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.
"Among the most valuable features are the exclusions. And on the scalability side, we can integrate well with the SIEM orchestration engine and a number of applications that are proprietary or open source."
"The visibility and insight this solution gives you into threats is pretty granular. It has constant monitoring. You can get onto the device trajectory to look at a threat, but you can also see what happened prior to the threat. You can see what happened after the threat. You can see what other applications were incorporated into the execution of the threat. For example, you have the event, but you see that the event was launched by Google Chrome, which was launched by something else. Then, after the event, something else was launched by whatever the threat was. Therefore, it gives you great detail, a timeline, and continuity of events leading up to whatever the incident is, and then, after. This helps you understand and nail down what the threat is and how to fix it."
"Any alert that we get is an actionable alert. Immediately, there is information that we can just click through, see the point in time, what happened, what caused it, and what automatic actions were taken. We can then choose to take any manual actions, if we want, or start our investigation. We're no longer looking at digging into information or wading through hundreds of incidents. There's a list which says where the status is assigned, e.g., under investigation or investigation finished. That is all in the console. It has taken away a lot of the administration, which we would normally be doing, and integrated it into the console for us."
"It doesn't impact the devices. It is an agent-based solution, and we see no performance knock on cell phones. That was a big thing for us, especially in the mobile world. We don't see battery degradation like you do with other solutions which really drain the battery, as they're constantly doing things. That can shorten the useful life of a device."
"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."
"Another of my favorite features is called the Device Trajectory, where it shows everything that's going on, on a computer. It shows the point in time when a virus is downloaded, so you can see if the user was surfing the internet or had a program open. It shows every running process and file access on the computer and saves it like a snapshot when it detects something malicious. It also has a File Trajectory, so you can even see if that file has been found on any of your other computers that have AMP."
"I'm only using the AMP (advanced malware protection) which is protecting my file system from all the malicious things that might happen. It should protect all kinds of things that might happen on the servers, things that I cannot see."
"Integration is a key selling factor for Cisco security products. We have a Cisco Enterprise Agreement with access to Cisco Email Security, Cisco Firepower, Cisco Stealthwatch, Cisco Talos, Cisco Threat Grid, Cisco Umbrella, and also third-party solutions. This is key to our security and maximizing operations. Because we do have the Email Security appliance and it is integrated with Threat Response, we have everything tied together. Additionally, we are using the Cisco SecureX platform, as we were a beta test for that new solution. With SecureX, we are able to pull all those applications into one pane for visibility and maintenance. This greatly maximizes our security operations."
"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."
"The feature that I find to be the most valuable, is being able to look at the system analysis and being able to baseline what is installed on the system."
"The OverWatch is the most valuable feature to me. It's a 24x7 monitoring service, and when they see anything suspicious in my environment, they will investigate."
"CrowdStrike Falcon is a very light solution. It does not use too much processor or RAM."
"The most valuable feature is that we don't need to re-image machines as much as we had to."
"The 10 hours a week that we are freeing up from having to manage and monitor our AV solution has really allowed us to focus on other areas of the business. This has been a huge return on investment."
"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."
"Cyberattack detection is very good. We use it for detecting different vulnerabilities, such as ransomware, virus, and malware. It is a good product today when compared to Symantec that we used previously."
"Auto-remediation: When the product sees malware, it resolves the issue immediately. This protects the machine."
"It's a Microsoft product; it's easier to deploy this product than other options."
"A few years ago, when I was using a different product, I was affected by a virus that destroyed everything. Since using Microsoft Defender, I have not had this kind of problem."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has been secure and there is zero maintenance required because it updates with Microsoft Windows."
"The solution is highly scalable."
"It captures data through machine learning, which is built-in on the back-end. It also provides built-in analytics and a threat intelligence feature. It is a one-stop solution that doesn't require an antivirus because it comes prebuilt into Windows 10."
"It shows us the risky sign-ins, and if a user's password has been compromised."
