We performed a comparison between Crowdstrike Falcon and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: All other things being equal, Crowdstrike Falcon is the favorite when it comes to both ease of deployment and customer service and support.
"Fortinet FortiEDR's scalability is quite good, and you can add licenses to the 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 price is low and quite competitive with others."
"NGAV and EDR features are outstanding."
"The product's initial setup phase is very easy."
"The main thing is that I feel safe. Because the processes that have been used to get a handle on the attackers are much better than other competitors"
"The product detects and blocks threats and is more proactive than firewalls."
"It is stable and scalable."
"The malware protection is the most valuable feature of CrowdStrike Falcon."
"I like the detection rates of mobile threats."
"The solution has improved my organization by automating the detection and reporting of unwanted applications so we're aware of them and can respond appropriately."
"Enables us to understand what processes are running on the system, what registry keys have been enabled."
"CrowdStrike Falcon is effortless to use, and it's a cloud-specific platform. You only need to deploy the light agents on the licensed endpoints, and you're ready to work. Your dashboards will tell you the number of the endpoints being protected and the incidents. There are also incident dashboards with alerts that will tell you about the details."
"It's very easy to set up."
"It's given me a level of confidence that my network is secure."
"The most valuable feature of CrowdStrike Falcon is crowdsourcing intelligence."
"The most valuable feature is that it comes with the package, so there is no additional installation of third-party software. It's also easy to use."
"It is quite stable. We have not had any cases, i.e., viruses, that would require a reboot, etc. We have never had a situation where we needed to reinstall the tools as a result of the Defender application or a feature being corrupt."
"The most important feature is the way it monitors the threats and blocks them. About 10 days ago, we were implementing SOC for a particular client. The SOC was not yet implemented, but they had Microsoft Defender. That organization was hit by some ransomware, but the hacker could not succeed. Because of the EDR, the hacker could not install the hacking tools. They were trying to do that, but Microsoft Defender completely blocked that. The hacker could log into the system, but they could not install anything."
"The patch management is very easy, as it can be done automatically or added to a schedule."
"Defender provides useful alerts and groups them. It sends an alert to your portal if it detects any malicious activity, and you can group multiple alerts to form an incident."
"It can reach our applications and PC activities in the cloud."
"This is a very go, proactive solution to threat protection using advanced analysis."
"The most important and the most relevant features of Defender for Endpoint are the malware and ransomware protection."
"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."
"Cannot be used on mobile devices with a secure connection."
"Once, we had an event that was locked and blocked, but information about it came to us two or three days later."
"The dashboard isn't easy to access and manage."
"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 haven't seen the use of AI in the solution."
"The solution's installation from a central installation server could be improved because the engineers had a little bit of trouble getting it installed from a central location."
"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 technical support could improve because I am in India and the support I receive is from the UK or Australia. It is difficult to manage the time difference. The service could be faster. However, when we do have the support they are knowledgeable."
"In terms of features, I would like them to add detailed logging functionality in CrowdStrike. Currently, CrowdStrike detects the threats immediately based on the IOCs and the signature-based policies or many threat behaviors, but in terms of logging those threats, it is not very good. The information that they provide in the logs is very little. They can build more analytics into it."
"To simplify the budgeting process for our clients, CrowdStrike should consider offering bundled packages that include essential features."
"Sometimes CrowdStrike changes the GUI, and they need to be better at informing us and providing guidance concerning that."
"The biggest issue with Falcon as a standalone product is it doesn't have very much reporting."
"The management of log aggregation is in need of improvement."
"The solution needs to have integration with on-premises security devices and security facilities. That means all the security products, including the perimeter firewall, the DMZ."
"We can do a threat analysis of any machine at any time, but that threat analysis is very limited."
"It would be helpful if they offered video tutorial guides."
"The anti-ransomware features need to be improved upon."
"I would just like them to have more consistency, and that's a comment that's across the board with Microsoft. They change things a lot."
"The second major area for improvement involves enhanced capabilities for different operating systems or platforms. That is, even though we have coverage for different operating systems or platforms such as Linux, we don't get all of the controls and enhanced capabilities that are available with Windows devices."
"The solution should be updated by Microsoft with new features from time to time."
"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."
"With increase of cyber threats and cybersecurity issues, I would recommend that the product be developed like an AI product with more features which can counter any threat in the coming eras."
"I would like to see the next generation of the tool improved to work with other operating systems, like Linux."
More Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Pricing and Cost Advice →
CrowdStrike Falcon is ranked 3rd in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 107 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is ranked 1st in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 182 reviews. CrowdStrike Falcon is rated 8.8, while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of CrowdStrike Falcon writes "Easy to set up with good behavior-based analysis but needs a single-click recovery option". 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". CrowdStrike Falcon is most compared with Microsoft Defender XDR, Darktrace, Trend Micro Deep Security, Trend Vision One and VMware Carbon Black Endpoint, whereas Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is most compared with Symantec Endpoint Security, Intercept X Endpoint, SentinelOne Singularity Complete, Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks and Microsoft Intune. See our CrowdStrike Falcon vs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint report.
See our list of best Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) vendors and best Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) vendors.
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The CrowdStrike solution delivers a lot of information about incidents. It has a very light sensor that will never push your machine hardware to "test", you don't have the usual "scan now" feature but on the platform, you can drill down the events to find the starter of a blocked event.
It does have basic features to whitelist programs and paths, does show you information about what kind of threat was blocked, gives you information about user logged, machine details (SO, version, serial, Mac Address, Local and WAN IP,...) and grants you with the time, the file that executed the event, allows you to group devices and define exclusion, detection, response policies based on them.
It does allow you to create specific profiles for each type of user like helpdesk analysts, managers, etc (with different access, etc).
The solution is pretty good, actually and I'm pretty happy with it. I don't have experience with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint but will do in a couple of months to update this. =]
Depends on your budget and on the conditions of a Microsoft license. If you have an M365 license (like E3 or E5), Microsoft is cheaper.
In terms of functionality, CrowdStrike is better.