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Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs Morphisec 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)
5th
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)
Morphisec
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
53rd
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (64th), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (35th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (60th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (33rd), Threat Deception Platforms (17th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) category, the mindshare of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is 3.7%, down from 4.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Morphisec is 0.5%, up from 0.3% 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) 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. Additionally, multi-tenancy and multi-cloud features are not available and should be considered for inclusion.
Rick Schibler - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers in-memory protection at a lower price than competitors
Morphisec's in-memory protection is probably the most valuable feature because it stops malicious activity from occurring. If something tries to install or act as a sleeper agent, Morphisec will detect and stop it. Morphisec's Moving Target Defense is critical to hardening our attack surface. If it detects something, it indicates whether it's valid. That means you've got a breach requiring investigation. It detects anomalies but doesn't necessarily point to what caused them. You still need to do that work. The solution is reasonably easy to administer. They made some changes last year, adding a cloud-based monitoring solution that makes deploying and monitoring our endpoints easy.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The stability of this product is very good."
"The most valuable feature of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is its machine-learning capabilities. Additionally, there is full integration with other solutions."
"It is an easy-to-use tool."
"Cortex XDR is a simple platform that's easy for administrators and users. You have a lot of flexibility to change or customize the features."
"The solution is a new generation XDR that has a lot of artificial intelligence modules."
"It's a nice product that's stable and scalable."
"The behavior-based detection feature is valuable."
"Stability is a primary factor, and then there's the ease of distribution and policy management."
"The biggest feature is that it hides everything from your operating system that's running in-memory from anything to try to run against it. That's the most unique thing that's on the market. There's nothing else out there that's quite like that. That's a big selling point and why we went with it. It does exactly what the design does. If you can't find it, you can't execute against it."
"Morphisec's in-memory protection is probably the most valuable feature because it stops malicious activity from occurring. If something tries to install or act as a sleeper agent, Morphisec will detect and stop it."
"Morphisec provides full visibility into security events from Microsoft Defender and Morphisec in one dashboard. Defender and Morphisec are integrated. It's important because it lowers the total cost of maintenance on the engineer's time, more or less. So the administrative time is dramatically reduced in maintaining the product. This saves an engineer around four to five hours a week."
"It also provides full visibility into security events from Microsoft Defender and Morphisec in one dashboard. We've always had that capability with Morphisec. The more recent version appears to do that even a little bit more natively and it's given us visibility that we didn't have otherwise."
"Morphisec has absolutely helped save money on our security stack. The ransomware at the end of the day can cost organizations millions upon millions of dollars. Investing in tools like Morphisec is a great reduction in that cost. If I can spend $10,000 in a year to protect assets that could be ransomed for $20,000,000, that's definitely a bet that one should pursue. Morphisec absolutely it's worth the investment."
"Morphisec makes use of deterministic attack prevention that doesn’t require investigation of security alerts. It changes the memory locations of where certain applications run. If you think of Excel, opening a PDF, running an Excel macro, or opening a webpage and clicking on a link, all of those actions run in a certain area of memory. Morphisec changes the memory locations of where those run."
"The simplicity of the solution, how easy it is to deploy and how small it is when deployed as an agent on a device, is probably the biggest aspect, given what it can do."
"I really like the integration with Microsoft Defender. In addition to having third-party endpoint protection, we're also enabling Defender... I like the reporting that we get from Defender, when it comes in. I like that it's one console showing both Morphisec and Defender where it provides me with full visibility into security events from Defender and Morphisec."
 

