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BlackBerry Cylance Cybersecurity vs Microsoft Defender for Business comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Net...
Sponsored
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
108
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (7th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (6th), Ransomware Protection (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (2nd)
BlackBerry Cylance Cybersec...
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
24th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.6
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Microsoft Defender for Busi...
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
15th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Microsoft Security Suite (16th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) category, the mindshare of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is 3.5%, down from 4.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of BlackBerry Cylance Cybersecurity is 1.3%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Business is 1.9%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks3.5%
Microsoft Defender for Business1.9%
BlackBerry Cylance Cybersecurity1.3%
Other93.3%
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
 

Featured Reviews

ABHISHEK_SINGH - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Process Expert at A.P. Moller - Maersk
Gained full visibility and streamlined threat detection through behavior-based insights and AI integration
Initially, we got to have a lot of false positives when we onboarded, but nowadays it's quite smooth. We have fine-tuned our security policies and allowed different levels of policies to get rid of those false positives. Currently, we are getting a fairly good amount of incidents that are not false positives or benign, but actionable items. The process is streamlined. In the initial days, the operations used to get involved in a lot of benign and other activities, but now the process is streamlined. We are leveraging the auto-detection and remediation plans. The operations teams are now more involved in other business roles as well, not just looking into the logs and fetching out what's happening there. They have fixed a lot of things. Initially, they didn't have IAC code drift detection, cloud posture management, or security posture management, but they have those now. They purchased different vendors and did a merger with that. They have now Prisma Cloud that gets integrated and now they are working with Cortex Cloud. Everything that was negative has now been addressed, and the product altogether looks to be in a very better and mature shape now. Currently, it's more or less detecting the workloads with AI-based best practices. Since most organizations are consuming AI agents and other things, we are looking forward to seeing what other feature enhancements Palo Alto can support in that.
Sooraj Makkancherrry - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Operations Manager at Philips
Doesn't have daily updates, which is important for healthcare IT
I face challenges with the exclusion policy - it still scans folders we told it not to, causing issues. When we contact support, they tell us to update the latest agent, but we can't do that immediately due to medical device protocols and validation testing. I wish support would try to understand our issues better instead of giving this standard response. The machine learning feature they use often tells us to upgrade the agent or add things to the exclusion list, which isn't unacceptable. It's a very good and new technology as a tool and antivirus. But sometimes, it doesn't work properly with our medical devices and products, quarantining files it shouldn't even after we add them to exclusions. This is tricky for us.
Takayuki-Umehara - PeerSpot reviewer
Public Cloud Engineer at Prudential
Product deployment protects assets but needs improvement in system support
I am doing maintenance for Microsoft Defender for Business, and I'm currently working with it. We don't need to use the latest version of Microsoft Defender for Business. We still use the latest virus definition file that Microsoft Defender for Business has automatically updated. We implement a basic update mechanism. Our compliance division manages how many servers and PCs we have and whether those servers have antivirus solutions. I am not certain about how Microsoft Defender for Business helps with AI-driven security strategies. I just use it normally and don't know if it uses AI technology. I rate Microsoft Defender for Business a six out of ten.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"But overall, when we speak about security and protection, they are one of the top providers."
"Its interface and pricing are most valuable. It is better than other vendors in terms of security."
"The product's most valuable features are massive user and feature intelligence exploit detection."
"The policy configuration is great, the granularity of policies that are available is very helpful, it is straightforward to set up, and it has pretty much everything we need and works well within the Palo Alto ecosystem."
"Cortex XDR is stable, offering high quality and reliable performance."
"Cortex XDR's most valuable feature is its intelligence-based dashboards."
"Palo Alto is the best security solution in the market."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks's ability to block sophisticated threats in real time is quite good and is on par with SentinelOne's."
"Its setup is simple if you have a Windows device; it is executable."
"On the management side, we liked the way it displays things."
"In most cases, the solution's ability to detect in the MITRE framework, and its ability to be able to detect attacks in any one of seven or eight different areas of the life cycle of an attack is very useful."
"The most valuable features are script blocking and macros within Word documents for stopping unwanted applications from running in the background."
"Its setup is simple if you have a Windows device; it is executable."
"What I like best about CylancePROTECT is its accuracy, as it doesn't give many false positives."
"The solution is stable; it was no problem and all went quite well, with no bugs or freezes."
"It works well and covers a good number of the bases you need covered for general cybersecurity and vulnerability management."
"A few things are valuable. One is the alerting we see when any kind of intrusion is happening, any kind of malware is being deployed across the endpoints, or any kind of suspicious activity is going on. We have a footprint across all of North America, Canada, and Mexico, so we want to make sure that all our endpoints are protected and we are able to look for any anomalous activity."
"It is scalable."
"Microsoft Defender for Business works well with the Microsoft Azure Security ecosystem, including Defender for Endpoint and Office 365 Cloud."
"If you're an Intune user, you can bring in certain capabilities like system-hardening policies, which further enhances the security."
"Microsoft Defender for Business stands out due to its ease of use, particularly due to the fact that many of my customers already use Microsoft and Azure."
"Microsoft Defender for Business offers the best pricing option in the market and is very cost-effective."
"The solution includes attack-savvy service and risk protection, part of data center management, and offers an effective single-dashboard view with Microsoft 365."
"The solution is effective, continuously improving, and highly regarded, especially with Microsoft's leadership in the industry."
 

