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Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs Deep Instinct Prevention Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 9, 2024

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...
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
91
Ranking in other categories
Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (7th), Ransomware Protection (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (4th)
Deep Instinct Prevention Pl...
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
40th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Anti-Malware Tools (21st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) category, the mindshare of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is 3.7%, down from 4.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Deep Instinct Prevention Platform is 0.7%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
 

Featured Reviews

NiteshSharma - PeerSpot reviewer
Automated threat response and behavioral control improve security measures
I recommend adding a data loss prevention (DLP ( /categories/data-loss-prevention-dlp )) solution to Cortex XDR ( /categories/extended-detection-and-response-xdr ) by Palo Alto Networks. The inclusion of this feature would allow the application of DLP ( /categories/data-loss-prevention-dlp ) policies alongside antivirus policies via a single agent and console, making it more competitive as other OEMs often offer DLP solutions as part of their antivirus products. Additionally, multi-tenancy and multi-cloud features are not available and should be considered for inclusion.
Elena Yau - PeerSpot reviewer
Prevention, in advance, saves us remediation time
We have a PHI (protected health information) committee, and some of the things that we review on a weekly basis are incidents. For example, if there was malware or adware or some kind of phishing attempt, or even ransomware, we would have to investigate and see if there was any PHI impact. We've seen small things because some kind of adware made its way through the browser from some malicious link, and it's really hard to prevent those. We're putting more levels of filtering around that. There are some product development ideas that we have been working on alongside the DI team, and they've been super helpful. There are definitely a lot more little areas of improvement for the interface. Also, we have talked with the DI team about adding the forensic piece, which is what we do a lot. That would be added value and they've just recently provided more individuals to think about the roadmap. That's part of their strategy and one of the good features that they want to bring on. Hopefully, they can bring that to fruition and that will ease our workflow a little bit more. The additional predictive and prevention capabilities in the 3.0 version, that don't require special rules and configuration, help our organization. The only caveat is that when things get done automatically, I would appreciate more logging of what's happening in the background, if it is doing some kind of intervention. If we need to do some forensics, we should be able to backtrack from the log that gets uploaded to our cloud instance and see, forensically, what the root cause was. We should be able to see what instigated that trigger by DI and what exactly was done. That's a missing piece. It does a good job of preventing, but then we don't know what were the symptoms of the prevention. Let's say that there was like a PowerShell block. We'll see an indicator on the dashboard and we'll look at the logs and investigate. Sometimes we find that the logs that are captured locally on the endpoint itself are not very thorough. We were coached through our training with DI that, when troubleshooting, the DI team would always ask for the logs from the endpoint. We know what we need to do to look at something. But the logging for DI doesn't capture everything. There are some things that are missing. When it comes to root-cause analysis, or kill-chain analysis, and figuring out exactly what happened, it's very hard to do that right now on the product. I have used Carbon Black before and they're pretty good with the forensic analysis. That does save some efforts of my one engineer and myself when we have to go through the PHI committee. Right now, with Di, that feels like a blind spot. Another area for development is making the license clean-up a little bit easier. We always have to manually uninstall agents. If there were some way to remove the licensing and do better license management on the platform, that would help my team as well.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product's initial setup phase is very easy."
"Stability is a primary factor, and then there's the ease of distribution and policy management."
"On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks a nine."
"Threat identification and detection are the most valuable features of this solution."
"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."
"One of the main benefits of the solution is its intelligence to correlate the events into an incident."
"Cortex XDR's most valuable feature is its intelligence-based dashboards."
"Cortex XDR features advanced threat detection capabilities."
"Its false positives are very low, because the behavior analysis engine double checks them."
"I really like the behavioral analysis feature, because it looks at all the different things, like arbitrary shellcode and reflective DLL. It looks at a lot of things that threat actors use as threat vectors to get into the environment."
"It's just a single agent that has everything in it... With the EDR solutions, you have to install it, then you have another service history installed, and you have behavioral analytics, etc. With this, everything is in a single small "box," a small agent that has pretty much got everything."
"The most important thing is that it is for prevention. It prevents attacks of any type of malware. Normally, what we've seen in other products is that they are not for prevention. They isolate a possible threat that they don't understand or know about, and then they check it with our database to see if it needs any correction or elimination. This means that the threat is already inside a customer's base, whereas Deep Instinct prevents a threat from getting in. Prevention is basically done by an agent in each installation, PCU, or product. An agent has its own intelligence to be able to detect if it should stop a threat or not. It has been taught. It is like a brain that has been taught to react according to any possible threat. Deep Instinct is very light. It doesn't take too much CPU attention or memory. It doesn't slow down the performance. You don't really realize any change in the performance, which makes it very different from other solutions. They are usually heavy for the users."
"It has the lowest false-positive ratio that I have come across. I have only had one which was a legitimate file that I had to whitelist. It was for one of the applications I was trying to install and integrate. But the false positive ratio is very low."
"The detection rate is very high. In all the testing with around 20 partners in different environments, quite a lot of them had installed with other anti-malware applications, like Sophos. This software can co-exist with those applications in the same machine. This is impressive."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"It has a very low false-positive ratio. That is important because it means we're not wasting time... We're able to run that entire 20,000-endpoint base with just a handful of engineers."
 

