Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs Wazuh comparison

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Microsoft Logo
5,744 views|4,276 comparisons
98% willing to recommend
Palo Alto Networks Logo
13,073 views|7,388 comparisons
94% willing to recommend
Wazuh Logo
15,129 views|8,235 comparisons
75% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks and Wazuh based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Extended Detection and Response (XDR) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs. Wazuh Report (Updated: March 2024).
768,857 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"Microsoft Defender's most critical component is its CASB solution. It has many built-in policies that can improve your organization's cloud security posture. It's effective regardless of where your users are, which is critical because most users are working from home. It's cloud-based, so nothing is on-premise.""Setting up Microsoft 365 Defender is easy. It's a user-friendly solution that provides threat protection. It has good stability and scalability.""Advanced hunting is good. I like that. We can drill down to lots of details.""It provides a single pane of glass within the 365 admin interface, streamlining our experience by consolidating information in one place and eliminating the need to navigate through multiple interfaces.""There is also one dashboard that shows us the status of many controls at once and the details I can get... It gives a great overview of many areas, such as files, emails, chats, and links. Even with the apps, it gives you a great overview. In one place you can see where you should look into things more deeply...""The most valuable features of Microsoft 365 Defender are the combination of all the capabilities and centralized management.""Microsoft 365 Defender is simple to upgrade.""The EDR and the way it automatically responds to ransomware and other attacks are valuable features."

More Microsoft Defender XDR Pros →

"It's a nice product that's stable and scalable.""Palo Alto is constantly adding new features.""The multi-layered approach to the product gives you confidence that it will stop exploits, ransomware, worms, or viruses from compromising endpoints, essentially providing peace of mind.""It'll not slow down your system when compared to others.""The stability of the solution is very good. We have about 100 users on it right now, and we use it twice a week.""They have a new GUI which is just fantastic.""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.""If there are multiple alerts, the app will automatically create and rate an event instead of going through each one."

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"Wazuh's logging features integrate seamlessly with AWS cloud-native services. There are also Wazuh agent configurations for different use cases, like vulnerability scanning, host-based intrusion detection, and file integrity monitoring.""We use it to find any aberration in our endpoint devices. For example, if someone installs a game on their company laptop, Wazuh will detect it and inform us of the unauthorized software or unintended use of the devices provided by the company.""My company implemented Wazuh because it was relatively inexpensive. They could quickly get their hands on it to check a box for some audit and compliance.""Some of the strengths of Wazuh that stand out for us include its scalability when deployed on Azure, its open-source nature, which allows for customization based on our needs, and its compatibility with various security solutions like threat intelligence platforms.""Wazuh offers numerous features, such as the ability to define custom rules for detecting malicious activities and remembering behaviors.""It is a stable solution.""I like that the solution is on top of the Kubernetes stack.""The deployment is easy and they provide very good documentation."

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Cons
"Microsoft tends to provide too many features, which makes the solution prone to bugs.""In the Microsoft Azure Portal, in Active Directory, if there is anything on the user it will provide you with the information, but you still have to go through it a bit. And sometimes, I have experienced difficulties in understanding the information, especially because the synchronization between Microsoft Intune and the devices that are connected to the user in Azure Active Directory takes a lot of time.""In the future, it would be beneficial for Microsoft to consider making the product more user-friendly or simplified for those who are interested in using it. Currently, it requires a high level of technical expertise, making it challenging for beginners or less experienced individuals.""There should be better information for experts on features in the solution. What I see when reading about features in Microsoft 365 Defender is that it is always general information. If Microsoft could go deeper into details for the experts about how to use the tools, usage of it would be more familiar and it would be easier to use.""The only problem I find is that the use cases are built-in. There is no template available that you can modify according to your organization's standards. What they give is very generic, the market standard, but that might not be applicable to every organization.""There are other SIEM solutions that are easier to use, mainly based on the creation of rules, use cases, and groups.""At times, when we have an incident email and we click on the link for that incident, it opens a pop-up, but there is nothing. It has happened a couple of times.""The support from Microsoft could improve. There are times I have to wait for a response from a qualified specialist."

