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Intercept X Endpoint vs VMware Carbon Black App Control 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
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
108
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (5th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (7th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (6th), Ransomware Protection (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (2nd)
Intercept X Endpoint
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
109
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (11th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (14th), ZTNA (9th), Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (7th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (13th), Ransomware Protection (4th)
VMware Carbon Black App Con...
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Application Control (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Intercept X Endpoint1.6%
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint7.8%
CrowdStrike Falcon6.6%
Other84.0%
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
Application Control Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Carbon Black App Control12.1%
ThreatLocker Zero Trust Endpoint Protection Platform19.7%
Airlock Digital Application Control13.2%
Other55.0%
Application Control
 

Q&A Highlights

TT
IT Manager at a wellness & fitness company with 51-200 employees
Dec 03, 2020
 

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.
AM
IT Head at Dee Development
Has struggled to detect major threats but has offered basic protection over time
Intercept X Endpoint could learn from CrowdStrike in terms of overall performance and filtering because performance is most important, especially these days as Windows is getting buggier and buggier, which puts a huge load on the PC, and even with the most advanced CPUs and everything in place, it still lags in performance in so many places, thanks to Windows' clumsy design of these collaboration suites that make it extremely heavy on PC's resources. The interface of Intercept X Endpoint is quite old-fashioned. The Sophos interfaces, including for Intercept X Endpoint, are quite bad actually; to be very honest, even in UTM boxes, they are not great at all. You can hardly see a very small portion of windows while it's creating the firewall rules, and we have been complaining about this for quite some time, but there hasn't been any improvement on those grounds. Intercept X Endpoint's anti-ransomware capabilities failed us during a bad attack, and just because of our own backup policies, we could restore our normal operations; otherwise, if we had to depend on this solution, we would have been long dead because the infection was so bad, it couldn't even detect the infection. Intercept X Endpoint cannot handle zero-day attacks; in my experience, last year, we had this major issue with a malware attack, and it happened just because of our backup policies that we were able to recover without any support from Sophos, which just told us they would charge us some 1 Crore in rupees. Intercept X Endpoint should improve their implementation; things will never be perfect for the new world. This new world is always facing new kinds of attacks and new ways to compromise the system. They need to learn fast, implement fast, and sometimes redesigning the solution is the solution—not just patchwork. There was a time we used to love Sophos because of its fresh design and innovative thought. In my experience, when technical companies are led by MBA professionals, they lose their shine on the technical part and become more dependent on target sales; it turns into a marketing-centric operation that loses the technical focus completely.
AM
Cybersecurity Consultant at KAFD DMC
We can isolate problem machines and limit their access
We use App Control to scan the network for virtual machines that have unauthorized applications. We can isolate the problem VMs and control application access.  More than two years. I rate Carbon Black App Control 10 out of 10 for stability. I rate App Control six out of 10 for scalability.…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Traps is quite a stable product. Once it was properly deployed and configured, you have nothing to be worried about."
"Implementing Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks has had a significant impact on my security analyst workload because it becomes much easier."
"It has pretty much everything we need and works well within the Palo Alto ecosystem."
"Its ability to react to cyber data attacks is awesome."
"The solution's most valuable feature is the user interface."
"One of the main benefits of the solution is its intelligence to correlate the events into an incident."
"Palo Alto is one of the tech vendors that always provides top-of-the-line products."
"These days it's machine-learning technology and behavior-based analytics features that make us more secure."
"What I have found the most valuable about Sophos Intercept X is the ease of use with management administration and the solution's ability to stop exploits and ransomware."
"The solution has great protection against anti-ransomware and all of the zero-day threats."
"It is stable."
"The patches on offer are very helpful."
"Ransomware protection is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"My advice to others would be to use centralized management because it makes it much easier to implement, manage, track the installations, and the day-to-day usage."
"Intercept X's smart prevention is very good, as are its machine learning capabilities for troubleshooting channels and files."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"The effectiveness of application whitelisting is very good."
"If any malicious activity, like VAT viruses, anything RNE, ZOD malware, or something similar, comes in we know that unless we approve it, it's going to be blocked."
"Overall, this is a good product and one that I recommend."
"All the functions within VMware Carbon Black App Control are valuable."
"We use App Control to scan the network for virtual machines that have unauthorized applications. We can isolate the problem VMs and control application access."
"We have been dealing with VMware Carbon Black App Control for one year, and during this time we have already made sure that this is the best solution to protect our user machines and servers."
"Carbon Black offers a total lockdown solution; it shows us the attacks that are being attempted against our infrastructure and how we are being protected."
"I use the console to check for threats and I find it to be very user-friendly."
 

