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Deep Instinct Prevention Platform vs Microsoft Defender for Endpoint comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 9, 2024

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

Deep Instinct Prevention Pl...
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
40th
Ranking in Anti-Malware Tools
21st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Microsoft Defender for Endp...
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
1st
Ranking in Anti-Malware Tools
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
197
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (4th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (3rd), Microsoft Security Suite (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) category, the mindshare of Deep Instinct Prevention Platform is 0.7%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is 10.4%, down from 14.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
 

Featured Reviews

Elena Yau - PeerSpot reviewer
Prevention, in advance, saves us remediation time
We have a PHI (protected health information) committee, and some of the things that we review on a weekly basis are incidents. For example, if there was malware or adware or some kind of phishing attempt, or even ransomware, we would have to investigate and see if there was any PHI impact. We've seen small things because some kind of adware made its way through the browser from some malicious link, and it's really hard to prevent those. We're putting more levels of filtering around that. There are some product development ideas that we have been working on alongside the DI team, and they've been super helpful. There are definitely a lot more little areas of improvement for the interface. Also, we have talked with the DI team about adding the forensic piece, which is what we do a lot. That would be added value and they've just recently provided more individuals to think about the roadmap. That's part of their strategy and one of the good features that they want to bring on. Hopefully, they can bring that to fruition and that will ease our workflow a little bit more. The additional predictive and prevention capabilities in the 3.0 version, that don't require special rules and configuration, help our organization. The only caveat is that when things get done automatically, I would appreciate more logging of what's happening in the background, if it is doing some kind of intervention. If we need to do some forensics, we should be able to backtrack from the log that gets uploaded to our cloud instance and see, forensically, what the root cause was. We should be able to see what instigated that trigger by DI and what exactly was done. That's a missing piece. It does a good job of preventing, but then we don't know what were the symptoms of the prevention. Let's say that there was like a PowerShell block. We'll see an indicator on the dashboard and we'll look at the logs and investigate. Sometimes we find that the logs that are captured locally on the endpoint itself are not very thorough. We were coached through our training with DI that, when troubleshooting, the DI team would always ask for the logs from the endpoint. We know what we need to do to look at something. But the logging for DI doesn't capture everything. There are some things that are missing. When it comes to root-cause analysis, or kill-chain analysis, and figuring out exactly what happened, it's very hard to do that right now on the product. I have used Carbon Black before and they're pretty good with the forensic analysis. That does save some efforts of my one engineer and myself when we have to go through the PHI committee. Right now, with Di, that feels like a blind spot. Another area for development is making the license clean-up a little bit easier. We always have to manually uninstall agents. If there were some way to remove the licensing and do better license management on the platform, that would help my team as well.
John Rallo - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers excellent visibility into vulnerabilities and the attack surface itself
Attack surface reduction and limiting attack surface vectors are valuable features. It's helpful to isolate specific devices and get super granular with the features they offer. The visibility into the attack surface is good. It gets highly granular. I don't work on that side, but the people who do tell me they get more visibility.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The support is very good. They reply and respond very quickly."
"Instead of having features like rollback and after-event actionable stuff, the whole premise and the context of the solution is to actually prevent these malicious attacks from happening to begin with.... The ability to prevent threats is the most appealing aspect. It absolutely, 100 percent helps with real-time prevention of unknown malware. That's the strength of the product."
"Its false positives are very low, because the behavior analysis engine double checks them."
"Deep Instinct complements the solutions we already have. You don't need to rip and replace any antivirus or endpoint that you have. It's easy to use and it's easy to have it side-by-side with other solutions. That makes it really easy to have an additional level of protection, rather than to hassle with doing solution migration."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The most important thing is that it is for prevention. It prevents attacks of any type of malware. Normally, what we've seen in other products is that they are not for prevention. They isolate a possible threat that they don't understand or know about, and then they check it with our database to see if it needs any correction or elimination. This means that the threat is already inside a customer's base, whereas Deep Instinct prevents a threat from getting in. Prevention is basically done by an agent in each installation, PCU, or product. An agent has its own intelligence to be able to detect if it should stop a threat or not. It has been taught. It is like a brain that has been taught to react according to any possible threat. Deep Instinct is very light. It doesn't take too much CPU attention or memory. It doesn't slow down the performance. You don't really realize any change in the performance, which makes it very different from other solutions. They are usually heavy for the users."
"Deep Instinct’s prevention-first approach to stopping unknown ransomware and malware is the reason why we purchased the product. The pre-execution versus post-execution is a big piece for us where it is able to stop something before it even hits the box or desktop. That was one of the big reasons why we went with Deep Instinct."
"It has the lowest false-positive ratio that I have come across. I have only had one which was a legitimate file that I had to whitelist. It was for one of the applications I was trying to install and integrate. But the false positive ratio is very low."
"It depends on the licensing. Most of the customers have got at least a 365 E3 license, and they can use most of the features of Windows 10 Defender. So, anyone who has got an enterprise license can start using those features. Some of the customers have got E5 licenses, and they can use all advanced features. Customers with E5 licenses use the advanced site protection (ATP) features and web content filtering without going via a proxy, which gives the benefit of replacing the proxy. They can get the benefit of MCAS and integration with Intune and the endpoint manager. It is a kind of single platform for all 365 technologies. It helps customers in managing everything through a unified portal."
"It was quite important to have extra security on our mobile platform because of geopolitical situations, as we are located close to some countries that represent a concern. Defender for Endpoint allows us automatic resolutions if a unit is compromised or if a user clicks a malicious link."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has significantly impacted our security posture."
"It's pretty easy to use, works with compliance issues, and is reliable."
"We are a Microsoft shop, and Defender is a Microsoft solution that provides some security at a reasonable cost."
"Defender's analytics are much better than CrowdStrike's."
"It's great for investigating what's happening on a machine. They show a whole bunch of machine timeline events that are related to a security incident. They have quite good details on the things related to threat and vulnerability management, such as any weakness that has been disclosed publicly, assets that are exposed, and if there is an exploit active in the wild for that vulnerability. It can provide you with all such information, which is cool."
"We use Microsoft Defender for the antivirus."
 