More Microsoft Defender XDR Cons →

"The solution lacks real-time, on-demand antivirus.""The connection to the internet has not performed as expected.""In the next release, I would like to see more UI improvements. Their UI is a bit basic. When we are speaking about Palo Alto Networks they are the big company, so they can improve the UI a little bit. The UI, the reports, the log system can all be improved.""The solution should force customers to integrate with network traffic to see the full benefits of XDR.""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.""Every 30 or 40 days, there's a new version and we need to go and make sure our customer's laptops are upgraded.""Impact on system performance is horrible, adding a lot of delays for users.""It automatically detects security issues. It should be able to protect our network devices while operating autonomously."

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"The only challenge we faced with Wazuh was the lack of direct support.""The technical support can be improved. Wazuh has some bugs that need to be fixed. It would be good if we can have automation with respect to incidence responses.""A more structured approach, perhaps with modular UI components, to facilitate easier integration and navigation within the Wazuh platform for custom integrations would be beneficial.""One area where Wazuh could use some improvement is in its reporting mechanism, especially for high-level management like CSOs and CEOs.""Wazuh could improve the detection, it is not detecting all of the attacks. Additionally, it is lacking features compared to other solutions.""Since it's an open-source tool, scalability is the main issue.""Wazuh needs more security and features, particularly visualization features and a health monitor.""Some features, like alerting, are complex with Wazuh."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The solutions price is fair for what they offer."
  • "The price could be better. Normally, the costs depend on the country you're located in for the license. When we were in the initial stage, we went with the E5 license they call premium standard. It cost us around $5.20 per month for four users."
  • "The price of the solution is high compared to others and we have lost some customers because of it."
  • "Microsoft is not competitive with the pricing of the solution. The competitors are able to offer lower discounts. The price of the solution is higher."
  • "We have a lot of problems in Latin America regarding the price of Microsoft 365 Defender, because the relationship between dollars and the money of the different countries, it's is a lot. Many customers that have small businesses say that they would like the solution but it is too expensive. However, large companies do not find the cost an issue."
  • "The most valuable licensing option is expensive, so pricing could be improved. Licensing options for this solution also need to be consolidated, because they frequently change."
  • "Microsoft should provide lower-level licensing options. They should do it in such a way that even an individual could purchase a license, and it should be entirely flexible."
  • "They have moved from a licensing model to pay-per-use... The question is: What happens if, for any reason, there's not enough budget to accept this model? That could be a great problem."
  • More Microsoft Defender XDR Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "I feel it is fairly priced."
  • "The pricing seems fair, and I do like the licensing model. You use wherever they are, and it is elastic."
  • "We didn't have to pay any additional fee for the cloud instance. It just came with the renewal, which was nice."
  • "It is "expensive" and flexible."
  • "Traps pays for itself within the first 16 months of a three-year subscription. This is attributed to OPEX savings, as security teams spent less time trying to identify and isolate malware for analysis as a result of a reduction in malware incidents, false positives, and breach avoidance."
  • "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 is cost-effective compared to similar solutions. It fits for the small businesses through to the big businesses."
  • "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."
  • More Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Wazuh is open-source, so I think it's an option for a small organization that cannot go for enterprise-grade solutions like Splunk."
  • "There is not a license required for Wazuh."
  • "Wazuh is open-source, but you must consider the total cost of ownership. It may be free to acquire, but you spend a lot of time and effort supporting the product and getting it to a point where it's useful."
  • "Wazuh is open-source, therefore it is free. You can purchase support for $1,000 a year."
  • "Wazuh is totally free and open source. There are no licensing costs, only support costs if you need them."
  • "Wazuh has a community edition, and I was using that. It's free and open source."
  • "The current pricing is open source."
  • "Wazuh is free and open source."
  • More Wazuh Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:I like Defender XDR's automation capabilities. XDR isn't automated by default, but you can automate it to respond. If an… more »
    Top Answer:While Microsoft Defender XDR carries a higher cost, its ease of use compared to Defender may justify the investment.
    Top Answer:Defender XDR has good threat visibility, but it could be better in some areas, like when we are hunting for a specific… more »
    Top Answer:Cortex XDR by Palo Alto vs. SentinelOne SentinelOne offers very detailed specifics with regard to risks or attacks.… more »
    Top Answer:Cortex XDR by Palo Alto vs. CrowdStrike Falcon Both Cortex XDR and Crowd Strike Falcon offer cloud-based solutions that… more »
    Top Answer:Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a cloud-delivered endpoint security solution. The tool reduces the attack surface… more »
    Top Answer:Integrates with various open-source and paid products, allowing for flexibility in customization based on use cases.
    Top Answer:I have built some rules that produce duplicate alerts two or three times. Therefore, these rules should be consolidated… more »
    Top Answer:We use Wazuh for the onboarding of both Windows and Linux machines, as well as for firewall and SIM configuration. The… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Microsoft 365 Defender, Microsoft Threat Protection, MS 365 Defender
    Cyvera, Cortex XDR, Palo Alto Networks Traps
    Learn More
    Overview

