BlackBerry Cylance Cybersecurity vs Microsoft Defender for Endpoint comparison

BlackBerry Cylance Cybersecurity vs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

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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...

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) category, the mindshare of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is 3.8%, up from 3.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of BlackBerry Cylance Cybersecurity is 1.8%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is 6.4%, down from 9.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint	6.4%
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks	3.8%
BlackBerry Cylance Cybersecurity	1.8%
Other	88.0%

Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)

Featured Reviews

ABHISHEK_SINGH

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.

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Sooraj Makkancherrry

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.

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Robert Arbuckle

Security Analyst III at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Automatically isolates threats and integrates with logging to reduce response time

Overall, I would evaluate the Microsoft support level that I receive at probably about a seven, but that depends on the day. It has been spotty. We have had issues where the urgency level of the Microsoft support is not as high as ours, especially during a data breach or potential data breach situation. We have had issues with some of the offshore support being lackluster. One specific thing that comes to mind is we were on a support call with our CISO on the call, and the Microsoft agent, who did not actually work for Microsoft, is one of the vendors that Microsoft uses for support, said, "Just to set expectations, my lunch break is in an hour and I am going to go away then." For us, it was already ten o'clock at night and we had been working on this for a couple of hours, trying to get a security engineer on with us. For him to tell us that he was going to go away and have lunch, it was, "Okay, but go find somebody else if you need to." It was just the lackluster approach, and it seemed like he did not really care. We seem to get a lot of this when we get non-Microsoft support. I can identify areas for improvement with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, as it is kind of a convoluted mess to try to take care of false positives. Especially when they have been identified as false positives but they keep going off over and over again. It is great for my pocketbook because it generates a lot of on-call action, but I would really prefer more sleep at two o'clock in the morning than dealing with false positives. I would say that the unified portal for managing Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is suitable for both teams as they are all in there. It would be great if they would stop moving things around and renaming things, which makes sense. The new XDR portal is pretty nice. Being able to have it central again inside of the regular Security Center without having to open up two windows is helpful. Overall, I think it is pretty good. There is always going to be something that could be improved, such as alerting and the ability to modify alerts would be a little bit helpful to have. Being able to add more data into the alerts and turn off alerts that are not as useful would be beneficial. It is hard to say what the quantitative impact the security exposure management feature has had on our company's security, because a lot of it is kind of subjective. I think we are sitting at around a fifty percent score still, and a lot of it is just kind of unusual circumstances that we cannot really implement without breaking the organization.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cortex XDR is stable, offering high quality and reliable performance."

"The solution allows control over the user and his machine through Cortex XDR security policies."

"The most valuable feature of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is its machine-learning capabilities. Additionally, there is full integration with other solutions."

"The stability of the solution is very good. We have about 100 users on it right now, and we use it twice a week."

"We've had a significant increase in blocking with a decrease in false positives, because it's looking at how the files work, not just a list of files that it's been told to look for."

"The solution's most valuable feature is the user interface."

"The product's initial setup phase is very easy."

"This software helps us understand any issues that may arise when someone is not at work."

More Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks pros

"The solution runs in the background, and I do not need to care about it."

"The most valuable features of CylancePROTECT are its powerful machine-learning capabilities and predictive intelligence."

"From an administrative overhead point of view, there is a 75% reduction in administrating the solution."

"The solution is stable."

"CylancePROTECT works on AI technology, is always up to date, and uses very few resources on your devices."

"Two or three years ago when the WannaCry virus struck, the people that were on Cylance were the ones that weren't affected."

"The non-daily requirement to update signatures is the most valuable feature. From a functional point of view, it is pretty spot on. For instance, we compared an algorithm from five years ago to today's algorithm, and it was 98% accurate. It has the ability to detect and mitigate. In the industrial environment that we work in, there's what we call OT versus IT. You are IT Central, but this is OT. Generally, we don't have the same level of skillset as IT individuals or IT professionals have. This particular product doesn't require you to be a computer scientist to be able to understand its proprietary algorithm and to be able to deploy, use, and work within it. It integrates well with a robust SIEM or SOAR solution, and it plays nice with others. We use other detection solutions like CyberX or site provision with Cisco, and it plays nice. That's one of the things we really liked about it."