Cons

"Although I would say this product is highly-rated, it could probably do more because nothing does everything that you want."
"There is a severe gap in functionality between Windows, Linux, and Mac versions. For example all folder restriction settings are Windows only. Traps 5.0+ does not have SAML / LDAP integration."
"It'll help if customization was easier."
"It is a complex solution to implement."
"They've been having some issues with updating their endpoint agents, and it has been quite frustrating."
"Palo Alto Networks Cortex XDR does not detect malicious activity like in other anti-virus solutions like Trend Micro and Windows with Cisco."
"It should support more mobile operating systems. That is one of the cons of their infrastructure right now."
"Technology evolves every day, so it would be nice if it gets more secure. It can also have more integration with other platforms."
"Right now, it's just their auto-update feature. I know they are currently working on that. When they release a new version of the threat prevention platform, I do have to update that, rolling out to every computer. They have said, "From version 5, you would be able to do an auto-update." While this is very minor, that is the only thing that I would say needs to be upgraded. It would just make life a lot easier for other IT teams. However, I have simplified the process, so all I need to do is just download one file."
"If anything, tech support might be their weakest link. The process of getting someone involved sometimes takes a little time. It seems to me that they should have all the data they need to let me know whether an alert is legitimate or not, but they tend to need a lot of information from me to get to the bottom of something. It usually takes a little longer than I would expect."
"Automating reports needs improvement. I would like to have better reporting capabilities within it or automated reporting to be a little bit more dynamic. That's something I know they're working on. We literally are in the process. We started the process a week and a half ago of going to their latest version, so I've not seen their latest one up and running yet."
"It might be a bit much to ask, but we are now beginning to use Morphisec Scout, which provides vulnerability information. At this time, it's recognizing vulnerabilities and reporting them to us, but it's not necessarily resolving them. There's still a separate manual process to resolve those vulnerabilities, primarily through upgrades. We have to do that outside of Morphisec. If Morphisec could somehow have that capability built into it, that would be very effective."
"From a company standpoint, a little more interaction with the customers throughout the year might be beneficial. I would like check-ins from the Morphisec account executives about any type of Morphisec news as well as a bit more interaction with customers throughout the year to know if anything new is coming out with Morphisec, e.g., what they are working on in regards to their development roadmap. We tend not to get that up until the time that we go for a yearly renewal. So, we end up talking to people from Morphisec once a year, but it is usually at renewal time."
"Those are some of the features that I was looking for on my on-prem platform that they've already instituted in the cloud and that I'm sure will be instituting on their on-prem platform as well. Having to have an on-prem server required a lot of administration. Being able to push that to the cloud and have it managed up there for us is a real nice addition."
"We wanted to have multi-tenants in their cloud platform, so every entity can look into their own systems and not see other systems in other entities. I have a beta version on that now. I would like them to incorporate that in the cloud solution."
"The only area that really needs improvement is the reporting functionality. Gathering the detailed information that is in the system for an executive, or for me as a director, could be better. Some of the interface and reporting aspects are a little bit dated. They're working on it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cortex XDR's pricing is ok."
"The solution is expensive. It's pricing is on a yearly-basis."
"The pricing is a little high. It is per user per year."
"The return on investment is from the user side because we have seen the performance of it increase the delivery time of the product if we are using too many web-based and on-premise applications. In indirect ways, we saw the return of investment in terms of performance and user satisfaction increase."
"This is an expensive solution."
"I did PoCs on products called Cylance and CrowdStrike. Although, I consider these products and they were also good, when it come to cost and budgetary factors, Traps has been proven to be better than the other two products. It is quite cost-effective and delivers all the entire solution which we require."
"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."
"It has a yearly renewal."
"Morphisec is reasonably priced because our parent company's other subsidiaries use different products like CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike is four or five times more expensive than Morphisec. The competitive pricing saves us money in our overall security stack."
"It does not have multi-tenants. If South Africa wants to show only the machines that they have, they need their own cloud incidence. It is not possible to have that in a single cloud incidence with multiple tenants in it, instead you need to have multiple cloud incidences. Then, if you have that, it will be more expensive. However, they are going to change that, which is good."
"Licenses are per endpoint, and that's true for the cloud version as well. The only difference is that there is a little extra charge for the cloud version."
"Compared to their competitors, the price of Morphisec is not that high. You can easily deploy it on a large-scale or small-scale network."
"Our licensing is tied into our contract. Because we have a long-term contract, our pricing is a little bit lower. It is per year, so we don't get charged per endpoint, but we do have a cap. Our cap is 80 endpoints. If we were to go over 80, when we renewed our contract, which is not until three years are over. Then, they would reevaluate, and say, "Well, you have more than 80 devices active right now. This is going to be the price change." They know that we are installing and replacing computers, so the numbers will be all over the place depending on whether you archive or don't archive, which is the reason why we just have to keep up on that stuff."
"It is a little bit more expensive than other security products that we use, but it does provide us good protection. So, it is a trade-off."
"The pricing is definitely fair for what it does."
"It is priced correctly for what it does. They end up doing a good deal of discounting, but I think it is priced appropriately."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Outsourcing Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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How is Cortex XDR compared with Microsoft Defender?
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Also Known As

Cyvera, Cortex XDR, Palo Alto Networks Traps
Morphisec, Morphisec Moving Target Defense
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
Lenovo/Motorola, TruGreen, Covenant Health, Citizens Medical Center
Find out what your peers are saying about Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs. Morphisec and other solutions. Updated: August 2025.
865,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.