    Microsoft Defender XDR is a comprehensive security solution designed to protect against threats in the Microsoft 365 environment. 

    It offers robust security measures, comprehensive threat detection capabilities, and an efficient incident response system. With seamless integration with other Microsoft products and a user-friendly interface, it simplifies security management tasks. 

    Users have found it effective in detecting and preventing various types of attacks, such as phishing attempts, malware infections, and data breaches.

    Watch the Microsoft demo video here: Microsoft Defender XDR demo video.

    Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is the first threat detection and response software to combine both visibility across all types of data as well as autonomous machine learning analytics. Threat detection very often requires analysts to divide their attention among many different data streams. This platform unifies a vast variety of data flows, which allows analysts to assess threats from a single location. Users can now maintain a level of visibility that other threat detection programs simply cannot offer. This level of transparency lends itself to both quick identification of problems that arise and the equally quick development of a potential solution.

    Cortex XDR’s machine learning works on many different levels to detect and prevent threats. It is constantly scanning for threats and vulnerabilities. The solution can scan up to 5.4 billion IP addresses in three-quarters of an hour. This allows it to spot weak points in the system and notify administrators long before hackers can take advantage of vulnerabilities. Once the Artificial Intelligence (AI) discovers an issue or an area where an issue could potentially take place the system creates a log of the information and subsequently sends an alert to system administrators. The AI takes the information that it has gathered and uses it to assign threat levels to the issues that it detects. Following this, a human analyst will be assigned to manually assess the issue and deal with it accordingly. You can set it to automatically respond to the threat by isolating the issue while analysts investigate it.

    Benefits of Cortex XDR

    Some of Cortex XDR’s benefits include:

    • The use of advanced AI analytics, behavior analytics, and custom-made detection to detect advanced threats before they occur.
    • The ability to group similar threat alerts, reducing incoming alerts by as much as 98%. This allows analysts to avoid being overwhelmed by the volume of incoming alerts.
    • The ability to investigate threats as much as 8 times faster than would be possible with other software. The machine learning, when coupled with the unified data stream that Cortex XDR collects, significantly increases the ability to more quickly discover the root cause of a threat.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks software stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its ability to isolate threats while enabling them to be studied and the way that the software combines all of the data that it gathers into a single, more complete picture than other solutions offer.

    PeerSpot users note the effectiveness of these features. A network designer at a computer software company wrote, “The solution has a very helpful isolation feature. If any system gets compromised, with one click I can access the system and isolate it from other networks, and then go into further forensic investigation of the current threat without compromising anything else.”

    Jeff W., Vice President/CTO at Sinnott Wolach Technology Group, noted, “The ability to kind of stitch everything together and see the actual complete picture is very useful. I guess you'd call it a playbook. Some people call it the forensics analysis of what was happening on particular endpoints when they detected some malicious behavior, and what transpired before that to cause that. It is also very user friendly.”



    Wazuh is an enterprise-ready platform used for security monitoring. It is a free and open-source platform that is used for threat detection, incident response and compliance, and integrity monitoring. Wazuh is capable of protecting workloads across virtualized, on-premises, containerized, and cloud-based environments.