"The solution is pretty easy to scale."

More BlackBerry Cylance Cybersecurity pros

"Endpoint's most valuable feature is deep analysis."

"It is easy to use because it is already pre-installed in Windows 10."

"The solution provides protections and reports about strange behavior and automatically blocks some of it. I love the way that statuses are represented."

"The technical support from Microsoft is very good. We are part of the Microsoft Suite, and from being part of this we have consistent news regarding Microsoft Defender for Endpoint."

"Because it has been integrated with the OS, we get the entire software inventories, and we even get access to the registries. Those are the primary features."

"I find the layer protection and real-time protection very useful because when I launch a program, I always have a notification and an alarm."

"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has been awesome, so far."

"Easy to understand and easy to set up endpoint security solution. It's a multifeatured product with web content filtering and automated investigation features. It also has a fantastic vulnerability management dashboard."

More Microsoft Defender for Endpoint pros

Cons

"The solution needs better reports. I think they should let the customer go in and customize the reports."

"When it comes to malware files, it should be a little quick because, at times, it would give a wrong result in the sense of what it might be on malware, even if it still might be a normal one."

"There are some false positives. What our guys would have liked is that it would have been easier to manipulate as soon as they found a false positive that they knew was a false positive. How to do so was not obvious. Some people complained about it. The interface, the ESM, is not user-friendly."

"Impact on system performance is horrible, adding a lot of delays for users."

"Cortex does not offer an on-premises solution. However, some customers would prefer not to be on the cloud. It would be ideal if it could offer something on-prem as well."

"It tends to do 99.9% of things. The only thing I'd like is single sign-on authentication into their cloud platform so that my users can be properly authenticated against it."

"The GUI could be improved. It's a little bit cumbersome. It could be more user-friendly."

"If you compare it to SentinelOne, which has more functionalities and detection capabilities on an open platform, the pricing on SentinelOne is far more reasonable and cheaper than Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks."

More Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks cons

"I would like to see a little bit of additional reporting or insight as to what it is doing exactly."

"There are a lot of false positives and it takes up a lot of time."

"The process of whitelisting a script that you want to be able to run can be a little bit difficult, or awkward."

"The OPTICS component could be made more user-friendly with respect to giving people more information."

"An area for improvement in CylancePROTECT is its pricing, as it's a bit costly."

"CylancePROTECT could be improved in its technical support and communication."

"I would like to see a better UI in terms of sifting through more specific data and providing analytics. A little bit more would be nice."

"Enhancing the product's detection rates and streamlining the user interface for easier management in daily operations would be beneficial improvements."

More BlackBerry Cylance Cybersecurity cons

"Some executive reporting is inefficient, and we're looking into ways to improve it."

"I would like Microsoft to have some kind of direct integration for USB controls. They have GPO and other controls to control the access of the USB drives on devices, but if there is something that can be directly implemented into the portal, it would be good. There should be a way to control via a cloud portal or something like that in a dynamic way. USB control for data exfiltration would be a good feature to implement. Currently, there are ways to do it, but it involves too many different things. You have to implement it via GPOs and other stuff, and then you move or copy those big files via Defender ATP. If there is a simple way of implementing those features, it would be great."

"Localization is always a challenge, especially with new products you typically want."

"We encountered some issues when we were trying to enable automatic updates from our group policy."

"I would like to see better integration with their other security products to give better visibility from a higher level."

"Defender is free for one year. Once that year is over, we will switch to Kaspersky."

"My main issue with the tool is that there are too many menus. This causes a steep learning curve for those without training or unfamiliar with Defender for Endpoint. From an end-user perspective, the solution is there on the machine and does its job; it works seamlessly. However, as a security professional dealing with it behind the scenes, the learning curve can be steep, but not too steep. Still, it has taken some of my analysts up to a month to get familiar with the product."

"The solution should be updated by Microsoft with new features from time to time."

More Microsoft Defender for Endpoint cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I don't recall what the cost was, but it wasn't really that expensive."

"The pricing is a little high. It is per user per year."

