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CompassOne by Blackpoint Cyber vs Microsoft Defender for Endpoint comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 15, 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 Detection and Response (EDR)
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
115
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (4th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (4th), Ransomware Protection (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (1st)
CompassOne by Blackpoint Cyber
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
41st
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (35th), Vulnerability Management (49th), Application Control (10th), Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (12th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (14th)
Microsoft Defender for Endp...
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
212
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (1st), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (5th), Anti-Malware Tools (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) 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 CompassOne by Blackpoint Cyber is 0.8%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is 5.6%, down from 10.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint5.6%
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks3.7%
CompassOne by Blackpoint Cyber0.8%
Other89.9%
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
 

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.
Gary Herbstman - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner at Byte Solutions Inc.
Experienced reduced alert fatigue with streamlined notifications
We use Blackpoint Cyber MDR for our higher-end clients who need a higher level of control over security We get a deeper look into security related events that are otherwise difficult find and analyze. Security operations does a good job of weeding out the noise. I appreciate that there are…
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

"The live terminal is probably the best thing ever. It gives you the access to get straight onto any machine."
"Its ability to react to cyber data attacks is awesome."
"Cortex covers everything I need. It's a perfect solution. Cortex provides a different level of visibility because it's an extended EDR, allowing you to grab logs from the network and firewalls. Palo Alto invented the concept of the extended EDR or XDR."
"We have found in our test Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks to be a very good tool."
"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."
"Threat identification and detection are the most valuable features of this solution."
"If the user leaves our premises or network, Palo Alto Traps will still be on that endpoint and will still apply our policies."
"The initial setup isn't too bad."
"Their SOC is phenomenal in not monitoring and responding and taking action."
"The solution is all encompassing and can incorporate email monitoring."
"On a scale from one to ten, I would rate the overall solution as a ten."
"On my end, the most valuable feature of this solution is that I can install it and forget about it. After that, their SOC team takes over and they only call me when there's a problem."
"The solution also watches over Microsoft 365 and keeps a copy of logs."
"I appreciate that there are people behind the scenes sorting out valuable alerts from those that are not, so I only get alerts when they are real."
"When it comes to the comprehensiveness of the threat protection from these products, so far I have seen how it's able to pick up the smallest script that is hidden in any type of malicious file."
"It is very stable, highly recommended, free with the purchase of Windows Server, and it is doing its job for Microsoft Windows Server as a good product."
"Defender works in the background monitoring the traffic for viruses."
"It definitely improves the organization in terms of security and productivity."
"It comes included with the Windows license."
"We have not had any attacks, in terms of viruses, worms, or ransomware, in the last three years."
"Its simplicity is the most valuable. It also has very good integration. We like it."
"Overall, I was pretty impressed by it."
 

Cons

"It is not a suitable solution if you are looking for a single product with multiple features such as DLP, encryption, rollback, etc."
"The downsides of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks are that in many incidents, when I enter the causality chain, there are numerous logs."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks could improve by adding a sandbox feature to better compete with their competitors which have it."
"It takes time to scan the servers and devices."
"If they had pulse rate detection, it would be better."
"Cortex XDR could be improved with more GUI features."
"The solution should force customers to integrate with network traffic to see the full benefits of XDR."
"I have run into some detection issues with Cortex XDR. It needs to be better at detection of internal attacks."
"The solution does not tie into other EDR products like CyberArk or CrowdStrike but that might be more useful."
"The feature we keep asking for is a vulnerability scan."
"The interface could be more intuitive. More transparency is needed in the interface as a lot of details are hidden behind the scenes, making them difficult or impossible to access."
"Some texts seem to report items as normal too quickly."
"While I am very satisfied with the service, supporting additional platforms, particularly Linux support, would be a beneficial improvement."
"The interface could be more intuitive."
"One thing that was lacking in Defender was web filtering. Its web filtering wasn't as comprehensive. Sophos was a little bit better than Defender for blocking URLs or installing programs."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint could improve by providing more user-friendly dashboards. They may be complicated for some."
"The solution could always be more secure."
"It makes your Surface devices hot. It is resource-intensive."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint's licensing is confusing. It has conflicting information on the website. We also faced integration issues with other systems. It makes laptops slower than traditional antivirus systems."
"I would like to be able to set up any kind of protection I want in the firewall, any IP address or any number."
"The alerting is something that needs to be improved. Alerts need to be sent immediately because as it is now, you see some of them without delay and others arrive perhaps 30 minutes later, and it leaves important gaps in terms of information gathering."
"Where we stand right now, compared to other products that are there in the market, they still have to work on their threat intelligence and the overall maturity of detecting the malware."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's way too expensive, but security is expensive. You pay for your licensing, and then you pay for someone to monitor the stuff."
"Our license will require renewal in August, after which the maintenance will continue as usual."
"The solution has one subscription for endpoint protection and one subscription for detection and response. The two licenses combined give you the BRO version."
"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."
"We pay about $50,000 USD per year for a bundle that includes Cortex XDR."
"The price was fine."
"Cortex XDR’s pricing is very reasonable."
"It is cost-effective compared to similar solutions. It fits for the small businesses through to the big businesses."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"The pricing is in line with other products."
"For most people, the price of the license is not something that they have to worry about."
"It is an expensive solution. It would be nice if it could be included with the Microsoft Office package."
"Because Microsoft Defender comes as an add-on, it can be a bit expensive if you're trying to buying it separately. Another option is to upgrade, but the enterprise licenses for Microsoft can also be quite a bit pricey. Overall, the cost of Microsoft Defender compared to that of other endpoint detection solutions is slightly higher."
"The solution comes free with Microsoft Windows 10."
"I'm not too familiar with costs as I'm an architect, though I know about online pricing, as I help two teams with online purchasing and procurement. Nowadays, everyone has an enterprise agreement, such as an E3 license, which we provide to our customers."
"We sell this product as part of Office 365 and it is not expensive."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is more affordable compared to some other endpoint solutions."
"The solution is free with Windows."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise54
No data available
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 needs improvement with Blackpoint Cyber MDR?
While I am very satisfied with the service, supporting additional platforms, particularly Linux support, would be a b...
What is your primary use case for Blackpoint Cyber MDR?
The solution serves as a baseline security offering. We have implemented it for every client that we do business with.
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
Blackpoint Cyber Managed Detection + Response, Blackpoint Cyber Managed Detection and Response
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
CoreRecon, Peerless Tech Solutions, Lorien Health
Petrofrac, Metro CSG, Christus Health
Find out what your peers are saying about CompassOne by Blackpoint Cyber vs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,877 professionals have used our research since 2012.