We performed a comparison between Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike Falcon based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Both products receive high marks from reviewers. However, CrowdStrike Falcon comes out on top in this comparison due to its robust performance, ease of deployment, reasonable cost, and impressive ROI.
"It is extensive in terms of providing visibility and insights into threats. It allows for research into a threat, and you can chart your progress on how you're resolving it."
"The entirety of our network infrastructure is Cisco and the most valuable feature is the integration."
"Any alert that we get is an actionable alert. Immediately, there is information that we can just click through, see the point in time, what happened, what caused it, and what automatic actions were taken. We can then choose to take any manual actions, if we want, or start our investigation. We're no longer looking at digging into information or wading through hundreds of incidents. There's a list which says where the status is assigned, e.g., under investigation or investigation finished. That is all in the console. It has taken away a lot of the administration, which we would normally be doing, and integrated it into the console for us."
"It doesn't impact the devices. It is an agent-based solution, and we see no performance knock on cell phones. That was a big thing for us, especially in the mobile world. We don't see battery degradation like you do with other solutions which really drain the battery, as they're constantly doing things. That can shorten the useful life of a device."
"The visibility and insight this solution gives you into threats is pretty granular. It has constant monitoring. You can get onto the device trajectory to look at a threat, but you can also see what happened prior to the threat. You can see what happened after the threat. You can see what other applications were incorporated into the execution of the threat. For example, you have the event, but you see that the event was launched by Google Chrome, which was launched by something else. Then, after the event, something else was launched by whatever the threat was. Therefore, it gives you great detail, a timeline, and continuity of events leading up to whatever the incident is, and then, after. This helps you understand and nail down what the threat is and how to fix it."
"The solution makes it possible to see a threat once and block it everywhere across all endpoints and the entire security platform. It has the ability to block right down to the file and application level across all devices based on policies, such as, blacklisting and whitelisting of software and applications. This is good. Its strength is the ability to identify threats very quickly, then lock them and the network down and block the threats across the organization and all devices, which is what you want. You don't want to be spending time working out how to block something. You want to block something very quickly, letting that flow through to all the devices and avoiding the same scenario on different operating systems."
"One of the best features of AMP is its cloud feature. It doesn't matter where the device is in regards to whether it's inside or outside of your network environment, especially right now when everybody's remote and taken their laptops home. You don't have to be VPNed into the environment for AMP to work. AMP will work anywhere in the world, as long as it has an Internet connection. You get protection and reporting with it. No matter where the device is, AMP has still got coverage on it and is protecting it. You still have the ability to manage and remediate things. The cloud feature is the magic bullet. This is what makes the solution a valuable tool as far as I'm concerned."
"I'm only using the AMP (advanced malware protection) which is protecting my file system from all the malicious things that might happen. It should protect all kinds of things that might happen on the servers, things that I cannot see."
"The most valuable feature is that you can select remote access of any machine for sandboxing."
"Their XDR agent and their behavioral indicators of compromise (BIOC) are pretty nice. Their managed threat hunting is also pretty nice. They also have WildFire, which is a service for actively looking for malware. It's quite useful."
"The user interface of the solution is sophisticated and straightforward."
"I've found the solution to be highly scalable for enterprises."
"I like the centralized console and the predictive analysis it does of malware. It is very stable and also scalable."
"The protection offered by this product is good, as is the endpoint reporting."
"It integrates well into the environment."
"Cortex XDR lets us manage several clients from the same console, and its endpoint defense is more advanced than traditional antivirus."
"I have found the connection to search the hosts for detections very useful in CrowdStrike Falcon."
"The most valuable feature is that we don't need to re-image machines as much as we had to."
"The UI is simple and self-explanatory. Everything is easy to understand."
"The 10 hours a week that we are freeing up from having to manage and monitor our AV solution has really allowed us to focus on other areas of the business. This has been a huge return on investment."
"The initial setup is very simple."
"It has definitely minimized resources. When everything was on-prem, there was a lot more work maintaining it. One of the big value tickets: I don't have lists of hundreds of exceptions for certain applications that I have to maintain, add, delete, and move. The very nature of the product has lessened my workload considerably."
"One of the most valuable features of CrowdStrike Falcon is when there are upgrades there are no additional fees."
"The detection is very reliable. Also, OverWatch is a great feature."
