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Guardz vs Microsoft Defender for Endpoint comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
115
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (4th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (4th), Ransomware Protection (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (1st)
Guardz
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
71st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Email Security (40th), Data Loss Prevention (DLP) (56th), Ransomware Protection (16th)
Microsoft Defender for Endp...
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
212
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (1st), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (5th), Anti-Malware Tools (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) category, the mindshare of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is 3.7%, down from 3.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Guardz is 0.5%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is 5.6%, down from 10.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint5.6%
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks3.7%
Guardz0.5%
Other90.2%
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
 

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.
Steve Bowtell - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing Director at Cyber Active
Exceptionally easy to integrate and covers a multitude of cybersecurity issues
The solution's interface appears very simple, but it is very complicated in the back end. So, it removes all the complications that an MSP or an MSSP would normally have. The solution's maintenance depends on whether you run it like an MDR platform where you provide the detection response part for the customer. That would normally be the MSP part. Sometimes, you have customers who are just happy to get an email and tell them what the problem is, and they fix it themselves. If there's no in-house expertise, the MSP or the MSSP can do the maintenance. If there's in-house expertise, it's just a matter of advising them. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.
Robert Arbuckle - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Analyst III at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Automatically isolates threats and integrates with logging to reduce response time
Overall, I would evaluate the Microsoft support level that I receive at probably about a seven, but that depends on the day. It has been spotty. We have had issues where the urgency level of the Microsoft support is not as high as ours, especially during a data breach or potential data breach situation. We have had issues with some of the offshore support being lackluster. One specific thing that comes to mind is we were on a support call with our CISO on the call, and the Microsoft agent, who did not actually work for Microsoft, is one of the vendors that Microsoft uses for support, said, "Just to set expectations, my lunch break is in an hour and I am going to go away then." For us, it was already ten o'clock at night and we had been working on this for a couple of hours, trying to get a security engineer on with us. For him to tell us that he was going to go away and have lunch, it was, "Okay, but go find somebody else if you need to." It was just the lackluster approach, and it seemed like he did not really care. We seem to get a lot of this when we get non-Microsoft support. I can identify areas for improvement with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, as it is kind of a convoluted mess to try to take care of false positives. Especially when they have been identified as false positives but they keep going off over and over again. It is great for my pocketbook because it generates a lot of on-call action, but I would really prefer more sleep at two o'clock in the morning than dealing with false positives. I would say that the unified portal for managing Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is suitable for both teams as they are all in there. It would be great if they would stop moving things around and renaming things, which makes sense. The new XDR portal is pretty nice. Being able to have it central again inside of the regular Security Center without having to open up two windows is helpful. Overall, I think it is pretty good. There is always going to be something that could be improved, such as alerting and the ability to modify alerts would be a little bit helpful to have. Being able to add more data into the alerts and turn off alerts that are not as useful would be beneficial. It is hard to say what the quantitative impact the security exposure management feature has had on our company's security, because a lot of it is kind of subjective. I think we are sitting at around a fifty percent score still, and a lot of it is just kind of unusual circumstances that we cannot really implement without breaking the organization.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Stability is one of the features we like the most."
"I don't have to do much monitoring with it; I don't have to have anybody manually looking at this, it gives us reports, and it lets us know if something needs to be addressed, and we can easily address it."
"The most valuable feature is that you can select remote access of any machine for sandboxing."
"The stability of the solution is very good. We have about 100 users on it right now, and we use it twice a week."
"I like the centralized console and the predictive analysis it does of malware. It is very stable and also scalable."
"I recommend this solution to others because it is easy to manage, reliable, and overall good to use."
"Cortex XDR alerts us on the dashboard when there's a threat, which allows us to restrict that user and helps secure our infrastructure."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is specifically designed to prevent zero-day attacks and is part of an ecosystem of Palo Alto, providing customers with a long-term vision to modify and redesign how security is applied in their company."
"The solution is exceptionally easy to integrate and covers a multitude of cybersecurity issues."
"The solution's threat protection is mostly AI and machine-learning based. That is the most important feature of the product. It also offers centralized management so I can remotely manage devices."
"Overall, our security posture looks much better and our attack surfaces are limited."
"I've started to test it from the security point of view. There are plenty of features that are interesting, but at this time, the XDR functionality is most valuable. It is endpoint security on steroids."
"The solution's latest features for threat analysis are updated to provide us with future protection against the latest threats worldwide."
"Defender for Endpoint has one dashboard with security-related information, vulnerability-related information, and basic recommendations from Microsoft, all in different tabs. That's helpful because if we want to fix only the recommended ones, we can go fix all of them..."
"With its intelligence and tools over cloud infrastructure, it's a good product."
"It captures data through machine learning, which is built-in on the back-end, and also provides built-in analytics and a threat intelligence feature, making it a one-stop solution that doesn't require an antivirus because it comes prebuilt into Windows 10."
"I like that it's easy to deploy because it already comes with Windows 10. Overall, it has all the features that we need. Easy to deploy, comes with updates, and comes with Windows updates. You don't have to really manage or update the signature."
 

