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CrowdStrike Falcon vs Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 11, 2026

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...
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
122
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (4th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (5th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (3rd), Ransomware Protection (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (1st)
CrowdStrike Falcon
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (3rd), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (1st)
Microsoft Defender External...
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Attack Surface Management (ASM) (14th), Microsoft Security Suite (33rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
CrowdStrike Falcon5.5%
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint6.4%
SentinelOne Singularity Endpoint4.4%
Other83.7%
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
Attack Surface Management (ASM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management3.0%
HackerOne4.1%
Darktrace3.8%
Other89.1%
Attack Surface Management (ASM)
 

Featured Reviews

ABHISHEK_SINGH - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Process Expert at A.P. Moller - Maersk
Gained full visibility and streamlined threat detection through behavior-based insights and AI integration
Initially, we got to have a lot of false positives when we onboarded, but nowadays it's quite smooth. We have fine-tuned our security policies and allowed different levels of policies to get rid of those false positives. Currently, we are getting a fairly good amount of incidents that are not false positives or benign, but actionable items. The process is streamlined. In the initial days, the operations used to get involved in a lot of benign and other activities, but now the process is streamlined. We are leveraging the auto-detection and remediation plans. The operations teams are now more involved in other business roles as well, not just looking into the logs and fetching out what's happening there. They have fixed a lot of things. Initially, they didn't have IAC code drift detection, cloud posture management, or security posture management, but they have those now. They purchased different vendors and did a merger with that. They have now Prisma Cloud that gets integrated and now they are working with Cortex Cloud. Everything that was negative has now been addressed, and the product altogether looks to be in a very better and mature shape now. Currently, it's more or less detecting the workloads with AI-based best practices. Since most organizations are consuming AI agents and other things, we are looking forward to seeing what other feature enhancements Palo Alto can support in that.
JW
Senior Security Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Centralized endpoint protection has strengthened compliance and accelerated incident response
There are a number of areas that I only touch a handful of times, but when I get in there, I realize why I don't do that. The main area would be within the support area. The support bot is not really as smart as you would expect it, especially in this day and age of LLM and other capabilities that I know CrowdStrike Falcon is already capable of doing. Additionally, I would appreciate a little bit more easy to read insights of some of the dashboards or maybe manipulation of the dashboards. It is still a little cumbersome to build custom dashboards and it's not as intuitive as you would think. Documentation is abysmal and needs to be improved dramatically. I know that there's a big effort to do this, however, even the new effort is honestly worse than it was before. Those are definitely major areas of improvement, just more in the usability of the features.
AndyChan3 - PeerSpot reviewer
General manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Enhanced visibility and exposes vulnerabilities but needs more integration
I am currently in the pilot stage of implementing Microsoft External Attack Surface Management (EASM). My organization is transitioning to a comprehensive track of Microsoft solutions, and we will move to full-scale production in another year, maybe Microsoft External Attack Surface Management…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It has absolutely improved the way our organization functions, we are more secure, it is giving us more peace of mind, and it has found malicious activity happening on our endpoints that probably would not have been detected if we didn't have it."
"When the pandemic started, Palo Alto came up with many solutions, which helped with the quick shift from on-premises to the cloud."
"It is easy to use."
"Its interface and pricing are most valuable, and it is better than other vendors in terms of security."
"We think that this product will help us grow, as it meets our needs currently and we can grow with it over time."
"The solution allows us to gain remote access without the user's knowledge and take the necessary actions on the device."
"The most valuable features are incident creation, policy-based protection, IP whitelisting, and device encryption. These are beneficial for endpoint and server security."
"The solution is a new generation XDR that has a lot of artificial intelligence modules."
"We are now able to find the root cause analysis on any threat. We can figure out where the issue came in versus just dealing with where it is at the moment."
"This solution has made the lives of the IT staff much easier, compared to the previous one."
"CrowdStrike Falcon has positively impacted my organization by helping stop many breaches, and they are very good at alerting and following and escalating during critical alerts."
"The most valuable feature is the indicator of compromise, which show you what file was either quarantined or removed."
"Since using CrowdStrike Falcon, I have seen a lot faster incident response actions, containment, and it helps me mitigate many threats automatically that I previously handled manually."
"CrowdStrike Falcon has positively impacted my organization by allowing fewer people to do more workloads, so it has saved us time, money, and effort."
"Probably the most valuable thing to me is the real-time response piece. The fact that I can connect to an endpoint as long as it is on the Internet, no matter where it is globally. I can remove files from the endpoint, drop files on the endpoint, stop processes, reboot it, run custom scripts, and deploy software. Pretty much no other tool can do all that."
"As an EDR tool, we can integrate log management and event management, and the solution deals with threats automatically, that's the advantage."
"It seems to be better at protecting from cyberattacks."
"Microsoft External Attack Surface Management helps improve the visibility of my exposed vulnerabilities and provides an overview of my security posture across the globe."
 

