We performed a comparison between Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Trend Micro Apex One based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Trend Micro Apex One has a slight edge in this comparison due to its being the less expensive solution.
"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."
"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."
"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 setup is pretty simple."
"The console is easy to read. I also like the scanning part and the ability to move assets from one to the other."
"Ability to get forensics details and also memory exfiltration."
"Forensics is a valuable feature of Fortinet FortiEDR."
"Defender works in the background monitoring the traffic for viruses."
"Ensures that I'm working with a product that gets updated regularly without me having to remember to do it. Since it's a Microsoft product, I'm confident that it requires a low use of system resources. The benefit of that being that my computer isn't constantly being drained."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is easy to load and it runs quietly in the background, unlike other solutions."
"I like the fact that it has the ransomware solution in there. I'm glad that the ransomware solution is built into it. That's probably the biggest thing that I see in Microsoft Defender."
"Defender is stable. The performance is good."
"User-friendly, offering safety and security."
"One feature I like the most is vulnerability management, which shows any vulnerable software or OS present in my environment. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint provides a complete overview and also recommends the steps to mitigate the vulnerabilities or threats. Most of the other antivirus or EDR solutions generally don't provide vulnerability management. It is an add-on that Microsoft Defender for Endpoint provides."
"We have liked the fact that it comes with Microsoft Windows 10 and it is constantly updated with all new virus definitions. It is also updated with new security features on a regular basis."
"I believe that optimization is a really good feature on the front side."
"Apex One is effective at catching malicious activity. It has multiple modules that improve threat prevention across hundreds of networks."
"I think this is the best solution in the category of endpoint protection, it's really excellent. It's better than McAfee."
"The initial setup was very straightforward."
"This is a very stable product and we plan to continue using it."
"Many features that this solution has, competitors lack. The feature I think is quite good is data loss prevention."
"Its reporting and dashboard are valuable. Its dashboard is easy to use."
"It's easy to use and used to be a very good solution."
"There's room for improvement in the quick response time and technical support for integration issues, especially when dealing with multiple vendors."
"The only minor concern is occasional interference with desired programs."
"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."
"We've encountered challenges during API deployment, occasionally resulting in unstable environments."
"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."
"Once, we had an event that was locked and blocked, but information about it came to us two or three days later."
"It takes about two business days for initial support, which is too slow in urgent situations."
"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."
"I am not sure if I will be using this product in the future because of the price."
"It can get a bit laggy sometimes. Other than that, we don't have any issues. They constantly tweak it and fix it up based on users' feedback. It has improved a lot over the past four years. Defender for Endpoint never really used to be a good endpoint security solution, but over the past couple of years, Microsoft has invested heavily in it. So, it has come a long way in all aspects of endpoint security. If they want to make it better, they should just continue investing in the current path of what they've been doing over the past couple of years."
"Our team's knowledge of the solution needs to be improved, and Microsoft could do a better job conveying the necessary information to users. We could proactively use the tool more and explore capabilities we are not yet utilizing."
"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."
"Windows Firewall is integrated with Windows Defender. Over the last few days, I have had a problem with defining a wildcard on Windows Firewall. For example, I wanted to pull out the connection of my program and install a software package with a lot of executable files. I wanted to prevent it from accessing the internet. I could not select executables by using a wildcard. I had to select a single executable with its full name."
"The solution could always be more secure."
"One thing that was lacking in Defender was web filtering. Its web filtering wasn't as comprehensive. Sophos was a little bit better than Defender for blocking URLs or installing programs."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint does not offer default templates for alerts, requiring us to configure everything ourselves to avoid numerous false positives."
"Sometimes it will not communicate with the server, and we need to manually restart items."
"The UI has room for improvement."
"We do not have much control as we have to work with regional policies and regional support."
"One of Trend Micro's weaknesses is its high resource utilization."
"It would be ideal if the solution could be simplified a bit."
"Lacking features, not yet fully mature."
"The scans in Trend Micro Apex One take a very long time and it takes up my system resources. I do not receive alerts. These areas could improve."
"The solution could improve by making the interface less confusing, it needs to be simplified."
More Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Pricing and Cost Advice →
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is ranked 1st in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 182 reviews while Trend Micro Apex One is ranked 6th in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 124 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is rated 8.0, while Trend Micro Apex One is rated 8.2. 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". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Trend Micro Apex One writes "Good monitoring and server protection with helpful machine learning". Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is most compared with Symantec Endpoint Security, Intercept X Endpoint, CrowdStrike Falcon and SentinelOne Singularity Complete, whereas Trend Micro Apex One is most compared with Trend Micro Deep Security, Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks, Trend Micro Smart Protection, CrowdStrike Falcon and Trellix Endpoint Security. See our Microsoft Defender for Endpoint vs. Trend Micro Apex One report.
See our list of best Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) vendors and best Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) vendors.
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