"The GUI needs improvement, it's not good."
"The room for improvement would be on event notifications. I have mine tuned fairly well. I do feel that if you subscribe to all the event notification types out-of-the-box, or don't really go through and take the time to filter out events, the notifications can become overwhelming with information. Sometimes, when you're overwhelmed with information, you just say, "I'm not going to look at anything because I'm receiving so much." I recommend the vendor come up with a white paper on the best practices for event notifications."
"...the greatest value of all, would be to make the security into a single pane of glass. Whilst these products are largely integrated from a Talos perspective, they're not integrated from a portal perspective. For example, we have to look at an Umbrella portal and a separate AMP portal. We also have to look at a separate portal for the firewalls. If I could wave a magic wand and have one thing, I would put all the Cisco products into one, simple management portal."
"The thing I hate the most, which they have not fixed, is when it creates duplicate entries within a console. If you have a computer and you upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10, or you upgrade your agent from version 6 to 7, it creates a new instance in there instead of updating the information. Instead of paying a license for one computer, I have to license two computers until I manually go in, search for all the duplicate entries, and clean them out myself."
"In Orbital, there are tons of prebuilt queries, but there is not a lot of information in lay terms. There isn't enough information to help us with what we're looking for and why we are looking for it with this query. There are probably a dozen queries in there that really focus on what I need to focus on, but they are not always easy to find the first time through."
"The connector updates are very easily done now, and that's improving. Previously, the connector had an issue, where almost every time it needed to be updated, it required a machine reboot. This was always a bit of an inconvenience and a bug. Because with a lot of software now, you don't need to do that and shouldn't need to be rebooting all the time."
"They could improve the main dashboard to more clearly show me the things that I want to see. When I open the dashboard right now, I see a million things and they are not always the things that I need."
"We have had some problems with updates not playing nice with our environment. This is important, because if there is a new version, we need to test it thoroughly before it goes into production. We cannot just say, "There's a new version. It's not going to give us any problems." With the complexity of the solution using multiple engines for multiple tasks, it can sometimes cause performance issues on our endpoints. Therefore, we need to test it before we deploy. That takes one to three days before we can be certain that the new version plays nice with our environment."
"We had a problem with getting our older endpoints up to date, but their newest updates have been really good. I've been pleased with it in terms of what our needs are. It's doing what we want it to do."
"A little bit more automation would be nice."
"Limited remote connection."
"Data privacy is a matter of concern. You have to be careful with data privacy, it can be sensitive and Cortex can have most of your access."
"It should support more mobile operating systems. That is one of the cons of their infrastructure right now."
"It's very time-consuming to log support issues and the people that answer the tickets aren't very knowledgeable."
"There's an overall lack of features."
"It would be better if they could educate the customers more. Some sort of seminars and roadshows will help educate the customers and show what the product can do. The price could be better. It would also help if they had a team for deployment and support."
"They need to strengthen the forensic capabilities of this product, for e-discovery."
"The product could be more accurate in terms of performance."
"This solution could be improved with greater scope for admins to make changes to the solution."
"I would rate it an eight out of ten. It does what it needs to do but there's always room for improvement."
"In the six months that I have been using CrowdStrike, it has not been able to detect anything."
"On the firewall management side, there should be more granularity. There should also be more granularity for device control. Everything else is brilliant."
"We would like to be able to perform on-demand scanning, rather than relying on the scheduler."
"The solution could improve by providing more types of reports because it's in the detection span you cannot re-export anything. If it could be exported to a CSV file directly there it would help a lot. I currently need to do this by API to get what I need."
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Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is ranked 5th in Endpoint Protection for Business (EPP) with 42 reviews while CrowdStrike Falcon is ranked 1st in Endpoint Protection for Business (EPP) with 50 reviews. Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is rated 8.2, while CrowdStrike Falcon is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks writes "Easy to set up, reliable, and always scanning". On the other hand, the top reviewer of CrowdStrike Falcon writes "Speeds up the data collection for our phishing playbooks dramatically". Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, SentinelOne, Symantec Endpoint Security, Sophos Intercept X and Trellix Endpoint Security, whereas CrowdStrike Falcon is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, SentinelOne, Darktrace, Carbon Black CB Defense and Fortinet FortiEDR. See our Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs. CrowdStrike Falcon report.
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