We performed a comparison between Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks and SentinelOne 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, SentinelOne comes out on top in this comparison due to its impressive security and EDR features, attractive price, and impressive ROI.
"From the perspective of Microsoft 365 XDR, the main benefit is a single, centralized dashboard offering the holistic visibility organizations crave."
"The incident threat response and its ability to facilitate effective remediation against threats are the standout features."
"I like that it's fully integrated with Windows, Microsoft 365 Exchange Online, and Outlook. It is better than other antivirus solutions because it's fully integrated with all Microsoft products. It's easy to integrate them and onboard all Windows devices from SCCM."
"The timeline feature is excellent. I also like the phishing simulation. We have phishing campaigns to educate employees and warn them about these threats."
"The attack simulation is excellent; initially, this feature wasn't very robust, but Microsoft improved what we could achieve with it. We can now customize our practice phishing emails and include our company logo, for example. Attack simulation also helps integrate with third-party solutions where applicable and provides an overview of our security architecture through testing. The summary includes areas for improvement in our protection and what steps we need to take to get there."
"Another noteworthy feature that I find appealing in Microsoft Defender is the credit-backed simulation. This feature enables organizations to train their users on effectively responding to phishing emails through a simulated training environment."
"The comprehensiveness of Microsoft's threat detection is good."
"I have found the ability to delete unwanted threats beneficial."
"Monitoring is most valuable."
"Provides behavior-based detection which offers many benefits over signature-based detection."
"The information the dashboard provides is very clear."
"They have a new GUI which is just fantastic."
"If there are multiple alerts, the app will automatically create and rate an event instead of going through each one."
"The product has an intuitive dashboard."
"It's a nice product that's stable and scalable."
"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."
"SentinelOne’s Rollback is its best feature."
"The most valuable feature varies from client to client but having absolute clarity of what happened and the autonomous actions of SentinelOne are what most people find the most assuring."
"The GUI is really easy to use."
"SentinelOne's managed detection response service Vigilance Respond is convenient for companies like ours with small IT teams. If something happens on the weekend, SentinelOne steps in and resolves the issue. It's a false positive 97% of the time, but at least they're resolved instead of hanging around for us to find on Monday."
"The deep visibility feature is valuable. It is helping enrich our IR team in their investigations."
"The solution is both stable and scalable."
"The most valuable feature of SentinelOne is the good graph it provides. It has a specific page where it detects the recent attacks on other machines or the hackers, for example, group APT28 and all."
"I like Singularity's rollback features, threat-hunting, and Ranger Insights. The Ranger feature scans the network and provides visibility into all the unsecured assets."
"At times, there may be delays in the execution of certain actions and their effects."
"Automated playbooks and automated dashboards would be preferable to the way the data is currently being presented."
"The Defender agent itself is more compatible with Windows 10 and Windows 11. Other than these two lines, there are so many compatibility issues. Security is not only about Microsoft. The core technical aspects of it are quite good, but it would be good if they can better support non-Microsoft solutions in terms of putting the agents directly into VMware and other virtualization solutions. There should be more emphasis on RHEL and other operating systems that we use, other than Windows, in the server category."
"Intrusion detection and prevention would be great to have with 365 Defender."
"365 Defender has multiple subsets, including Defender for Cloud Apps. When integrating Defender for Cloud Apps with apps on third-party cloud platforms like AWS or GCP, there are limitations on our ability to control user activities. If Microsoft added more control over third-party products, that would be a game-changer and help us quite a lot."
"The web filtering solution needs to be improved because currently, it is very simple."
"I personally have not seen much evidence of how Defender can enhance the story of zero trust for enterprises."
"I would like more of the features in Defender for 365 to be included in the smaller licenses. Even if I buy a small license and don't need everything, security shouldn't be a question. Security is one of the main aspects of all projects from our side, so it would be nice to have more features in the smaller licenses."
"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."
"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."
"Although I would say this product is highly-rated, it could probably do more because nothing does everything that you want."
"In reporting they should have a customizable dashboard due to the fact that C-level people don't like reporting to the IT department. They prefer to have a real-time dashboard. That kind of dashboard needs to have various customizations."
"The solution can never really be an on-premises solution based simply on the way it is set up. It needs metadata to run and improve. Having an on-premises solution would cut it off from making improvements."
"We have found that there are times Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks does not detect some of the viruses, we have to use another protection solution called Kaspersky."
"I would like to see better protection, specifically to protect email applications."
"I would like to see them include NDR (Network Detection Response)."
"Deployment strategy for large organizations that do not use active directory (AD)."
"The MDM functionality and maturity still need improvement."
"Their documentation could afford to be a little bit better communicated. A lot of times we have to look at things in the knowledge base, and much of that could be communicated better, but that would probably be the only thing that needs to be improved."
"DLP support would be a good addition."
"Their CASB tool needs to mature. I think there are some CASB vendors out there that have a dashboard tool that's much more mature than SentinelOne. That would be the only constructive criticism that I have."
"The reporting needs improvement and I would like to see a more granular level of administrative privileges."
"There should be Terraform support for console administration. Dynamic tagging would be also useful."
"Ranger does provide me with visibility of the network, but not completely because the assets it scans are often mistakenly identified regarding what type of device they are."
More Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks Pricing and Cost Advice →
More SentinelOne Singularity Complete Pricing and Cost Advice →
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is ranked 4th in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 80 reviews while SentinelOne Singularity Complete is ranked 2nd in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 176 reviews. Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is rated 8.4, while SentinelOne Singularity Complete is rated 8.8. 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 SentinelOne Singularity Complete writes "Provides peace of mind and is good at ingesting data and correlating". Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, CrowdStrike Falcon, Darktrace, Symantec Endpoint Security and Wazuh, whereas SentinelOne Singularity Complete is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, CrowdStrike Falcon, Darktrace, ThreatLocker Protect and Symantec Endpoint Security. See our Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs. SentinelOne Singularity Complete report.
See our list of best Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) vendors, best Extended Detection and Response (XDR) vendors, and best Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) vendors.
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I haven't used Cortex. My worry with it and every other solution is how well does it perform when disconnected from the cloud/ the internet?
S1 - I have been using it for a couple of years now without an issue. I had been using Cylance prior. I've been very happy with the S1 solution. Works with or without the Internet.
Depends on the size, scope and needs of your environment.
XDR is an ok monitoring/alerting tool, especially if you have a Palo Alto firewall already and everything can integrate well together. However, S1 is a superior tool IMHO and can catch and fix things automatically if you so choose (magic quadrant agrees).
Cost-wise XDR is probably cheaper but I don't know specifics on-prem vs cloud. S1 is a cloud tool but is extremely fast and responsive compared to some other tools we POC'd and can support legacy devices w2k8 and below or Linux or VDI without having to special of workarounds. So again, it depends on your needs, environment and cost.
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 the environment is note-worthy. Sentinel One works inconspicuously in the background, continually providing protection. It has an automated active EDR that will not only find issues but can fix them. I don’t know that any other solution does that.
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto has a nice console and is easy to use. One of my favorite things about it is that it will automatically connect and log various kinds of suspicious behavior - you don’t need to do it manually. Cortex XDR is very secure but it is missing some basic features. It doesn’t offer an on-prem solution and it doesn’t integrate so well with some third-party solutions.
SentinelOne can be challenging to set up and there seem to be some applications that do not function properly when SentinelOne is installed. I would like to be able to make the reporting more specific to my needs. It would be a more attractive option if the cost was lower.
Conclusions
The find-and-fix option that SentinalOne provides was a huge win for us. We feel it provides a deeper and more thorough level of security.