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.
"The ability to detonate a particular problem in a sandbox environment and understand what the effects are, is helpful. We're trying, for example, to determine, when people send information in, if an attachment is legitimate or not. You just have to open it. If you can do that in a secure sandbox environment, that's an invaluable feature. What you would do otherwise would be very risky and tedious."
"The most valuable feature is signature-based malware detection."
"The entirety of our network infrastructure is Cisco and the most valuable feature is the integration."
"If somebody has been compromised, the question always is: How has it affected other devices in the network? Cisco AMP gives you a very neat view of that."
"The threat Grid with the ability to observe the sandboxing, analyze, and perform investigations of different malicious files has been great."
"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."
"One of the best features of AMP is its cloud feature. It doesn't matter where the device is in regards to whether it's inside or outside of your network environment, especially right now when everybody's remote and taken their laptops home. You don't have to be VPNed into the environment for AMP to work. AMP will work anywhere in the world, as long as it has an Internet connection. You get protection and reporting with it. No matter where the device is, AMP has still got coverage on it and is protecting it. You still have the ability to manage and remediate things. The cloud feature is the magic bullet. This is what makes the solution a valuable tool as far as I'm concerned."
"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."
"This solution has a traditional antivirus, I believe that signature-based detection is most valuable."
"I find the main valuable feature to be the antivirus, it is very effective with removing viruses."
"The ability to push policies and also to restrict an installation or to restrict any form of threat within the policy has been quite useful."
"It's a very user-friendly product."
"The protection and device control features are the most valuable. I found its user interface and integration pretty good. It is very user friendly as compared to other products."
"We found the initial setup to be very straightforward."
"The solution has a very good endpoint feature."
"The solution is very lightweight and does not consume that much processor in terms of CPU utilization. The centralized management system is very good."
"Offers good protection."
"This product is flexible, and it is very easy to get updates from the Microsoft website."
"We like that it has a free version available."
"We are able to productively integrate with existing on-prem, hybrid, or cloud applications."
"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."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is scalable. Currently, we have 600,000 users in our organization."
"It is already integrated with Windows 10, so you don't need to worry about that."
"It is stable and very easy to use."
"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."
"The GUI needs improvement, it's not good."
"In Orbital, there are tons of prebuilt queries, but there is not a lot of information in lay terms. There isn't enough information to help us with what we're looking for and why we are looking for it with this query. There are probably a dozen queries in there that really focus on what I need to focus on, but they are not always easy to find the first time through."
"...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 one challenge that I see is the use of multiple endpoint protection platforms. For instance, we have AMP, but we also have Microsoft Windows Defender, System Center Endpoint Protection, and Microsoft Malware Protection Engine deployed. So, we have a bunch of different things that do the same thing. What winds up happening is, e.g., if I get an alert for a potential incident or malware and want to pull the file, I'll go to fetch the file to analyze it. But, one of these other programs has already gotten it, so the file has already been quarantined by another endpoint protection system. AMP doesn't realize that and the file fetch fails, then you're left wondering what's going on."
"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."
"It could be improved in connection with artificial intelligence and IoT."
"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."
"They can improve ransomware protection, and there should be cloud sandboxing for Mac."
"The initial setup of ESET Endpoint Security can be complicated when you get involved with encryption."
"The user interface of ESET Endpoint Security could be more user-friendly and more features could be added."
"ESET Endpoint Security should offer more integration with multi-attack frameworks."
"They recently released an EDR integration. I hope they have more AI or intelligence filtering on the EDR events. Even though it has already got AI, but it is quite a different thing. So, they still have room to improve on the EDR part. This is one small piece that they need to improve. Otherwise, it is just fine."
"Sometimes, ESET sends alerts within my own network that cause confusion. That is, it might warn about contamination, or that the VM has crashed, but it doesn't go further than that. It just shows me the alert and sometimes I am not sure what to do about it."
"They should have better support for different languages and auto-upgrading."
"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."
"We encountered some issues when we were trying to enable automatic updates from our group policy."
"Lowering the price would be an improvement."
"I personally haven't experienced any pain points, but some of my coworkers feel that it isn't secure enough."
"The reporting in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint should improve. The solution has limited features."
"The scanning is slow when it is working with incoming emails."
"There could be an increase in security for the solution."
"In India at least, it seems to be a bit more expensive than other options."
"In terms of improvement, they update the platform it seems quite a bit. Every month something is in a new spot or something changed somewhere. There should be less of that."
More Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Pricing and Cost Advice →
ESET Endpoint Security is ranked 16th in Endpoint Protection for Business (EPP) with 31 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is ranked 3rd in Endpoint Protection for Business (EPP) with 114 reviews. ESET Endpoint Security is rated 8.2, while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of ESET Endpoint Security writes "Good at detecting potentially dangerous websites, but the alerts can be confusing at times". 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". ESET Endpoint Security is most compared with SentinelOne, Sophos Intercept X, CrowdStrike Falcon, Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks and Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business, whereas Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is most compared with CrowdStrike Falcon, Symantec Endpoint Security, Sophos Intercept X, Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks and Malwarebytes. See our ESET Endpoint Security vs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint report.
See our list of best Endpoint Protection for Business (EPP) vendors.
We monitor all Endpoint Protection for Business (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.
