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BlackBerry Cylance Cybersecurity vs Microsoft Defender for Endpoint 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)
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
112
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (6th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (4th), Ransomware Protection (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (1st)
BlackBerry Cylance Cybersec...
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
32nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.6
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Microsoft Defender for Endp...
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
212
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (5th), Anti-Malware Tools (1st), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (3rd), Microsoft Security Suite (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) category, the mindshare of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is 3.7%, down from 3.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of BlackBerry Cylance Cybersecurity is 1.5%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is 6.8%, down from 10.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint6.8%
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks3.7%
BlackBerry Cylance Cybersecurity1.5%
Other88.0%
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.
Robert Arbuckle - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We use Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks for its ability to detect based on behavior rather than simple virus scan to prevent malicious activities."
"This software helps us understand any issues that may arise when someone is not at work."
"Technical support is the best in class, in my opinion, because they have invested heavily in research and development."
"If you are looking to deploy a security solution as a whole, this is a good option."
"The solution is a new generation XDR that has a lot of artificial intelligence modules."
"Cortex is the best tool for endpoint detection, and I have used it to verify hashes or domains to identify malicious activity, trigger playbooks that automate and gather endpoint logs, block malicious processes, and update incident tickets, showcasing end-to-end processes with automation in investigation and reducing the analysis workflow."
"It can automatically correlate events and logs, which is very helpful for an IT administrator. It can correlate different kinds of malware activities over a network, agent, or host system. You do not need to do it manually. It is a good feature. It is also a user-friendly solution. We have deployed it on the cloud because our space does not provide any flexibility for on-premises deployment, but Palo Alto has added some flexibility to install it on-premises. It must be like the same Cortex XDR agent for all the VPN services, web filtering services, and everything else."
"The ability to kind of stitch everything together and see the actual complete picture is very useful. I guess you'd call it a playbook. Some people call it the forensics analysis of what was happening on particular endpoints when they detected some malicious behavior, and what transpired before that to cause that. It is also very user friendly. The way they have done everything and integrated all the solutions that they've purchased over the years to make it a very seamless, effective product is very good. One thing about Palo Alto is that they take the products or services that they purchase and make them seamless for the end user as compared to some companies that purchase other companies and then just kind of have their products off to the side or keep different interfaces. Palo Alto doesn't do that."
"CylancePROTECT works on AI technology, is always up to date, and uses very few resources on your devices."
"Even if an endpoint loses connection to the Internet, I know that endpoint is protected against 99.99% of the threats in the wild today."
"On the management side, we liked the way it displays things."
"​Centralized dashboard online which can be used for managing a huge product."
"You can manage all the threats and everything from a centralized dashboard."
"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 most valuable features are script blocking and macros within Word documents for stopping unwanted applications from running in the background."
"It is a good endpoint solution. It is very easy to manage and detect the threat immediately. It will take the necessary actions."
"I would recommend my friends and colleagues use Microsoft Defender because it always protects us against ransomware and viruses."
"The stability is great. I haven't seen any outages with Microsoft."
"The most valuable features are that it is flexible, and it is integrated with Microsoft products."
"Windows is a great tool that I have used; it has helped my organisation in achieving what it does daily and protected our data in a great way."
"User-friendly, offering safety and security."
"Integration between Microsoft products is very easy."
"It's pretty easy to use, works with compliance issues, and is reliable."
"The primary advantage is that you don't need to install it, because it's included in the Windows 10 delivery and is integrated as part of the Microsoft 365 suite."
 

