrowdStrike Falcon, SentinelOne Singularity Complete, Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks and Fortinet FortiClient. See our Intercept X 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.
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.