We performed a comparison between ESET Endpoint Security 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: ESET Endpoint Security ultimately won out in this comparison. Our reviewers agree that ESET Endpoint Security is easy to install and easy to use. In addition, it has excellent customer support.
"Fortinet FortiEDR's firewalling, rule creation, monitoring, and inspection profiles are great."
"Fortinet FortiEDR's scalability is quite good, and you can add licenses to the solution."
"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."
"The console is easy to read. I also like the scanning part and the ability to move assets from one to the other."
"Fortinet is very user-friendly for customers."
"The most valuable feature is the analysis, because of the beta structure."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the ability to customize it and to reduce its size. It lets you run in a very small window in terms of memory and resources on legacy cash registers."
"The stability is very good."
"It can scale as well."
"I feel the solution to be beneficial in respect of features that I cannot find with SSTM's."
"ESET has regular updates, and it gives me good feedback. It's not too onerous like some of the products I've used in the past."
"The solution has very useful MDM features."
"The overall security capability of the product is pretty reliable."
"All of our devices are integrated with the solution."
"The dashboard is useful for management, and its cost for the features is hard to beat."
"It hasn't crashed a single time, so it is stable in that sense."
"The most important and the most relevant features of Defender for Endpoint are the malware and ransomware protection."
"The endpoint detection of threats is valuable. The initial detection of things like ransomware and viruses and being able to shut down machines immediately and stop a threat is valuable. We can stop a threat at a source versus allow it to propagate it across the network."
"The technical support from Microsoft is very good. We are part of the Microsoft Suite, and from being part of this we have consistent news regarding Microsoft Defender for Endpoint."
"Defender has very little impact on the end-user and the agent works quite well with a minimal impact on the client and server."
"The best thing I like about it is its interaction with the other Defender products. It provides the ability to push telemetry up. It gives me endpoint visibility and allows me to take automated actions."
"It is a straightforward setup."
"DFE organizational security posture has been a positive experience. We're a Microsoft house. It works. Once it's deployed and once it's configured, it works and our clients tend to be happy with it. I haven't really experienced anyone who has been so unsatisfied with the platform that they wanted to go a couple of different directions, that has never happened to me."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a robust platform."
"There's room for improvement in the quick response time and technical support for integration issues, especially when dealing with multiple vendors."
"The amount of usage, the number of details we get, or the number of options that can be tweaked is limited in comparison to that with other EDR solutions"
"We find the solution to be a bit expensive."
"We'd like to see more one-to-one product presentations for the distribution channels."
"Integration with Azure and SaaS provisioning tools could improve Fortinet FortiEDR."
"Cannot be used on mobile devices with a secure connection."
"Once, we had an event that was locked and blocked, but information about it came to us two or three days later."
"Detections could be improved."
"While the pricing is good, they could always lower it a bit."
"Data Leak Protection is is what we are searching for at the moment. It is not included with ESET."
"It would be nice to have more features in vulnerability scanning, which I believe will happen eventually."
"There are other features you can add on to help make the security stronger, however, they should offer better security even on a basic level."
"They need to improve licensing for VMs. When ESET is uninstalled from a VM, the seat stays on the license management server. We have to manually delete the seat from that server because it doesn't know how to handle it. I contacted exclusive ESET support here in Croatia and they told me there is no solution for this yet."
"It would be great to have VIP functions added to the solution in a future release."
"A few times, we have had problems with downloading an agent. We had to try multiple times and multiple uploads."
"It can be hard to set up if you need to customize it."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint can improve by providing more and different types of reports."
"I personally haven't experienced any pain points, but some of my coworkers feel that it isn't secure enough."
"The integration and effectiveness of email security could be better. It's already built-in to the solution and checks emails, scans the links they contain etc."
"The deployment of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint on Windows 10 is not quite so straightforward. This could be made easier."
"The scanning is slow when it is working with incoming emails."
"Other vendors provide a lot of customization when it comes to integration, which every big organization requires. No big organization depends on one particular tool. Defender lacks that at this point."
"It is inexpensive but could be cheaper like anything else."
"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."
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ESET Endpoint Protection Platform is ranked 9th in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 96 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is ranked 1st in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 182 reviews. ESET Endpoint Protection Platform is rated 8.2, while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of ESET Endpoint Protection Platform writes "Easy to set up with good security and rapidly improving capabilities". 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". ESET Endpoint Protection Platform is most compared with Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business, CrowdStrike Falcon, SentinelOne Singularity Complete, Check Point Harmony Endpoint and Fortinet FortiClient, whereas Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is most compared with Symantec Endpoint Security, Intercept X Endpoint, CrowdStrike Falcon, SentinelOne Singularity Complete and Fortinet FortiClient. See our ESET Endpoint Protection Platform vs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint report.
See our list of best Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) vendors, best Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) vendors, and best Anti-Malware Tools vendors.
We monitor all Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.