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.
"Ability to get forensics details and also memory exfiltration."
"NGAV and EDR features are outstanding."
"It notifies us if there's any suspicious file on any PC. If any execution or similar kind of thing is happening, it just alerts us. It doesn't only alert. It also blocks the execution until we allow it. We check whether the execution is legitimate or not, and then approve it or keep it blocked. This gives us a little bit of control over this mechanism. Fortinet FortiEDR is also very straightforward and easy to maintain."
"Fortinet is very user-friendly for customers."
"Having all monitoring, response, tracking, and mitigation tools in one dashboard provides our analysts and SOC team with a comprehensive view at a glance."
"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."
"We have FortiEDR installed on all our systems. This protects them from any threats."
"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."
"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."
"Falcon's best feature is its detection and blocking of threats."
"The solution is silent and sits on your system as one single agent."
"I like the overall reports of this solution. They are crisp, and to the point."
"I have found the connection to search the hosts for detections very useful in CrowdStrike Falcon."
"The CS falcon agent is a lightweight agent compared with other agents of EDR products."
"The initial setup is a very fast process."
"We are happy with CloudStrike's ease of use and touch notification."
"Coming from an organization where the EDR wasn't strong, it has always been a case of basically searching through the information you already have and looking for something. It was basically trying to find the needle in a haystack. What the Defender platform does is that it reduces the size of the haystack, and it'll say that the needle is over here. Minutes matter, and it certainly zeros you in on the events that are concerning. It also simplifies the effort of trying to get some kind of correlation of behaviors or actions you see in the environment and confirming if something is benign or a threat."
"The most valuable feature is that we can use the solution right out of the box without too much configuration."
"It doesn't cause the slowness of the system, which is one of the reasons why I like it."
"Defender is stable, I haven't had any problems with viruses when using it, and it's easy to update."
"You have endpoint security to keep your devices safe. That's the feature that we're interested in."
"It is stable and very easy to use."
"It's a very complete application. I have all the controls in one site. I can track emails, attacks, and threats, and I can research information. I really like this configuration because I have all the information in place."
"It has Kusto Query Language (KQL), so we can use our own queries to find anything."
"I would like the solution to extend beyond endpoint protection and include other attack surfaces such as other network components."
"We find the solution to be a bit expensive."
"The solution is not stable."
"I haven't seen the use of AI in the solution."
"The EDR console should have more extensive reporting. You shouldn't need to purchase FortiAnalyzer. It should be included in the EDR part. The security adviser cloud platform could be improved with more options for exclusive or intensive rules for devices."
"We'd like to see more one-to-one product presentations for the distribution channels."
"We've had a lot of false positives; things incorrectly flagged that require manual configuration to allow. Even worse, after we allow a legitimate program, it sometimes gets flagged again after an update. This has caused a lot of extra work for my team."
"The only minor concern is occasional interference with desired programs."
"I have experience with a product called SentinelOne, which has a feature that allows for the customization of query languages. I would like to see such a feature for CloudStrike."
"The current database schema presents challenges and has potential for improvement."
"CrowdStrike costs a little more than its competitors."
"A year and a half ago or more, if you put in a support request by email, then it wasn't timely addressed. It could be a day to three days before you received a response, which was a bit frustrating. There was a lot of customer feedback around this issue, which has been greatly refined."
"We encounter occasional issues, such as when disabling network access for a host that uses CrowdStrike."
"The skillsets needed to run CrowdStrike Falcon are extensive if you want to get the most value out of the tool."
"It does take more time to scan than other solutions."
"The content-filtering features for children could be improved. We have young grandchildren aged 12 and 8. My daughter, their mother, wants to keep them from getting in trouble on the net. She looked at all these other solutions from Google, Microsoft, etc., and she couldn't figure out how to make any of those work. I told her that I bet CrowdStrike could handle this. Sure enough, CrowdStrike can do exactly that. It's the same solution that the Defense Department gets. It works, but it's a little complicated to implement. It could be simpler to set the policies."
"Microsoft Defender could be improved with features more like the McAfee ePO. It would be better if I had a console to get all the information for my endpoints. Maybe this is too much for it, but it would be better if it could handle those non-signature-based malicious codes or viruses."
"It should support non-Windows products better. Microsoft is now one of the leading vendors in the security area. So, they should be product-independent."
"Microsoft support could be more knowledgeable."
"I miss having an executive dashboard or a simple view for viewing things. Everything is extensive in this solution. Everything is configurable and manageable, but the environment of Microsoft 365 has about 13 administrative dashboards, and in each of the dashboards, there are a gazillion things to set up. It is good for a large enterprise, but for a 200-seat client, you need to see 5% of that."
"We would like more customization."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is effective for validating work, but not ideal for investigations."
"It is not very scalable from the eyes of an MSP because there is no dashboard that you can use to see all of your devices that have Windows Defender unless you have your own dashboard or an RMM tool to actually look at it. So, you might not get to know that a particular computer of a client is doing something, and it might have got a virus. That person might know that, but unless you set it up to actually send you the information, you won't get to know that. That's one of the things that is hard with Microsoft Defender. It is not made for the MSP world where you have one pane of glass to see all of your clients with Microsoft Defender on it unless your RMM tool already has that built-in and it can see the telemetry from Microsoft Defender."
"The initial setup can be a bit complex."
More Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Pricing and Cost Advice →
CrowdStrike Falcon is ranked 3rd in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 105 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is ranked 1st in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 182 reviews. CrowdStrike Falcon is rated 8.8, while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of CrowdStrike Falcon writes "Easy to set up with good behavior-based analysis but needs a single-click recovery option". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint writes "Eliminates the need to look at multiple dashboards by automatically providing one XDR dashboard to show the security score of each subscription". CrowdStrike Falcon is most compared with Microsoft Defender XDR, Darktrace, Trend Micro Deep Security, SentinelOne Singularity Complete and VMware Carbon Black Endpoint, whereas Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is most compared with Symantec Endpoint Security, Intercept X Endpoint, SentinelOne Singularity Complete, Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks and Fortinet FortiClient. See our CrowdStrike Falcon vs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint report.
See our list of best Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) vendors and best Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) 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.