We performed a comparison between Crowdstrike Falcon and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: All other things being equal, Crowdstrike Falcon is the favorite when it comes to both ease of deployment and customer service and support.
"The threat Grid with the ability to observe the sandboxing, analyze, and perform investigations of different malicious files has been great."
"appreciate the File Trajectory feature, as it's excellent for an analyst or mobile analyst. I can track everything that happens on our server from my PC or device. Integration with SecureX is a welcome feature because it connects Cisco's integrated security portfolio with our complete infrastructure. Sandboxing is helpful, and integration with the Cisco environment is excellent as we use many of their products, and that's very valuable for us."
"Definitely, the best feature for Cisco Secure Endpoint is the integration with Talos. On the backend, Talos checks all the signatures, all the malware, and for any attacks going on around the world... Because Secure Endpoint has a connection to it, we get protected by it right then and there."
"The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this product is that there is a lot more malware slipping through my email filters than I expected."
"Device Trajectory is one of the most valuable features. We're able to dig in and really understand how things came to be and where to focus our efforts."
"It is extensive in terms of providing visibility and insights into threats. It allows for research into a threat, and you can chart your progress on how you're resolving it."
"The most valuable feature is its threat protection and data privacy, including its cyber attack and data protection, as we need to cover and protect data on user devices."
"The integration with other Cisco products seemed to be really effective. We had Umbrella in place and we were using AnyConnect as well as Firepower. Once a threat was detected, being able to do the threat lookups and the live tracking was really useful."
"The most valuable feature of CrowdStrike Falcon is its accuracy."
"It has definitely minimized resources. When everything was on-prem, there was a lot more work maintaining it. One of the big value tickets: I don't have lists of hundreds of exceptions for certain applications that I have to maintain, add, delete, and move. The very nature of the product has lessened my workload considerably."
"The solution is silent and sits on your system as one single agent."
"Scalability hasn't been an issue for us."
"I like the dashboard nature of it. Everything is clickable, linkable, and information is easy to obtain and find. How it presents that information is probably the biggest win as far as the information correlation aspect. The presentation of it is very good."
"Since we deployed CrowdStrike, the network has become much calmer, and we now understand the sources of infections, which helps us prevent them from spreading."
"CrowdStrike Falcon has done an excellent job at detecting breaches. It has allowed us to stay in business and keep our systems up."
"As long as the machine is connected to the Internet, and CrowdStrike is running, then it will be on and we will have visibility; no VPNing in or making some type of network connection. CrowdStrike always there and running in the background; for us, that is big. We wanted something that could give us data as long as the machines connected to the Internet and be almost invisible to the employees."
"We had Norton Antivirus before, and with Norton, we didn't have a way to centrally manage a lot of features. Defender allowed us to deploy it from our Office 365 admin console. That is probably the biggest thing that made us go with Defender."
"The antivirus features are very useful."
"The solution can scale as needed."
"The most important and the most relevant features of Defender for Endpoint are the malware and ransomware protection."
"The virus scanning capability is excellent, and it feeds all the logs into the Microsoft 365 Defender portal, making them easy to search for."
"What I found most valuable in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is that it's out-of-the-box, which brings more value to the customer. The technical support for the product is also one of the best parts, because it's good, in terms of the product knowledge of the technical engineers."
"The intelligence mechanisms are good."
"You have endpoint security to keep your devices safe. That's the feature that we're interested in."
"It could be improved in connection with artificial intelligence and IoT."
"In terms of the user experience, if the UX design could be much simpler [that would improve things]... if they could make it more intuitive for someone who is not an engineer so that they still can read what's going on in their webpage and understand, that would be something."
"The GUI needs improvement, it's not good."
"This product has issues with the number of false positives that it reports."
"In Orbital, there are tons of prebuilt queries, but there is not a lot of information in lay terms. There isn't enough information to help us with what we're looking for and why we are looking for it with this query. There are probably a dozen queries in there that really focus on what I need to focus on, but they are not always easy to find the first time through."
"The thing I hate the most, which they have not fixed, is when it creates duplicate entries within a console. If you have a computer and you upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10, or you upgrade your agent from version 6 to 7, it creates a new instance in there instead of updating the information. Instead of paying a license for one computer, I have to license two computers until I manually go in, search for all the duplicate entries, and clean them out myself."
"They could improve the main dashboard to more clearly show me the things that I want to see. When I open the dashboard right now, I see a million things and they are not always the things that I need."
"An easier way to do deduplication of machines, or be alerted to the fact that there's more than one instance of a machine, would be useful... That way you could get a more accurate device count, so you're not having an inflated number."