"It is already integrated with Windows 10, so you don't need to worry about that."
"The connector updates are very easily done now, and that's improving. Previously, the connector had an issue, where almost every time it needed to be updated, it required a machine reboot. This was always a bit of an inconvenience and a bug. Because with a lot of software now, you don't need to do that and shouldn't need to be rebooting all the time."
"The room for improvement would be on event notifications. I have mine tuned fairly well. I do feel that if you subscribe to all the event notification types out-of-the-box, or don't really go through and take the time to filter out events, the notifications can become overwhelming with information. Sometimes, when you're overwhelmed with information, you just say, "I'm not going to look at anything because I'm receiving so much." I recommend the vendor come up with a white paper on the best practices for event notifications."
"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."
"We had a lot of noise at the beginning, and we had to turn it down based on exclusions, application whitelisting, and excluding unknown benign applications. Cisco should understand the need for continuous updates on the custom Cisco exclusions and the custom applications that come out-of-the-box with the AMP for Endpoints."
"We have had some problems with updates not playing nice with our environment. This is important, because if there is a new version, we need to test it thoroughly before it goes into production. We cannot just say, "There's a new version. It's not going to give us any problems." With the complexity of the solution using multiple engines for multiple tasks, it can sometimes cause performance issues on our endpoints. Therefore, we need to test it before we deploy. That takes one to three days before we can be certain that the new version plays nice with our environment."
"...the greatest value of all, would be to make the security into a single pane of glass. Whilst these products are largely integrated from a Talos perspective, they're not integrated from a portal perspective. For example, we have to look at an Umbrella portal and a separate AMP portal. We also have to look at a separate portal for the firewalls. If I could wave a magic wand and have one thing, I would put all the Cisco products into one, simple management portal."
"The GUI needs improvement, it's not good."
"I would like to see integration with Cisco Analytics."
"The price is too high."
"CrowdStrike Suites and the way that it bundles things can be a bit challenging. It should be easier to integrate with the other stuff that they sell or be included with what they sell. We have one piece, then they are talking about another piece on vulnerability management all of the sudden, and we don't own that piece. We can see it in the console, but nothing shows up. It simply appears within the tool as an option, but we can't use it without purchasing it."
"We can do a threat analysis of any machine at any time, but that threat analysis is very limited."
"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."
"If we have a dashboard capability to uninstall agents, I think that would be great."
"It would be nice if the dashboard had some more information upfront, and looked a little better."
"Any kind of integration that you want to do, such as using the API to connect to a SIEM, is complex and it will be expensive to do."
"This solution could be improved with greater scope for admins to make changes to the solution."
"We encountered some issues when we were trying to enable automatic updates from our group policy."
"With regards to the interface, a challenge I found was that there was not enough documentation on how to tune it. I had to read multiple sources on the internet to learn how to configure the tool appropriately."
"It would be helpful if they included XDR features, on top of the EDR functionality."
"The anti-ransomware features need to be improved upon."
"I want Microsoft Defender to have the ability to deal with some issues automatically, so I don't need to address that issue manually."
"It can be more secure."
"The detection of viruses could be a little bit better."
"The solution could be more friendly for end-users, with different type of scans or scheduled scans for it."
More Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Pricing and Cost Advice →
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CrowdStrike Falcon is ranked 1st in Endpoint Protection for Business (EPP) with 51 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is ranked 3rd in Endpoint Protection for Business (EPP) with 114 reviews. CrowdStrike Falcon is rated 8.8, while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of CrowdStrike Falcon 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 is most compared with SentinelOne, Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks, Darktrace, Carbon Black CB Defense and Fortinet FortiEDR, whereas Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is most compared with Symantec Endpoint Security, Sophos Intercept X, Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks, SentinelOne and Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business. See our CrowdStrike Falcon vs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint report.
See our list of best Endpoint Protection for Business (EPP) vendors, best Anti-Malware Tools 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.