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Heimdal Endpoint Security vs Microsoft Defender for Endpoint comparison

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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 Protection Platform (EPP)
4th
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
118
Ranking in other categories
Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (4th), Ransomware Protection (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (1st)
Heimdal Endpoint Security
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
38th
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
41st
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.6
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Anti-Malware Tools (26th), Threat Intelligence Platforms (TIP) (26th), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (13th), Ransomware Protection (12th)
Microsoft Defender for Endp...
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
1st
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
212
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (4th), Anti-Malware Tools (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) category, the mindshare of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is 3.8%, up from 3.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Heimdal Endpoint Security is 0.6%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is 6.5%, down from 10.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint6.5%
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks3.8%
Heimdal Endpoint Security0.6%
Other89.1%
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
 

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.
DEEPAK KUMAR PACHDEO DUBEY - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Support Specialist at PXGEO
Delivers efficiency and agility with USB control limitations
One area where we lag is that, since we use everything from Heimdal, including XDR and other features, we also use the privilege manager feature called Elevation. What we lack is granular USB control. We have an issue where we can only switch USB on or off. I want to whitelist specific devices in the network, which I currently cannot do.
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

"After deploying Traps, we saw the performance of the network improve by 65 to 70 percent."
"Being a cloud solution it is very flexible in serving internal and external connections and a broad range of devices."
"The level of security I get for my endpoints and servers is extremely valuable."
"This software helps us understand any issues that may arise when someone is not at work."
"Based on my experience with Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks, I highly recommend it due to its quick response to zero-day attacks and low utilization from end-user devices."
"We have found in our test Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks to be a very good tool."
"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 features are incident creation, policy-based protection, IP whitelisting, and device encryption. These are beneficial for endpoint and server security."
"As compared to multiple solutions I have used in the past, Heimdal is a very agile and lightweight solution."
"The protection that it provides is quite good."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has helped free up our SOC team to work on other projects or tasks."
"Defender for Endpoint provides good visibility into threats and has favorable threat intelligence."
"In my opinion, the most valuable aspects are the reporting analytics and integration with Sentinel. Defender does an excellent job of correlating the different entities that comprise threat analysis, analytics data, and log analytics. It helps to piece together investigations into any exploit or malicious activity within a specific tenant. AI and analytics tools are probably the most valuable components."
"The product can be used for organizations that use Microsoft as their primary security defender and need zero-day threat protection."
"What I like most is the protection against phishing emails and anti-spam."
"The stability keeps getting better and better."
"It's got good detection rates, low on system resources, doesn't interfere or hamper workflows, and it's easy to use."
 

Cons

"It should support more mobile operating systems. That is one of the cons of their infrastructure right now."
"It'll help if customization was easier."
"Initially, we got to have a lot of false positives when we onboarded, but nowadays it's quite smooth."
"The negative aspect I see is the economic model used by Palo Alto."
"In the next release, I would like to see more UI improvements. Their UI is a bit basic. When we are speaking about Palo Alto Networks they are the big company, so they can improve the UI a little bit. The UI, the reports, the log system can all be improved."
"Being able to filter the events to see those that are related to the actual alert would save time spent by the engineer."
"In general, the price could be more competitive."
"One thing that was missing was the integration part. Currently, they don't have out-of-box integration with IBM QRadar, or if they have the integration, the integration doesn't work well."
"What we lack is granular USB control. We have an issue where we can only switch USB on or off."
"It's not easy to create special allowances for certain groups of users. It can be a little heavy-handed in some areas where Microsoft has decided to lock a feature out, meaning they make it hard to make an exception... One company we work with needed to use about 20 different thumb drives for about 20 users. To make that exception for them was very difficult. In fact, you can't really make an exception. But what you can do is allow them to use it and, while it will still alert, you can actually suppress those alerts."
"Microsoft Defender could be improved with features more like the McAfee ePO. It would be better if I had a console to get all the information for my endpoints. Maybe this is too much for it, but it would be better if it could handle those non-signature-based malicious codes or viruses."
"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."
"Sometimes, there are difficulties in downloading a file considered as malicious."
"On Mac, it's quite unstable and unusable; however, it's very stable for Windows."
"The log searches for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint are pretty difficult to navigate. It needs a better UI or more intuitive search and filter mechanisms to make it easy to get through and filter through all the data logs."
"We encountered some issues when we were trying to enable automatic updates from our group policy."
"I'm not too sure of its current capabilities, but I'm pretty sure they are doing a good job on Windows and Mac. However, I'm not sure whether they covered Linux. If I remember correctly, Microsoft Defender didn't have anything proper on Linux back then, but if they have improved it from that aspect, it would already be ticking all the boxes."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cortex XDR’s pricing is very reasonable."
"It is "expensive" and flexible."
"If one wishes to work with another team or large number of users at a future point, he must purchase a license for them."
"I am using the Community edition."
"The solution is expensive. It's pricing is on a yearly-basis."
"This is an expensive solution."
"The pricing is okay, although direct support can be expensive."
"When we first bought it, it was a bit expensive, but it was worth it. The licensing was straightforward."
Information not available
"This product is included in the pricing for Windows."
"The solution comes free with Microsoft Windows 10."
"We have the E5 security license, and the solution comes with that."
"The license cost is around $35 per machine, which is not expensive compared to other products."
"Microsoft Defender is an expensive product in my country."
"There is not a license required for this particular solution."
"Licenses depend upon what you are looking for and what kind of security do you want to implement. There are costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. When we used to buy Symantec, we used to spend on 100 licenses. We used to spend approximately $2,700 for those many licenses, and they came in packs. To add one more license, I had to buy a pack with a minimum of 10 licenses. I had to spend on nine extra licenses because I can't get a single license, whereas when we go for Microsoft, we can get as many licenses as we want. If I have 100 users today, and tomorrow, I have 90 users, I can release my 10 licenses next month. With any other software vendor, you buy licenses for one year, and you have to stick with that. If today you have 100 licenses, and tomorrow, you have 50, you have already paid for one year's license. You can't go back and tell them that I don't require these 50 licenses because I have lost my 50 users, but with Microsoft Defender, licensing is on a monthly basis. It gives you both options. You can go yearly and save on it, or you can go monthly. You will, again, save on it. It is very fair everywhere."
"Buying individual point products would've cost us a lot more money than one integrated solution that also capitalizes on Teams Voice and things of that nature. Given our size, buying individual products would have easily cost us a million dollars."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Construction Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Construction Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
14%
Computer Software Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business47
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise55
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business82
Midsize Enterprise44
Large Enterprise97
 

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,...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Heimdal Endpoint Security?
Pricing, compared to what we had before, was quite economical. There was a difference of about twenty percent or some...
What needs improvement with Heimdal Endpoint Security?
One area where we lag is that, since we use everything from Heimdal, including XDR and other features, we also use th...
What is your primary use case for Heimdal Endpoint Security?
My company colleagues and I use this antivirus solution. I am part of a company where I deploy solutions, and I also ...
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
Heimdal Next-Gent Endpoint Antivirus, Thor Vigilance Enterprise, Heimdal Endpoint Detection and Response, Heimdal DNS Security - Endpoint, Heimdal Threat Prevention, Heimdal Ransomware Encryption Protection
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
Brother, Symbion, CPH West
Petrofrac, Metro CSG, Christus Health
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, SentinelOne, CrowdStrike and others in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP). Updated: September 2026.
914,109 professionals have used our research since 2012.