"The return on investment is from the user side because we have seen the performance of it increase the delivery time of the product if we are using too many web-based and on-premise applications. In indirect ways, we saw the return of investment in terms of performance and user satisfaction increase."

"The pricing seems fair, and I do like the licensing model. You use wherever they are, and it is elastic."

"Traps pays for itself within the first 16 months of a three-year subscription. This is attributed to OPEX savings, as security teams spent less time trying to identify and isolate malware for analysis as a result of a reduction in malware incidents, false positives, and breach avoidance."

"When we first bought it, it was a bit expensive, but it was worth it. The licensing was straightforward."

"This is an expensive solution."

"Licensing for Palo Alto Networks Cortex XDR can be costly, especially when it comes to a hundred users. A license is required for each user, and the subscription must be renewed on a yearly basis."

More Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks pricing and cost advice

"The solution provides me with competitive pricing."

"CylancePROTECT is worth the money, but I'm not sure of its exact price. I can't remember off the top of my head."

"The license price for this solution could be better. It's on the expensive side."

"It is expensive, but not unreasonable."

"Review closely how many endpoints you actually need before buying into a pricing level. Deal and deal with the VAR of your choice."

"My company is on a yearly CylancePROTECT subscription. Price-wise, the solution is slightly expensive, so I'd rate it as eight out of ten."

"This cost of the license is approximately $5 USD monthly per user."

"Currently, we have competitive pricing for Cylance, which is affordable enough to consider."

More BlackBerry Cylance Cybersecurity pricing and cost advice

"There is not a license required for this particular solution."

"I recently switched from education to private business, and all I can say is that private business licensing from Microsoft is not cheap until you hit certain quantities or scale. That does not mean that it is not comparable to other industries. It is similar pricing, but it is still crazy to me how much you pay for a client. I feel it is high, but it is in line with other vendors."

"The normal, standalone model, is not expensive, but the enterprise model that includes the bundle with email and some web protection, is a bit more expensive."

"We mostly use Microsoft products. We use Office 365, and we use Azure. We're also a Microsoft partner. So, the licensing was much cheaper for us, and at the same time, a lot of the features that we were looking for were included in Defender."

"Pricing can always be lower."

"We have an enterprise agreement so from my perspective, this is a product that ships with Windows and it is not priced standalone."

"There is no licensing fee."

"We are required to pay for the data we ingest, and increasing the data amount incurs additional expenses."

More Microsoft Defender for Endpoint pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Comms Service Provider

14%

Outsourcing Company

12%

Construction Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Outsourcing Company

12%

Construction Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Outsourcing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	50
Midsize Enterprise	21
Large Enterprise	57

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	33
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	14

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	82
Midsize Enterprise	44
Large Enterprise	97

Questions from the Community

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How is Cortex XDR compared with Microsoft Defender?

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Which offers better endpoint security - Symantec or Microsoft Defender?

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We use Symantec because we do not use MS Enterprise products, but in my opinion, Microsoft Defender is a superior sol...

How does Microsoft Defender for Endpoint compare with Crowdstrike Falcon?

The CrowdStrike solution delivers a lot of information about incidents. It has a very light sensor that will never pu...

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Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

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Product Reports

Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks

Download Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks product report

BlackBerry Cylance Cybersecurity

Download BlackBerry Cylance Cybersecurity product report

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

October 2026

Download Microsoft Defender for Endpoint product report

Also Known As

Cyvera, Cortex XDR, Palo Alto Networks Traps

Blackberry Protect

Microsoft Defender ATP, Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection, MS Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender Antivirus

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

Palo Alto Networks

Demo not available

BlackBerry

Microsoft

Overview

Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks provides advanced threat detection with AI-driven endpoint protection and seamless integration, ensuring multi-layered security and automatic threat response.

Cortex XDR is designed to safeguard endpoints against malware and suspicious activities. It offers advanced threat detection and response capabilities using behavioral analysis, AI, and machine learning. It seamlessly integrates with security infrastructures, providing endpoint security, firewall integration, and enhanced visibility in both cloud-based and on-premises environments.

What are the key features of Cortex XDR?