Cons

"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is a very good product, but financially, it is very expensive, so the company should look into that area."
"The tool needs to be improved in terms of integration and interface."
"There are some false positives. What our guys would have liked is that it would have been easier to manipulate as soon as they found a false positive that they knew was a false positive. How to do so was not obvious. Some people complained about it. The interface, the ESM, is not user-friendly."
"Managing the product should be easier."
"The solution lags to the real-time scenarios here and there."
"The solution should offer more dashboards and they should be better customized."
"The deployment is pretty hard."
"There are some default policies which sometimes affect our applications and cause them to run around. In the hotel industry, we use a different type of data versus Oracle and SQL. By default, there are some policies which stop us from running properly. Because of this, the support level is also not that strong. We have to wait to get a results."
"Better protection in the endpoint, server, and mobile is needed."
"As for improvement, more notifications or emails about what to watch out for globally would be nice. For instance, information about the spread of a current phishing campaign or ransomware would be very helpful. I find that I have to dig in the back to find out what is happening on the global scene for things to be aware of."
"It's a big issue that there isn't a way to do remote deployment. It's actually difficult because you have to depend on a third party to make sure it actually works."
"I would like to have a built-in firewall, rather than having to integrate one."
"The solution can be expensive, although we do see the value in it."
"Better protection in the endpoint, server, and mobile is needed."
"Should include additional integration."
"The performance offered by the product needs improvement."
"Another issue is that even sometimes if you approve, for example, Adobe as a publisher, you say any product or anything that's from Adobe has to run. It generally runs, but especially in a large environment and with a lot of users, sometimes, due to some certification validation issues or some other issue, it might stop the process from running."
"Carbon Black does not use the database for identifying the file, the fields, or malware."
"The reporting is not good and needs to be improved."
"I rate App Control six out of 10 for scalability."
"I would like to see the addition of some more features that are in other, similar solutions."
"The solution should have overhead in keeping lists of applications that you want don't want to run."
"I would like to see the addition of some more features that are in other, similar solutions."
"Another issue is that even sometimes if you approve, for example, Adobe as a publisher, you say any product or anything that's from Adobe has to run. It generally runs, but especially in a large environment and with a lot of users, sometimes, due to some certification validation issues or some other issue, it might stop the process from running. Genuine processes like Adobe and Chrome can get blocked. so that needs to be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cortex XDR’s pricing is very reasonable."
"It is "expensive" and flexible."
"The price is on the higher side, but it's okay."
"The pricing is a little bit on the expensive side."
"We pay about $50,000 USD per year for a bundle that includes Cortex XDR."
"The cost of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is $55 to $90 USD per endpoint per month."
"Our license will require renewal in August, after which the maintenance will continue as usual."
"I feel it is fairly priced."
"Price-wise, it is good. Currently, we have a three-year plan."
"One can pay for the license annually, or at two and five year intervals."
"We have an annual subscription."
"Licensing costs are not expensive."
"Compared to other solutions, such as CrowdStrike, we are most certainly happy with its pricing. We did a three year-business deal."
"When you start going to the EDR technologies and the MTR, it is a little bit expensive. It's a very good technology, and obviously, you're going to pay for it, but the pricing could do a little bit of work."
"On a per-user basis, my company has to pay a certain amount of money."
"You are able to purchase more licenses for the number of devices or servers that you require. There are many other features available but our license does not include them, such as XDR, which is endpoint detection and response. We have not explored the new features as of yet but plan to in the coming future."
"Its price is reasonable and what is expected for these types of products."
"The pricing for this product is competitive and our customers who told us that often, Carbon Back is the cheaper solution."
"We pay a fee for support, which is renewed annually."
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Answers from the Community

TT
IT Manager at a wellness & fitness company with 51-200 employees
Dec 3, 2020
Dec 3, 2020
Officially the answer is Intercept X and anti-virus from other mfgs. can co-exist on an endpoint. Carbon Black is a bit more than just AV, so I would get a free 30-day trial of Int X and try it on one endpoint.
2 out of 3 answers
BA
Sales and Mktg Manager at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
Dec 12, 2019
Officially the answer is Intercept X and anti-virus from other mfgs. can co-exist on an endpoint. Carbon Black is a bit more than just AV, so I would get a free 30-day trial of Int X and try it on one endpoint.
AL
President/Owner at LibreTech
Dec 13, 2019
I’m not sure but if you are using Sophos Intercept X I would suggest just adding the Sophos EDR component.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business44
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise47
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business75
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise22
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

Cortex XDR by Palo Alto vs. Sentinel One
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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,...
How does Crodwstrike Falcon compare with Sophos Intercept X?
I like that Crowdstrike Falcon allows me to easily correlate data between my firewalls. Its detection and machine lea...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Sophos Intercept X?
Intercept X Endpoint has some impact on the budget. It is quite costly when measuring Intercept X Endpoint's protecti...
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Also Known As

Cyvera, Cortex XDR, Palo Alto Networks Traps
Sophos Intercept X
CB Protection, Carbon Black CB Protection
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
Flexible Systems
Kaas Tailored, Core-Mark, Indeed, Hologic, Landmark Credit Union, Project Worldwide
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