Cons

"I would like to see better protection, specifically to protect email applications."
"The solution needs better reports. I think they should let the customer go in and customize the reports."
"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 solution lacks real-time, on-demand antivirus."
"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."
"I recommend adding a data loss prevention (DLP) solution to Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks. The inclusion of this feature would allow the application of DLP policies alongside antivirus policies via a single agent and console, making it more competitive as other OEMs often offer DLP solutions as part of their antivirus products."
"It would be good if they could make an exception for applications. Sometimes, it can be a bit of a challenge to make exceptions for certain applications that have been used as rogue."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks could improve by offering remote management. It would be useful to look at the client's issue to fix it."
"I think it's probably the administration, especially the administration platform, which could be improved in the solution. It's clunky and hard to navigate, especially for inexperienced technicians."
"They have a manual, but it is not excessive."
"If the tool was able to provide fine-tuning capabilities from the product's end depending on the environment of its user, then it would be a good improvement in the solution."
"The Deep Instinct client stops working when you have two servers and you add high availability or Windows Failover Cluster mode. It doesn't work in a clustered mode. I haven't yet had time to go back and talk with their support and get it fixed. It would be good if they can make the installation independent of an actual user. Currently, its installation is dependent on the actual user being logged in. For example, a computer has to be logged in for the installation to happen. If it is not logged in, then on the cloud platform, it is going to show that the client is offline. On the management side of the cloud platform, we would like to have the administrators segregated by logical entities. We have told them that on their cloud management platform, we would like to be able to segregate clients into different logical entities or organizations so that the administrators are able to manage only those entities that are within their designated organization."
"Its support for Linux and Unix operating systems can be improved. Currently, they cover macOS and Windows, but they don't cover Linux and some of the Unix products. Pricing is also an issue. Its pricing is not as aggressive as it could be, and its price makes it difficult to sell. Customers feel that they can get an antivirus for a lower price, even though it is not a similar product. It is technically different. Their SLAs can be better. They have to give you 24/7 support, but their SLAs are not very good. They should be better documented, and the offerings should also be a little bit better. What happens is that the SLAs end up in the hands of the intermediary, seller, or the local partner of Deep Instinct in a country. The customers want very fast SLAs in a very short time, but Deep Instinct doesn't give them at the same speed. Having said that, SLAs are important when you have a lot of issues, but this product doesn't have too many issues, so it is not a big concern. However, for a customer who doesn't know the product, it could be a concern."
"I am looking forward to them adding Linux in Q1 or Q2 of 2019, as this is often requested by my partners and customers. Currently, Deep Instinct only has Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS."
"I would love to see a really exceptional, outstanding level of reporting. I know that's like asking for a unicorn to leap out of the sky with any of these products... When everything works, clients began to wonder: "Everything's fine. Why do we need you?" That's where the reporting capabilities would allow us to really demonstrate: "Hey, here's what's actually going on, Mr. Customer.""
"It would be nice if there were options where, if I have to do SIEM integration, I could do so from the UI: Just pick and choose what SIEM solutions the customers use and have options to have out-of-the-box connection facility."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the solution is high for the license and in general."
"This is an expensive solution."
"The price was fine."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is an expensive solution."
"I am using the Community edition."
"It has a higher cost than other solutions, like CrowdStrike or Microsoft’s EDR tools, but it reduces the cost of our operations because it’s a new generation antivirus tool."
"I don't have any issues with the pricing. We are satisfied with the price."
"It has reasonable pricing for the use cases it provides to the company."
"If I include the false positive rate and the detection rate in the comparison, Deep Instinct is worth its price."
"Their pricing is very competitive. It is good, fair, and a lot cheaper than what we were doing with Cylance."
"There is a need for customers of the product to pay towards the licensing costs of the tool."
"In comparison to the other products out there, it's exceptionally competitively priced. When you consider the lower administrative overhead that it facilitates, it's an absolute value."
"We are a nonprofit. The MSP had provides pretty decent nonprofit rates for us. This was one of the key factors that made us choose Deep Instinct over its competitors who were significantly more expensive."
"One thing about their licensing program that I like is that just one covers the server as well as on the endpoint as well as mobile devices. There is no complexity in calculating how many SKUs I need for mobile, for laptop, for desktop, and for servers. It's very simple and that makes it much easier to budget."
"There are no additional costs on the price, and our company has a support contract, which bundles in those services anyway."
"Its pricing is too high, but that is not because of the product. It is expensive because of the cost of the console. You need a console to control the whole thing, but the console is expensive. You have to split this cost among all possible users. Normally, to be able to make it economically attractive, you need at least 1,000 agents, PCs, or users. If you have a customer with 300 to 500 agents, PCs, or users, it becomes too pricey."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Healthcare Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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. The ability to reverse damage caused by ransomware with minimal interruptions to...
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 that are very scalable, secure, and user-friendly. Cortex XDR by Palo Alto offers ...
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, applies behavioral-based endpoint protection and response, and includes risk-ba...
What do you like most about Deep Instinct?
The product offers integration capabilities and is also easy to use.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Deep Instinct?
There is a need for customers of the product to pay towards the licensing costs of the tool.
What needs improvement with Deep Instinct?
The solution's stability is good. If the tool was able to provide fine-tuning capabilities from the product's end depending on the environment of its user, then it would be a good improvement in th...
 

Also Known As

Cyvera, Cortex XDR, Palo Alto Networks Traps
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs. Deep Instinct Prevention Platform and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,825 professionals have used our research since 2012.