Cons

"Although I would say this product is highly-rated, it could probably do more because nothing does everything that you want."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is a very good product, but financially, it is very expensive, so the company should look into that area."
"I have seen lagging with Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks. There was one time when we faced a threat actor trying to gain access to our system. When our team utilized the tool, we were all on the same dashboard and we faced a lag issue at that time of around five minutes, which was quite significant."
"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."
"This product has not improved my organization - in fact, we are in the process of moving back to another product as a result of Cortex's horrible impact on system performance."
"In terms of areas of improvement, we have not completed our review of the product. We're also looking at other products. So, it's a little bit hard to tell what could be different because we have not completed the review of this product, but based on our experience so far, its implementation is quite complex."
"The setup is quite easy. We had appropriate support from the manager. One thing that was missing was the integration part."
"We had a problem with getting our older endpoints up to date, but their newest updates have been really good. I've been pleased with it in terms of what our needs are. It's doing what we want it to do."
"We sometimes get false positives."
"I would assess the stability and reliability of CrowdStrike Falcon as being awesome, other than the great CrowdStriking. I have experienced downtime, crashes, or performance issues."
"The main area of improvement for CrowdStrike Falcon is making the names of the products and the licensing a little less confusing, as it can be quite confusing to know what the product stack is."
"There is room for improvement in managing multiple customer IDs."
"If CrowdStrike can further expand its support for XDR compatibility, that would give it an edge over all the other competing new products."
"I would like to see a more accurate integration and an option to check the local machine."
"The solution isn't known in my market. The brand isn't as recognizable. Their shortcomings are more on the marketing side."
"CrowdStrike Falcon could be made a little more user-friendly."
"Further integration across different Microsoft products would be an improvement."
"With Microsoft, support is always crazy, it's not easy to get support."
"The integration is not as seamless compared to competitors like Palo Alto."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the solution is high for the license and in general."
"Cortex XDR's pricing is ok."
"Cortex XDR’s pricing is very reasonable."
"In terms of the cost Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is very expensive because we are a Mexican company and when you translate dollars to pesos the cost is very high. The solution is very expensive for Mexican companies. I understand that they have international prices, but I do not think it offsets the price enough for many companies in countries, such as Mexico. The amount it is reduced is not a massive percentage."
"It is cost-effective compared to similar solutions. It fits for the small businesses through to the big businesses."
"The pricing seems fair, and I do like the licensing model. You use wherever they are, and it is elastic."
"Our license will require renewal in August, after which the maintenance will continue as usual."
"It's about $55 per license on a yearly basis."
"The solution's pricing is great for us."
"The cost of CrowdStrike Falcon in Latin America seems high relative to the economic conditions in the region."
"The solution isn't very costly; it's affordable."
"There is no license required to use this solution."
"It is expensive compared to SentinelOne, but as the market leader, it is worth it."
"When it comes to licensing, customers can choose a bundle or select licences based on the specific features they would like access to. This solution comes with premium pricing. It is approximately 20 to 30% more expensive than competing solutions."
"Crowdstrike Falcon is relatively cheap."
"The pricing is not bad. It's on the higher end of the market, but you get what you pay for."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
14%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
13%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business50
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise57
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business62
Midsize Enterprise54
Large Enterprise103
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Cortex XDR by Palo Alto vs. Sentinel One
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto vs. SentinelOne SentinelOne offers very detailed specifics with regard to risks or attacks. ...
Comparing CrowdStrike Falcon to Cortex XDR (Palo Alto)
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto vs. CrowdStrike Falcon Both Cortex XDR and Crowd Strike Falcon offer cloud-based solutions th...
How is Cortex XDR compared with Microsoft Defender?
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a cloud-delivered endpoint security solution. The tool reduces the attack surface,...
How does Crowdstrike Falcon compare with Darktrace?
Both of these products perform similarly and have many outstanding attributes. CrowdStrike Falcon offers an amazing u...
How does Microsoft Defender for Endpoint compare with Crowdstrike Falcon?
The CrowdStrike solution delivers a lot of information about incidents. It has a very light sensor that will never pu...
Is Crowdstrike Falcon better than Trend Micro Deep Security?
I like that Crowdstrike allows me to easily correlate data between my firewalls. What’s most useful for my needs is t...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management?
Further integration across different Microsoft products would be an improvement. Introduction of more AI automation i...
What is your primary use case for Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management?
I am currently in the pilot stage of implementing Microsoft External Attack Surface Management (EASM). My organizatio...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Cyvera, Cortex XDR, Palo Alto Networks Traps
CrowdStrike Falcon XDR, CrowdStrike Falcon Threat Intelligence, CrowdStrike Identity Protection, CrowdStrike Falcon Surface, CrowdStrike Falcon Platform
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
Information Not Available
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