Cons

"The solution lacks real-time, on-demand antivirus."
"Impact on system performance is horrible, adding a lot of delays for users."
"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."
"The main issue I could point out is the offline agents and the way that it is missing."
"It should support more mobile operating systems. That is one of the cons of their infrastructure right now."
"It automatically detects security issues. It should be able to protect our network devices while operating autonomously."
"The product's pricing needs improvement. They could provide more discounts. Additionally, the dashboard and control panel could be enhanced."
"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 solution's security awareness training and phishing are very United States-focused and don't work very well in Australia."
"The central console needs improvement."
"A single dashboard would be a significant improvement."
"With increase of cyber threats and cybersecurity issues, I would recommend that the product be developed like an AI product with more features which can counter any threat in the coming eras."
"The frequency of the patching, and the frequency of the updates, are not included with the free version."
"In terms of improvements for their technical support, a focus on enhancing response times could be beneficial."
"My main issue with the tool is that there are too many menus."
"It would be helpful if they included XDR features, on top of the EDR functionality."
"I would like Microsoft to have some kind of direct integration for USB controls. They have GPO and other controls to control the access of the USB drives on devices, but if there is something that can be directly implemented into the portal, it would be good. There should be a way to control via a cloud portal or something like that in a dynamic way. USB control for data exfiltration would be a good feature to implement. Currently, there are ways to do it, but it involves too many different things. You have to implement it via GPOs and other stuff, and then you move or copy those big files via Defender ATP. If there is a simple way of implementing those features, it would be great."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our customers have expressed that the price is high."
"It is present, but when compared to other competitive products, I would say it is not less expensive; however, when all of the other added values are considered, the price is reasonable."
"I did PoCs on products called Cylance and CrowdStrike. Although, I consider these products and they were also good, when it come to cost and budgetary factors, Traps has been proven to be better than the other two products. It is quite cost-effective and delivers all the entire solution which we require."
"Compared to CrowdStrike, Cortex XDR is an expensive solution."
"This is an expensive solution."
"The price of the product is not very economical."
"It's way too expensive, but security is expensive. You pay for your licensing, and then you pay for someone to monitor the stuff."
"It's about $55 per license on a yearly basis."
"I like Guardz's pricing model because it's very cost-effective and has no long-term commitments."
"Its price is fair. It has approximately the same price as the other products such as Kaspersky. It is much cheaper than Malwarebytes."
"Currently, for us, Windows Defender is free with the purchase of Windows Server. Pricing is an important point for us when we are looking at the competitors of this solution. If we choose to go with another vendor, we will have to pay some license fees."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint comes with Windows 10, and it's free. But for you to be able to manage it in the cloud and use the console, you need to have either an Office 365 E5 subscription or a Microsoft M365 subscription. You need to buy an extra license."
"I do not have to purchase antivirus solutions anymore because Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is integrated into Windows and comes free."
"We have an enterprise agreement so from my perspective, this is a product that ships with Windows and it is not priced standalone."
"We mostly use Microsoft products. We use Office 365, and we use Azure. We're also a Microsoft partner. So, the licensing was much cheaper for us, and at the same time, a lot of the features that we were looking for were included in Defender."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is included with a Microsoft E5 license."
"This product is included in the pricing for Windows."
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Top Industries

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

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise54
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business82
Midsize Enterprise45
Large Enterprise96
 

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,...
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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 sol...
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint?
We have been discussing pricing, setup cost, and licensing, and we are currently on an E3. We are discussing going to...
 

Also Known As

Cyvera, Cortex XDR, Palo Alto Networks Traps
No data available
Microsoft Defender ATP, Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection, MS Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender Antivirus
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
Information Not Available
Petrofrac, Metro CSG, Christus Health
Find out what your peers are saying about SentinelOne, CrowdStrike, Microsoft and others in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR). Updated: July 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.