Cons

"It should support more mobile operating systems. That is one of the cons of their infrastructure right now."
"Basically, they don't provide customer support tools just to investigate the logs."
"However, if you do not have Palo Alto in your environment, you are paying these additional services just for Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks, so it is not a cost-effective solution."
"We would also like to have advanced tech protection and email scanning."
"The solution should force customers to integrate with network traffic to see the full benefits of XDR."
"Currently, if you use Palo Alto endpoint protection as the only solution it's very complicated to remove pre-existing threats."
"I don't like that they have different types of licenses. For example, if users select a license, they think they will have all the platforms they need to improve their network or security. But after some time, Palo Alto Networks changed their licensing, and some of the features that, for example, were free at the beginning now have a cost. I think the integration can be improved. For example, a lot of tools are just integrated through APIs."
"It is not a suitable solution if you are looking for a single product with multiple features such as DLP, encryption, rollback, etc."
"The company that sells us the licenses sometimes doesn't know how to do certain things."
"While you are working, you are finding these things that were supposed to be waived have come back to being blocked. That's frustrating."
"I would say one thing that they might need to bring in is protection for mobile devices."
"The AI of CylancePROTECT has room for improvement. I'm on a trial license of SentinelOne, and its AI is much better than what's on CylancePROTECT."
"For example, the interface and the Cylance Optics need to be improved a fair bit."
"I'd like them to do software distribution too, but they said that that's architecturally not at the product line."
"The product needs to continue to offer better alerts. In particular, around false positives. It needs to reduce them from happening."
"Work on the math model. We are catching a lot of false positives, which gets to be a pain at the start of a deployment."
"Pricing could be lowered as it is expensive and not suitable for low-budget organizations."
"The user interface has a lot of features which can make it complex and hard to adapt to for some users."
"The threat detection capabilities require significant customization for multistage threat detection."
"The technical support from Microsoft is very poor. I would rate it a one, as their technical staff are very junior and take a long time to respond to simple questions."
"The pricing of Microsoft Defender for Business has a long way to go since people are still preferring solutions such as CrowdStrike and Palo Alto."
"Pricing could be lowered as it is expensive and not suitable for low-budget organizations."
"We faced some issues while running some applications on Mac."
"I have an open case for close to two months with no responses or updates, except for an email response, and I've made four or five phone calls regarding the Microsoft Interconnect for AD and cloud tenant."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Compared to CrowdStrike, Cortex XDR is an expensive solution."
"I did PoCs on products called Cylance and CrowdStrike. Although, I consider these products and they were also good, when it come to cost and budgetary factors, Traps has been proven to be better than the other two products. It is quite cost-effective and delivers all the entire solution which we require."
"It is cost-effective compared to similar solutions. It fits for the small businesses through to the big businesses."
"The price was fine."
"We didn't have to pay any additional fee for the cloud instance. It just came with the renewal, which was nice."
"Very costly product."
"We pay about $50,000 USD per year for a bundle that includes Cortex XDR."
"Cortex XDR’s pricing is very reasonable."
"Do not get hung up on price. You pay for what you get and expensive will hurt one time, where cheap will hurt forever, especially if you fall victim to a ransom attack, etc.​"
"Currently, we have competitive pricing for Cylance, which is affordable enough to consider."
"We went through a third party initially to do the renewal, but we won't be renewing, we will move on to something else."
"Review closely how many endpoints you actually need before buying into a pricing level. Deal and deal with the VAR of your choice."
"The solution's pricing is around the same as most EDRs but slightly behind some of the major ones."
"The tool is not that expensive."
"​Shop around for sure and be assured the price you pay will be close to other solutions available, but even at a slight mark-up from the other solutions, you are getting real endpoint protection versus nothing more than a cheap security blanket that might keep you warm at night."
"The solution provides me with competitive pricing."
"The tool's cost has been a little high, but I do not think it was terrible."
"Defender for Business is included by default with an Office 365 premium subscription."
"It has to get more competitive because we are starting to see some of the competitors providing better pricing, and some of it, of course, is to gain market share. The Defender product pricing is probably a little higher than the competitors."
"The tool is cheap, while some other solutions are more expensive. I remember the tool cost about five euros for a workstation or for a user on a monthly basis."
"Since we're a nonprofit, we get pretty good discounts on the tool."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
University
6%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Computer Software Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business44
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise47
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise13
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

Cortex XDR by Palo Alto vs. Sentinel One
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto vs. SentinelOne SentinelOne offers very detailed specifics with regard to risks or attacks. ...
Comparing CrowdStrike Falcon to Cortex XDR (Palo Alto)
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto vs. CrowdStrike Falcon Both Cortex XDR and Crowd Strike Falcon offer cloud-based solutions th...
How is Cortex XDR compared with Microsoft Defender?
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a cloud-delivered endpoint security solution. The tool reduces the attack surface,...
What do you like most about Blackberry Protect?
It is a good endpoint solution. It is very easy to manage and detect the threat immediately. It will take the necessa...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Blackberry Protect?
The price is reasonable for us at the moment. I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.
What needs improvement with Blackberry Protect?
I face challenges with the exclusion policy - it still scans folders we told it not to, causing issues. When we conta...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Defender for Business?
Our thoughts on the pricing for Microsoft Defender for Business are that we wish it could be better. If the pricing w...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Defender for Business?
I see room for improvement in Microsoft Defender for Business, particularly regarding the consolidation of all securi...
 

Also Known As

Cyvera, Cortex XDR, Palo Alto Networks Traps
Blackberry Protect
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
Panasonic, Noble Energy, Apria Healthcare Group Inc., Charles River Laboratories, Rovi Corporation, Toyota, Kiewit
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about BlackBerry Cylance Cybersecurity vs. Microsoft Defender for Business and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,976 professionals have used our research since 2012.