Advanced Threat Detection: Uses AI and machine learning for proactive threat identification.
Multi-layered Security: Combines various security measures for comprehensive protection.
Endpoint Protection: Safeguards against malware and exploits.
Behavioral Analysis: Monitors suspicious activity for early detection.
Automatic Threat Response: Automates responses to neutralize threats.

What benefits should users expect?

Ease of Use: Simplifies security management with intuitive design.
Resource Efficiency: Minimizes impact on system resources.
Integration Capabilities: Works well with existing security setups.
Reduced Analyst Workload: Automates processes to decrease manual intervention.

Organizations in diverse sectors deploy Cortex XDR to protect against malware, leveraging its advanced threat detection capabilities. Its integration with existing security infrastructures appeals to those seeking comprehensive protection in both cloud and on-premises environments, providing enhanced visibility and threat intelligence.

Palo Alto Networks

BlackBerry Cylance Cybersecurity, renowned for its AI-driven approach, provides comprehensive endpoint protection against sophisticated threats, including ransomware and zero-day attacks, ensuring security without frequent updates.

Known for its lightweight design, BlackBerry Cylance integrates artificial intelligence and machine learning to deliver a powerful cybersecurity platform. Businesses benefit from its low CPU usage and advanced threat detection, utilizing a centralized dashboard for seamless management. Cylance's predictive intelligence and ability to block unauthorized applications make it invaluable in safeguarding both internal networks and endpoints. Despite its high pricing, users seek improvements in information display, post-incident details, and reporting features, alongside better script whitelisting and modernized interface.

What are its most important features?

Lightweight Design: Ensures minimal impact on system resources.
AI and Machine Learning: Enhances threat detection capabilities without relying on constant updates.
Endpoint Protection: Provides robust security for desktops, servers, and virtual machines.
Script Blocking: Prevents unauthorized scripts from running.
Centralized Dashboard: Simplifies management and monitoring tasks.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

Predictive Intelligence: Offers proactive threat prevention, reducing risks of zero-day attacks.
Ease of Deployment: Facilitates faster, streamlined implementation across global systems.
Low CPU Usage: Maintains system performance while providing security.
Comprehensive Threat Analytics: Delivers actionable insights for enhanced security planning.

Organizations in sectors such as finance and healthcare deploy BlackBerry Cylance for its sophisticated security measures, enhanced threat analytics, and device control capabilities, ensuring operations remain secure even within closed network environments.

BlackBerry

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint provides comprehensive threat protection that integrates well with current systems, offering proactive threat detection and automatic updates while reducing manual efforts.

The platform is designed for seamless integration with Microsoft products, facilitating efficient management and use. It offers proactive ransomware protection and valuable threat intelligence, crucial for timely response and increased visibility across devices. Users highlight its ability to secure endpoints from viruses and malware, integrating with Windows and Office 365 to enhance real-time detection capabilities in diverse environments, including hybrid and on-premises setups. However, enhancements are needed in Linux integration, detection accuracy, and policy implementations.

What are the key features of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint?

Seamless Integration: Works smoothly with existing systems and Microsoft products for easy management.
Proactive Threat Detection: Advanced monitoring to identify and mitigate threats swiftly.
Ransomware Protection: Built-in features to protect against ransomware attacks automatically.
Centralized Management: Unified platform for better device visibility and collaboration.
Threat Intelligence: Provides critical data for rapid threat response.

What benefits should be evaluated in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint?

Cost-Effectiveness: Part of Windows bundles, offering comprehensive security at competitive pricing.
Time Efficiency: Reduces manual oversight with automatic updates and management ease.
Real-Time Detection: Enhanced security through seamless Office 365 and Windows integration.
Device Coverage: Supports hybrid and on-premises environments for varied digital infrastructures.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is implemented across industries for securing endpoints, relying on its deep integration with Windows and Office 365 to protect against malware and viruses. Organizations benefit from its real-time detection and comprehensive management capabilities, particularly in hybrid environments where diverse digital infrastructures need safeguarding.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank

Panasonic, Noble Energy, Apria Healthcare Group Inc., Charles River Laboratories, Rovi Corporation, Toyota, Kiewit

Petrofrac, Metro CSG, Christus Health

BlackBerry Cylance Cybersecurity vs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint