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Huntress Managed ITDR vs Microsoft Defender XDR comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 15, 2025

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

Huntress Managed ITDR
Average Rating
10.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.8
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (11th)
Microsoft Defender XDR
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
101
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (5th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (3rd), Microsoft Security Suite (3rd)
 

Featured Reviews

Kevin - PeerSpot reviewer
Peace of mind in identifying compromises in your M365 tenants
Huntress Managed ITDR examines various signals from the M365 tenants. If anything suspicious is identified, their SOC analysts can take a closer look and subsequently take action. It's a comprehensive solution covering endpoints and cloud tenants, offering peace of mind. I recognized its benefits immediately, as it provides protection against M365 identity compromises, like admin account breaches.
Gabor Nyerd - PeerSpot reviewer
Includes four services and four products, which can help organizations a lot
We found that sometimes integrations work, but testing them can take some time. Sometimes, configurations take much longer than expected. We have a configuration in place that needs to be synchronized with another server. However, the servers are four hours apart, so this can cause delays. In general, I believe that the time it takes to configure and test a service should be shorter. Sometimes, it can take a couple of hours to test a single configuration setting. Other times, it is only ten or fifteen minutes, which is normal. However, sometimes, even immediate actions can be triggered by configuration changes, and some settings can take up to eight hours to complete. I believe that this time can be improved. Microsoft is making a lot of improvements to its services in a short period of time. This is a good thing, as it means that the services are constantly being updated and improved. However, it can be challenging for customers to keep up with the changes. For example, a customer may read about an update, understand it, and share it with their colleagues and boss. However, it may take days or weeks to test the update and get the necessary approvals. This can be especially challenging for large customers with many users or machines. In some cases, Microsoft may change a service before the customer has had a chance to implement the previous update. This can be frustrating for customers, as it means that they have to constantly learn new things and adjust their workflows. On the one hand, it is important for Microsoft to keep updating and improving its services. This helps to ensure that the services are meeting the customers' needs and that they are staying ahead of the competition. Microsoft should also be mindful of the challenges that these changes can create for customers. One way to address this challenge is to provide customers with more time to implement changes. Microsoft could also provide more information about upcoming changes so that customers can plan ahead. Ultimately, Microsoft needs to strike a balance between keeping its services up-to-date and providing customers with a smooth transition to new features.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I rate the overall solution as a ten out of ten."
"Implementing Huntress Managed ITDR has improved our business by allowing us to be more proactive with our security posture."
"The centralized management with the EDR and ITDR is beneficial."
"Huntress Managed ITDR examines various nulls from the M365 tenants. If anything suspicious is identified, their SOC analysts can take a closer look and subsequently take action."
"The initial setup was very easy."
"The 'Incidents and Alerts' tab is a valuable feature where we can find triggered alerts."
"Microsoft Defender's most critical component is its CASB solution. It has many built-in policies that can improve your organization's cloud security posture. It's effective regardless of where your users are, which is critical because most users are working from home. It's cloud-based, so nothing is on-premise."
"The email protection feature is the most valuable because our risks primarily lie there, and it seems to be the most popular target."
"Scanning, vulnerability reporting, and the dashboard are the most valuable features."
"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that Microsoft Defender XDR is easy to integrate with other Microsoft platforms or products."
"The EDR and the way it automatically responds to ransomware and other attacks are valuable features."
"The ability to integrate and observe a more cohesive narrative across the products is crucial."
"The visibility into threats is also very impressive because Microsoft helps you predict things and provides analytics to help you really improve your security. And all of this technology works across the domain, so it is pretty helpful in terms of threat analytics."
 

Cons

"The product needs further maturity, with some improvements in the user interface."
"The product needs further maturity, with some improvements in the user interface."
"If anything, it's created more work, but that's because we're now seeing things that we weren't seeing before."
"More in-depth reporting could be beneficial for the solution."
"More in-depth reporting could be beneficial for the solution."
"The logs could be better."
"The mobile app support for Android and iOS is difficult and needs improvement."
"When we do investigations, it would be better if Microsoft could populate the host dashboard more. When we open any host for investigation, we want the entire timeline of what is happening on the host, including all the users logging in, their hardware, Windows version, etc."
"Stability could be improved by avoiding frequent changes to the interface."
"Customers say they want absolutely seamless integration between other Microsoft solutions and Defender XDR, including the ability to change device settings within the Defender portal. They need to contact the IT team responsible for the device management tools to change some settings. They would prefer that those changes be initiated directly from the Defender portal or applied from Intune without involving the IT operations team."
"While the XDR platform offers valuable functionalities, it falls short of other solutions in its ability to deliver a cohesive identity experience."
"The Defender agent itself is more compatible with Windows 10 and Windows 11. Other than these two lines, there are so many compatibility issues. Security is not only about Microsoft. The core technical aspects of it are quite good, but it would be good if they can better support non-Microsoft solutions in terms of putting the agents directly into VMware and other virtualization solutions. There should be more emphasis on RHEL and other operating systems that we use, other than Windows, in the server category."
"From an integration standpoint, it is always improving overall. With Security Copilot coming out, as partners, we are waiting for the GDAP support so that we can actually see Security Copilot on behalf of customers if they subscribe to it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"There are no issues with pricing, but sometimes, the clarity in licensing is a concern."
"Microsoft purposely makes its license combinations complex and includes combinations like Microsoft 365 E3 and Microsoft 365 E5, Office 365 E3, Office 365 E5, and Office 365 E1, so you get confused. Microsoft tries to sell you a bundle of a lot of things together."
"They have moved from a licensing model to pay-per-use... The question is: What happens if, for any reason, there's not enough budget to accept this model? That could be a great problem."
"For Defender, they have Endpoint Plan 1 and Endpoint Plan 2, but I don't know on what basis they have classified Endpoint Plan 1 and Plan 2, but it has given me enough pain to pick and design Endpoint Plan 1 or Endpoint Plan 2 for my organization. In fact, we are still struggling with it. Too many SKUs are confusing. There should not be too many SKUs, and they shouldn't charge for every new feature."
"The product is fairly priced for what we get from it."
"We have a lot of problems in Latin America regarding the price of Microsoft 365 Defender, because the relationship between dollars and the money of the different countries, it's is a lot. Many customers that have small businesses say that they would like the solution but it is too expensive. However, large companies do not find the cost an issue."
"We've managed to navigate it effectively through our enterprise agreement, and Microsoft's academic discounts have proven to be quite generous."
"The price of the solution is high compared to others and we have lost some customers because of it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
20%
Insurance Company
15%
University
9%
Performing Arts
6%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Huntress Managed ITDR?
More in-depth reporting could be beneficial for the solution.
What is your primary use case for Huntress Managed ITDR?
I use Huntress Managed ITDR for 365 protection, monitoring log run events, security, and abnormal logons.
What do you like most about Microsoft 365 Defender?
Microsoft Defender XDR provides strong identity protection with comprehensive insights into risky user behavior and potential indicators of compromise.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft 365 Defender?
The pricing for Microsoft Sentinel operates on a pay-as-you-go model based on data ingestion. I recall that Defender XDR pricing is based on the number of endpoints.
What needs improvement with Microsoft 365 Defender?
For Microsoft Defender XDR ( /categories/extended-detection-and-response-xdr ), there is currently no ability to reset passwords for on-premises accounts, which is a key challenge. Incident managem...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Microsoft 365 Defender, Microsoft Threat Protection, MS 365 Defender
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Accenture, Deloitte, ExxonMobil, General Electric, IBM, Johnson & Johnson and many others.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, CrowdStrike, SentinelOne and others in Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR). Updated: June 2025.
861,803 professionals have used our research since 2012.