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Cortex Agentic Endpoint Security vs Microsoft Defender for Endpoint comparison

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Executive Summary

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
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
122
Ranking in other categories
Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (3rd), Ransomware Protection (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (1st)
Cortex Agentic Endpoint Sec...
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
39th
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
43rd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
AI Security (236th), Agentic Endpoint Security (2nd), Endpoint Control and Prevention (ECP) (7th)
Microsoft Defender for Endp...
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
2nd
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
212
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (6th), Anti-Malware Tools (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (3rd), Agentic Endpoint Security (1st)
 

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.
JA
Ciso at CYBERcom
Unified telemetry has transformed our SOC operations and now automates complex incident response
The best features of Cortex Agentic Endpoint Security include UEBA and anomaly detections, all of the activities that happened on the network that are off the baseline. Most of the time in any attack, one of the first stages is something that the system did not see before. This gives us a lot of value, along with the automation part. When it comes to differentiating between benign tools, the criteria security analysts use includes taking a lot of advantage of the playbooks for enrichment and doing partial investigation, searching hashes on different blacklists and different IOC feeds, and searching for IP addresses and domain age. We also use our investigation systems that we built, which involves Cortex in them as a detection source.
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 anti-exploit is impenetrable."
"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."
"Since they've done their most recent update, the ease to isolate endpoints is valuable. If we find one where there is a virus on it, we can easily isolate it. We don't even have to contact the user. We don't have to manually take them off the network. We can easily isolate them."
"There has been a significant reduction of approximately 70% to 80% in our internal MTTR and MTTD metrics, now around five to eight minutes whereas previously it was hours, which has helped tremendously."
"One major outcome our organization achieved with Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is that it is a good tool for analysis, remediation, and incident response, with no negative points in terms of budget and overall effectiveness."
"The positive impacts I see from Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks include a complete 360-degree view of our security posture altogether, being a uniform platform where we are ingesting logs from multiple resources."
"Since using Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks, our MTTR has reduced, which means the mean time to resolve any ticket has been reduced."
"The best feature of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is that it collects logs from different sections such as the endpoint, the network, and the cloud, making it easy to investigate alerts, collect some of the investigation packages related to the infected machines, and provide live response."
"Once you add all of the additional features of XAIM and sending third-party logs to the system and using automation, this makes Cortex Agentic Endpoint Security superior to all of the other vendors."
"Defender works in the background monitoring the traffic for viruses."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has helped free up the SOC team to work on other projects and tasks."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is easy to load and it runs quietly in the background, unlike other solutions."
"The most important and the most relevant features of Defender for Endpoint are the malware and ransomware protection."
"The stability is great. I haven't seen any outages with Microsoft."
"Microsoft Defender is always running. It is doing its job, so it is fine. I don't have any issues with the way it was implemented or how we are running it. We have been upgrading IT throughout the years, but there have been no issues."
"The main thing I like about Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is that you can integrate it with or deploy it with Intune, so it's really easy to deploy without needing to bring in any third-party solution."
"I have used it enough to be sure that I could recommend it for home use on a PC."
 

Cons

"The price could be a little lower."
"It's very time-consuming to log support issues and the people that answer the tickets aren't very knowledgeable."
"They have the worst support, as a company, that I have ever worked with, as they are difficult to get a hold of and keep on the phone. They don't know what they are talking about when you get them on the phone. They don't like to respond to messages when you send them to them. They like to "research problems" for weeks on end, then pass you off to somebody else."
"The solution needs better reports. I think they should let the customer go in and customize the reports."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is not only pricey; it is extremely expensive."
"The GUI could be improved. It's a little bit cumbersome. It could be more user-friendly."
"Enhancing UI simplicity and playbook flexibility are areas that could benefit from more low-code automation options for smoother integrations."
"There are some default policies which sometimes affect our applications and cause them to run around. In the hotel industry, we use a different type of data versus Oracle and SQL. By default, there are some policies which stop us from running properly. Because of this, the support level is also not that strong. We have to wait to get a results."
"I rate the technical support for Cortex Agentic Endpoint Security as not always the best."
"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."
"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. Solutions are designed to be deployed where the most licenses are being consumed, such as in the United States. They focus on US products, devices, and networks. Specialized deployments for other countries would allow for a smoother experience in transition."
"Defender could be more secure and stable."
"Microsoft Windows Defender doesn't have a game mode."
"The time it takes to implement policies has room for improvement."
"There's a lot of manual effort involved to configure what we need."
"Everything can be cheaper I am sure. So, it could be less expansive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's price is moderate."
"If one wishes to work with another team or large number of users at a future point, he must purchase a license for them."
"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."
"Compared to CrowdStrike, Cortex XDR is an expensive solution."
"We pay about $50,000 USD per year for a bundle that includes Cortex XDR."
"The price was fine."
"This is an expensive solution."
"When we first bought it, it was a bit expensive, but it was worth it. The licensing was straightforward."
Information not available
"Currently, for us, Windows Defender is free with the purchase of Windows Server. Pricing is an important point for us when we are looking at the competitors of this solution. If we choose to go with another vendor, we will have to pay some license fees."
"It came with Windows."
"When customers haven't deployed the solution and don't have licenses, it can be expensive to start from scratch."
"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."
"The solution is an open source version and was free with a paid version of Windows 10."
"You just pay Windows 10 prices, then you have antivirus software. As a price comparison, Defender's costs are very low."
"We pay a yearly license for Microsoft Defender. We also have a support contract with them."
"You do not need to pay any additional costs for antivirus and anti-malware solutions for endpoint protection."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
14%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business50
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise57
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business82
Midsize Enterprise44
Large Enterprise97
 

Questions from the Community

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

Interactive Demo

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
Information Not Available
Petrofrac, Metro CSG, Christus Health
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