    It consists of an endpoint security agent and a management server. Additionally, Wazuh is fully integrated with the Elastic Stack, allowing users the ability to navigate through security alerts via a data visualization tool.

    • Wazuh’s agent can run on many different platforms, and is lightweight. It can successfully perform the tasks needed to detect threats in order to trigger responses automatically.
    • Wazuh manages the agents, can analyze agent data, and can scale horizontally.
    • Elastic Stack is where alerts are indexed and stored.

    Wazuh Capabilities

    Some of Wazuh’s most notable capabilities include:

    • Intrusion detection: Wazuh’s agents can detect hidden files, cloaked processes, or unregistered network listeners, as well as inconsistencies in system call responses. Wazuh’s server component uses a signature-based approach to intrusion detection, using its regular expression engine to analyze collected log data and look for indicators of compromise.

    • Log data analysis: Wazuh can read operating system and application logs, and securely forward them to a central manager for rule-based analysis and storage.

    • Integrity monitoring: File integrity monitoring can help identify changes in content, ownership, permissions, and attribute of files. Wazuh’s file integrity monitoring can be used in conjunction with threat intelligence.

    • Vulnerability detection: Wazuh agents can identify well-known vulnerable software so you can see where your weak spots are and take action before an attack can exploit them.

    • Configuration assessment: System and application configurations are monitored to make sure they are compliant with security policies. Periodic scans are used to detect applications that are known to be vulnerable, insecurely configured, or unpatched.
    • Incident response: Wazuh responds actively when active threats need to be addressed. It can perform countermeasures like blocking access to a system when a threat source is identified.

    • Regulatory compliance: Wazuh includes the security controls required to be compliant with industry regulations and standards.

    • Cloud security: Wazuh’s light-weight and multi-platform agents are commonly used to monitor cloud environments at the instance level. In addition, Wazuh helps monitor cloud infrastructure at an API level.

    • Security for containers: With Wazuh, you have increased security visibility into hosts and containers, allowing for easier detection of threats, anomalies, and vulnerabilities.

    Wazuh Benefits

    Some of the most valued benefits of Wazuh include:

    • No vendor lock-in
    • No license costs
    • Uses lightweight, multi-platform agents
    • Free community support

    Wazuh Offers

    • Annual support and maintenance
    • Assistance with deployment and configuration
    • Training and instructional hands-on courses

    Reviews From Real Users

    "It's very easy to integrate Wazuh with other environments, cloud applications, and on-prem applications. So, the advantage is that it's easy to implement and integrate with other solutions." - Robert C., IT Security Consultant at Microlan Kenya Limited

    The MITRE ATT&CK correlation is most valuable.” - Chief Information Security Officer at a financial services firm

    Sample Customers
    Accenture, Deloitte, ExxonMobil, General Electric, IBM, Johnson & Johnson and many others.
    CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
    Information Not Available
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company19%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Government11%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Government8%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Security Firm9%
    Government7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company15%
    Government8%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Comms Service Provider6%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company25%
    Comms Service Provider18%
    Security Firm14%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Comms Service Provider9%
    Financial Services Firm7%
    Government7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business44%
    Midsize Enterprise23%
    Large Enterprise33%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise57%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business41%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise37%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise56%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business54%
    Midsize Enterprise28%
    Large Enterprise18%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business32%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise48%
    Buyer's Guide
    Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs. Wazuh
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs. Wazuh and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    768,857 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is ranked 3rd in Extended Detection and Response (XDR) with 80 reviews while Wazuh is ranked 4th in Extended Detection and Response (XDR) with 38 reviews. Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is rated 8.4, while Wazuh is rated 7.4. 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 Wazuh writes "It integrates seamlessly with AWS cloud-native services". Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, CrowdStrike Falcon, Darktrace, Symantec Endpoint Security and Microsoft Defender for Cloud, whereas Wazuh is most compared with Elastic Security, Security Onion, Splunk Enterprise Security and AlienVault OSSIM. See our Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs. Wazuh report.

    See our list of best Extended Detection and Response (XDR) vendors.

    We monitor all Extended Detection and Response (XDR) 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.