We performed a comparison between Cortex XDR By Palo Alto Networks and Microsoft Defender for Cloud based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: The main difference between the two solutions is that Cortex XDR users say the solution is expensive while Microsoft Defender for Cloud users consider the solution to be fairly priced.
"Forensics is a valuable feature of Fortinet FortiEDR."
"he solution is an anti-malware product that integrates well with other vendor products such as firewalls, SIEM, etc. It captures threat intelligence and gives you better visibility. The product also has sandboxing features."
"This is stable and scalable."
"The product's initial setup phase is very easy."
"It is a scalable solution...The initial setup of Fortinet FortiEDR was straightforward."
"Having all monitoring, response, tracking, and mitigation tools in one dashboard provides our analysts and SOC team with a comprehensive view at a glance."
"The ease of deployment and configuration is valuable. It's very easy compared to other vendors like Sophos. Sophos' configuration is complex. Fortinet is a lot easier to understand. You don't need a lot of admin knowledge to do the configuration."
"The price is low and quite competitive with others."
"WildFire AI is the best option for this product."
"The integrations are out-of-the-box, as are the playbooks."
"It'll not slow down your system when compared to others."
"The initial setup is pretty easy."
"The user interface of the solution is sophisticated and straightforward."
"One thing that I like about Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks, it is detecting all the suspicious or malicious binaries, and it has integration with Palo Alto Firewall."
"It collects and caches and the knowledge of machine learning from different customers to take to the cloud. It makes it better to use for everybody. It allows for quick learning and updates and can, therefore, offer zero-day malware security. This sharing of metadata helps make the solution very safe."
"The initial setup isn't too bad."
"This is a platform as a service provided by Azure. We don't need to install or maintain Azure Security Center. It is a ready-made service available in Azure. This is one of the main things that we like. If you look at similar tools, we have to install, maintain, and update services. Whereas, Azure Security Center manages what we are using. This is a good feature that has helped us a lot."
"We can create alerts that trigger if there is any malicious activity happening in the workflow and these alerts can be retrieved using the query language."
"Microsoft Defender has a lot of features including regulatory compliance and attaching workbooks but the most valuable is the recommendations it provides for each and every resource when we open Microsoft Defender."
"One important security feature is the incident alerts. Now, with all these cyberattacks, there are a lot of incident alerts that get triggered. It is very difficult to keep monitoring everything automatically, instead our organization is utilizing the automated use case that we get from Microsoft. That has helped bring down the manual work for a lot of things."
"The solution's robust security posture is the most valuable feature."
"The security alerts and correlated alerts are most valuable. It correlates the logs and gives us correlated alerts, which can be fed into any security information and event management (SIEM) tool. It is an analyzed correlation tool for monitoring security. It gives us alerts when there is any kind of unauthorized access, or when there is any malfunctioning in multifactor authentication (MFA). If our Azure is connected with Azure Security Center, we get to know what types of authentication are happening in our infra."
"DSPM is the most valuable feature."
"Defender for Cloud is a plug-and-play solution that provides continuous posture management once enabled."
"Cannot be used on mobile devices with a secure connection."
"FortiEDR can be improved by providing more detailed reporting."
"I think cloud security and SASE are areas of concern in the product where improvements are required. The tool's cloud version has to be improved in terms of the security it offers."
"I haven't seen the use of AI in the solution."
"I would like the solution to extend beyond endpoint protection and include other attack surfaces such as other network components."
"The only minor concern is occasional interference with desired programs."
"Making the portal mobile friendly would be helpful when I am out of office."
"The solution is not stable."
"It is not very strong in terms of endpoint management. It should have additional features like DLP, encryption, or advanced device control. Currently, Cortex is good in terms of the security of the endpoints, but it is not as good as other vendors in terms of the management of the endpoint."
"If they had pulse rate detection, it would be better."
"I would like to see better protection, specifically to protect email applications."
"Cortex does not offer an on-premises solution. However, some customers would prefer not to be on the cloud. It would be ideal if it could offer something on-prem as well."
"The encryption is not up to the mark."
"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."
"Every 30 or 40 days, there's a new version and we need to go and make sure our customer's laptops are upgraded."
"The price could be a little lower."
"As an analyst, there is no way to configure or create a playbook to automate the process of flagging suspicious domains."
"From my own perspective, they just need a product that is tailored to micro-segmentation so I can configure rules for multiple systems at once and manage it."
"One of the main challenges that we have been facing with Azure Security Center is the cost. The costs are really a complex calculation, e.g., to calculate the monthly costs. Azure is calculating on an hourly basis for use of the resource. Because of this, we found it really complex to promote what will be our costs for the next couple of months. I think if Azure could reduce the complex calculation and come up with straightforward cost mapping that would be very useful from a product point of view."
"The solution could extend its capabilities to other cloud providers. Right now, if you want to monitor a virtual machine on another cloud, you can do that. However, this cannot be done with other cloud platform services. I hope once that is available then Defender for Cloud will be a unified solution for all cloud platform services."
"Agent features need to be improved. They support agents through Azure Arc or Workbench. Sometimes, we are not able to get correct signals from the machines on which we have installed these agents. We are not able to see how many are currently reporting to Azure Security Center, and how many are currently not reporting. For example, we have 1,000 machines, and we have enrolled 1,000 OMS agents on these machines to collect the log. When I look at the status, even though at some places, it shows that it is connected, but when I actually go and check, I'm not getting any alerts from those. There are some discrepancies on the agent, and the agent features are not up to the mark."
"If a customer is already using Okta as an SSO in its entire environment, they will want to continue with it. But Security Center doesn't understand that and keeps making recommendations. It would help if it let us resolve a recommendation, even if it is not implemented."
"Azure is a complex solution. You have so many moving parts."
"Microsoft sources most of their threat intelligence internally, but I think they should open themselves up to bodies that provide feel intelligence to build a better engine. There may be threats out there that they don't report because their team is not doing anything on that and they don't have arrangements with another party that is involved in that research."
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Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is ranked 4th in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 80 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 2nd in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) with 46 reviews. Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is rated 8.4, while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks writes "It provides a whole new level of visibility and integrates with most other vendors". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Cloud writes "Provides multi-cloud capability, is plug-and-play, and improves our security posture". Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, CrowdStrike Falcon, Darktrace, Symantec Endpoint Security and Fortinet FortiClient, whereas Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with AWS GuardDuty, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Defender XDR, Wiz and Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP. See our Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud report.
We monitor all Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.