Cons

"The solution should add unwanted malicious hash values to a block list so that whenever the action is triggered, it will automatically prevent the malicious content."
"While using Cortex, I noticed some aspects that could be improved, such as increasing the synchronization speed between XDR and Xnor."
"Every 30 or 40 days, there's a new version and we need to go and make sure our customer's laptops are upgraded."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is not only pricey; it is extremely expensive."
"The dashboard is the area that needs to improve so that we can have the ability to drill down without having to go elsewhere to verify results."
"In general, the price could be more competitive."
"The installation should be easier and the Palo Alto pre-sales and sales teams should have more information on the product because they don't know what they are selling."
"For working with the solution, you only really need a web browser, however, we've found that working on Chrome, for example, is horrible."
"I would like to see them fix the alerting system so that the endpoint reporting is a bit more streamlined."
"It could have integration with industrial base HMIS or Human Machine Interfaces Solutions. This is the industrial environment where you have a control center for all the automation that's happening, whether it is oil, gas, or chemical manufacturing. They often have to set up a computer at the back and watch the other stuff to get alerts. In these autonomous or on-premises environments, they often don't have access to email readily. Integration with other industrial solutions, such as HMIS, will allow them to communicate and get an alert that something has been found. This way, they can react to it sooner than having somebody watch the screen and keep checking the screen. Rockwell has its own suite. Similarly, Honeywell has its own suite. There's also an independent HMI/historian solution provider out there called VTSCADA. We actually get asked if we can get it to show up on a screen, which is difficult. Getting those alerts to work within an industrial environment would be a huge plus."
"The management console needs a little maturity in how it presents data and allows the administrator to drill down or search across systems."
"​It needs real analysis of quarantined files. The EDR product isn't showing much right now."
"It just doesn't make you feel like you're getting covered or have the best protection, which you should have."
"CylancePROTECT could be improved in its technical support and communication."
"The solution should implement AI in the product."
"While you are working, you are finding these things that were supposed to be waived have come back to being blocked. That's frustrating."
"The solution can be more user-friendly."
"Notifications are always popping up — I hate that."
"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."
"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."
"It would be helpful if they included XDR features, on top of the EDR functionality."
"We have had reports where users experience slowness on their PCs when files are being scanned regarding the stability and reliability of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint."
"It is using a large space in your memory all the time."
"Microsoft Defender in the basic form is not very useful for managing the security environment. The free version is not capable of covering the needs of centralized management, EDR, and behavioral analysis. If you don't have the commercial version, you can't have centralized management and set up the policies and other things. Each client is a standalone installation, which is not useful for security in an enterprise model."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is present, but when compared to other competitive products, I would say it is not less expensive; however, when all of the other added values are considered, the price is reasonable."
"The price of the solution is high for the license and in general."
"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."
"It's the most expensive solution, but features-wise, it's quite strong. It's very good for protection, so the results are very good in the case of protection. I would rate it a two out of ten in terms of pricing."
"It is "expensive" and flexible."
"The pricing seems fair, and I do like the licensing model. You use wherever they are, and it is elastic."
"The price of the product is not very economical."
"The cost of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is $55 to $90 USD per endpoint per month."
"I think that the price we are paying is good for what it is."
"The tool is not that expensive."
"The licensing part of the product is too expensive compared to other solutions in the market."
"It is expensive, but not unreasonable."
"The initial end-point cost may seem a little high (~$55/device/year) but when you look at the total peace of mind that the solution provides, with no reboots for updates, and negligible performance impact, it is well worth it."
"CylancePROTECT is an affordable solution."
"Currently, we have competitive pricing for Cylance, which is affordable enough to consider."
"The product cost is about $5, per user, per month."
"Microsoft has different plans for buying this product. The price depends on the configuration of the full set of products that you buy and on the licensing program in your contract."
"It is within the same range as other products. It is not too expensive, and it is also not cheap. Its price can be better, but, well, it is Microsoft."
"You don't need to worry about the renewal and purchase of antivirus products. It is bundled with Windows 10, so you don't need to worry about separately purchasing any antiviruses."
"Pricing for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is competitive. Out of the bundle, you will get a lot of security, if I talk about Microsoft E5, for example, and get a lot of benefits. If the customer goes and purchases a different solution, it will cost more, so pricing for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is quite reasonable at the moment. There isn't any challenge in terms of pricing, for example, I didn't see a customer who pulled back because of the price. Some prices could be negotiable, and sometimes, as a sales point, the two become negotiable, but they don't bill one and pull back because of the pricing. If you have an E5 license, you get everything."
"When customers haven't deployed the solution and don't have licenses, it can be expensive to start from scratch."
"For most people, the price of the license is not something that they have to worry about."
"The E5 license is the one that I recommend because it comes with Cloud App Security, which is a good thing to have on top of Microsoft Defender."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Construction Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise52
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise14
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business82
Midsize Enterprise45
Large Enterprise96
 

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 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 primary use case for Blackberry Protect?
I am using CylancePROTECT as an active learning algorithm. We installed it on almost 20,000 servers and virtual machi...
Which offers better endpoint security - Symantec or Microsoft Defender?
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint?
We have been discussing pricing, setup cost, and licensing, and we are currently on an E3. We are discussing going to...
 

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
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about BlackBerry Cylance Cybersecurity vs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,838 professionals have used our research since 2012.