"CrowdStrike Falcon could improve by adding manual scanning or serverless scanning. It is not available at this time."
"It would be nice if the dashboard had some more information upfront, and looked a little better."
"The overall cost of CrowdStrike Falcon could be reduced."
"There are some aspects of the UI that could use some improvement, e.g., working in groups. I build a group, then I have to manually assign prevention policies, update policies, etc., but there is no function to copy that group. So, if I wanted to make a subgroup for troubleshooting or divide workstations into groups of laptops and desktops, then I have to manually build a brand new group. I can't just copy a build from one to another. Additionally, in order to do any work within a group, I have to first do the work on the respective prevention policy page or individual policy page, then remove the group if the group is assigned to a different prevention policy, remove the prevention policy, and then add the new one in. So, it can get a little hectic. It would be easier if I could add and remove things from the group page rather than having to go into the policy pages to do it."
"Sometimes CrowdStrike changes the GUI, and they need to be better at informing us and providing guidance concerning that."
"I would love to see more investment in Insight because CrowdStrike have an opportunity to potentially displace some of the vulnerability management vendors with the visibility they can see over time. I want to see them continue to evolve, e.g., what other things can they disrupt which are operational things we have to continue to do as an organization."
"We would like to be able to perform on-demand scanning, rather than relying on the scheduler."
"The management of the solution could improve."
"It's not quite a mature solution just yet. It needs more time to grow and develop."
"Right now, there's a portal for Azure, portals for Microsoft Office, and portals for endpoints. It would be good to have only one portal and integrate everything."
"The deployment of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint on Windows 10 is not quite so straightforward. This could be made easier."
"The second major area for improvement involves enhanced capabilities for different operating systems or platforms. That is, even though we have coverage for different operating systems or platforms such as Linux, we don't get all of the controls and enhanced capabilities that are available with Windows devices."
"I would like MDE to have the ability to isolate a certain amount of time on the timeline."
"On the Mac OS platform, there is no parity between Windows and Mac OS. The solution is very feature-rich and very well-integrated into Windows, and I guess baked into Windows 10 and Windows 11. Whereas, on the Mac OS platform, there is still some work there to give it a more feature-reach platform."
"The price, in general, could always be a little bit cheaper."
"With the XDR dashboard, when you're doing an investigation and you're drilling down to obtain further details it tends to open many different tabs that take you away from your main tabs. You can end up having 10 tabs open for one investigation. This is another area for improvement because you can end up getting lost in the multiple tabs. Therefore, the central console can be improved so that it does not take you to several different pages for each investigation."
More Crowdstrike Falcon Endpoint Security and XDR Pricing and Cost Advice →
More Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Pricing and Cost Advice →
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Crowdstrike Falcon Endpoint Security and XDR is ranked 2nd in EPP (Endpoint Protection for Business) with 56 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is ranked 1st in EPP (Endpoint Protection for Business) with 121 reviews. Crowdstrike Falcon Endpoint Security and XDR is rated 8.6, while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Crowdstrike Falcon Endpoint Security and XDR writes "Speeds up the data collection for our phishing playbooks dramatically". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint writes "Enables ingestion of events directly into your SIEM/SOAR, but requires integration with all Defender products to work optimally". Crowdstrike Falcon Endpoint Security and XDR is most compared with SentinelOne, Darktrace, Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks, Trend Micro Deep Security and Trend Micro XDR, whereas Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is most compared with Sophos Intercept X, Symantec Endpoint Security, SentinelOne, Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks and Check Point Harmony Endpoint. See our Crowdstrike Falcon Endpoint Security and XDR vs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint report.
See our list of best EPP (Endpoint Protection for Business) vendors and best EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) vendors.
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The CrowdStrike solution delivers a lot of information about incidents. It has a very light sensor that will never push your machine hardware to "test", you don't have the usual "scan now" feature but on the platform, you can drill down the events to find the starter of a blocked event.
It does have basic features to whitelist programs and paths, does show you information about what kind of threat was blocked, gives you information about user logged, machine details (SO, version, serial, Mac Address, Local and WAN IP,...) and grants you with the time, the file that executed the event, allows you to group devices and define exclusion, detection, response policies based on them.
It does allow you to create specific profiles for each type of user like helpdesk analysts, managers, etc (with different access, etc).
The solution is pretty good, actually and I'm pretty happy with it. I don't have experience with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint but will do in a couple of months to update this. =]
Depends on your budget and on the conditions of a Microsoft license. If you have an M365 license (like E3 or E5), Microsoft is cheaper.
In terms of functionality, CrowdStrike is better.