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.
"Ability to get forensics details and also memory exfiltration."
"The product's initial setup phase is very easy."
"It is very easy to set up. I would rate my experience with the initial setup a ten out of ten, with ten being very easy to set up."
"The console is easy to read. I also like the scanning part and the ability to move assets from one to the other."
"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."
"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."
"Fortinet is very user-friendly for customers."
"Solution for endpoint detection and response, with good stability and scalability. Users also benefit from email protection and data loss prevention."
"The stability on offer is fine."
"The product efficiently prevents data leakages."
"Technical support is responsive and adept."
"Since it's cloud-managed, the solution is easy to administer, especially if the person using it is in a different geophysical location."
"This is really good because it's applicable to zero-day threats."
"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."
"The package we use also comes with spam filtering features, which are quite useful."
"Microsoft Defender can block some viruses or malware. So, it can protect my files. It can save files on Office 365 OneDrive. I use encryption for some files, then I can recover them from OneDrive."
"File protection is the most valuable feature. Antivirus security on the Level OS, Microsoft Defender, and Microsoft Guard for 2019."
"The patch updates and version updates are very good. Those happen on an automated basis whenever I'm connecting to the organization network, either through LAN or through the VPN."
"It captures data through machine learning, which is built-in on the back-end. It also provides built-in analytics and a threat intelligence feature. It is a one-stop solution that doesn't require an antivirus because it comes prebuilt into Windows 10."
"The biggest benefit to Windows Defender is that it is built-in to the operating system by Microsoft."
"Automatic scanning and cleaning of viruses is the best and most valuable feature helping this tool to thrive. If any viruses are found, they are cleaned automatically."
"It shows us the risky sign-ins, and if a user's password has been compromised."
"I like Defender's reporting and logging features. The email alerts are also helpful. It's hard sometimes to sift through the email, especially if you're an IT firm managing hundreds if not thousands of endpoints, but we find email reporting useful. For example, last Tuesday, we learned of new vulnerabilities that were discovered as a result of the previous patches. The endpoints without those patches triggered alerts in Defender."
"The only minor concern is occasional interference with desired programs."
"Cannot be used on mobile devices with a secure connection."
"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"
"ZTNA can improve latency."
"Integration with Azure and SaaS provisioning tools could improve Fortinet FortiEDR."
"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'd like to see more one-to-one product presentations for the distribution channels."
"The support needs improvement."
"The main real-time scanning takes most of the processing power of my notebook."
"I have not done it, but integrating it with authenticating the users on the Windows system looks a bit complicated to me. It could be because I don't understand it."
"The policies could be nicer to manage."
"The problem is that if you have a lot of different components going on, each managed under a different umbrella, then you're going to be spending a lot of time hopping back and forth between the different components to see, "Well, I got hit here. What did my firewall see? I got hit in the firewall, the firewall says it allowed that attack in, did it land on anything to compromise any of my endpoints?""
"It could be a bit easier to implement."
"It consumes a lot of resources, and something needs to be done for that."
"This product does not handle USB drives well."
"It would be better if it can automatically generate a report for each and every user so that the users get to know the things that shouldn't be accessed from their PCs. It can have information about malicious and non-malicious sites so users are aware of them, and they don't access malicious websites. Such reports can be generated at the end of the day. We should also be able to get through to their support team quickly. Currently, it takes more than half an hour to get through to a technical person."
"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."
"It would be helpful if they included XDR features, on top of the EDR functionality."
"In India at least, it seems to be a bit more expensive than other options."
"The integration and effectiveness of email security could be better. It's already built-in to the solution and checks emails, scans the links they contain etc."
"The detection of viruses could be a little bit better."
"They should bring back the feature of a dedicated proxy device for communication to the cloud. As of now, all the agents are required to send the logs directly to the cloud. There should be a solution where you can put a proxy and all the logs are consolidated, like a forwarder."
"The product should reduce updates since it is hard to keep up."
"Microsoft Windows Defender doesn't have a game mode."
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Intercept X Endpoint is ranked 7th in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 101 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 Trend Vision One Endpoint Security, whereas Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is most compared with Symantec Endpoint Security, SentinelOne Singularity Complete, CrowdStrike Falcon, Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks and Microsoft Intune. 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.
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