Cons

"There's an issue in the installation process where you can't install it unless you disable the built-in Windows Bitdefender antivirus. So, you have to manually disable Microsoft Bitdefender in order to install Deep Instinct. So, that makes it impossible to do a network rollout unless you manually visit each computer, which is ridiculous."
"I think it's probably the administration, especially the administration platform, which could be improved in the solution. It's clunky and hard to navigate, especially for inexperienced technicians."
"The interface on the endpoint could be a little more descriptive and more valuable. It doesn't always tell you the data you need to see. Improvement there would be very helpful."
"If the client is working remotely and doesn't have a VPN then the deployment is difficult to do."
"The Management Console is not localized."
"I would like a little more training for the admins."
"Due to the nature of deep learning, it’s sometimes difficult to determine why the AI model has blocked a specific file, although this has improved over time."
"I would like to see improvement in the user interface so that the user has more control. For example, it would be good if a user could change their grouping if they want to be part of another group. Or if I want to right-click and scan a specific file that I just imported, that would be helpful. Sometimes you just want to do an extra scan to make sure you're safe."
"The management console is something that can be improved."
"The solution could use improvement on the interface."
"It needs to improve the cybersecurity for lateral movements. For example, when a hacker tries to enter a machine, they try to get the password by doing a lateral movement."
"It would be helpful if they offered video tutorial guides."
"I would like to have additional features such as DNS lookup, which would help for detecting malicious sites."
"If they integrate with the EDR then it will benefit this solution."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint's licensing is confusing. It has conflicting information on the website. We also faced integration issues with other systems. It makes laptops slower than traditional antivirus systems."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint can have more options and more AI capabilities in the future, because everything keeps changing."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is a little bit expensive but we are satisfied with DI's performance."
"In comparison to the other products out there, it's exceptionally competitively priced. When you consider the lower administrative overhead that it facilitates, it's an absolute value."
"One thing about their licensing program that I like is that just one covers the server as well as on the endpoint as well as mobile devices. There is no complexity in calculating how many SKUs I need for mobile, for laptop, for desktop, and for servers. It's very simple and that makes it much easier to budget."
"There is a need for customers of the product to pay towards the licensing costs of the tool."
"If I include the false positive rate and the detection rate in the comparison, Deep Instinct is worth its price."
"We are a nonprofit. The MSP had provides pretty decent nonprofit rates for us. This was one of the key factors that made us choose Deep Instinct over its competitors who were significantly more expensive."
"There are no additional costs on the price, and our company has a support contract, which bundles in those services anyway."
"Their pricing is very competitive. It is good, fair, and a lot cheaper than what we were doing with Cylance."
"The solution comes free with Microsoft Windows 10."
"The cost is high for E5 licenses, but if we go with the E3 license, most of the features are not covered."
"Even if you are not registered as a not-for-profit, the offering that they have is definitely worth consideration. This is in the sense that the E5 stack just gives you so many benefits. You get your entire productivity suite through Microsoft 365 apps. You get all your security and identity protection. You get the Defender for Endpoint and Defender for Identity. You get the cloud access security broker as well. You get Azure Active Directory Premium P2, which gives you so many good things that you can configure and deploy. You don't have to configure them on day one, but you have access to so many different tools that will protect your data, security, endpoints, and identities that you could build out a security strategy 18 months long, and slowly work your way through it, based on what you have available to you through your license."
"The solutions price could be cheaper."
"You do not need to pay any additional costs for antivirus and anti-malware solutions for endpoint protection."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint can be costly as a standalone solution."
"It is free."
"The solution is free and comes with Windows."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Deep Instinct?
The product offers integration capabilities and is also easy to use.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Deep Instinct?
There is a need for customers of the product to pay towards the licensing costs of the tool.
What needs improvement with Deep Instinct?
The solution's stability is good. If the tool was able to provide fine-tuning capabilities from the product's end depending on the environment of its user, then it would be a good improvement in 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, applies behavioral-based endpoint protection and response, and includes risk-ba...
Which offers better endpoint security - Symantec or Microsoft Defender?
We use Symantec because we do not use MS Enterprise products, but in my opinion, Microsoft Defender is a superior solution. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a cloud-delivered endpoint security s...
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 push your machine hardware to "test", you don't have the usual "scan now" feature ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Microsoft Defender ATP, Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection, MS Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender Antivirus
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Petrofrac, Metro CSG, Christus Health
Find out what your peers are saying about Deep Instinct Prevention Platform vs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
863,901 professionals have used our research since 2012.