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Malwarebytes Teams vs Microsoft Defender for Endpoint comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 4, 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

Malwarebytes Teams
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
26th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Microsoft Defender for Endp...
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
198
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (4th), Anti-Malware Tools (1st), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (3rd), Microsoft Security Suite (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2025, in the Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) category, the mindshare of Malwarebytes Teams is 2.2%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is 9.5%, down from 12.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint9.5%
Malwarebytes Teams2.2%
Other88.3%
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
 

Featured Reviews

Davina Becker - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides protection against malware but needs improved billing transparency
I can only speak to it on a personal level. If someone is considering it, they should test it on their own systems. I can't personally recommend it because each person has their own needs. While it may work for me as a malware antivirus solution, I can't recommend it to someone else who may have a different system or use case. I rate the overall solution 7.5 out of 10. Malwarebytes protects me against malware. If they fix the pricing model so it's not automatically charging me, the rating could improve. Until then, I can't give it an 8.
NaySan @ Suraj Verma - PeerSpot reviewer
Has effectively blocked sophisticated attacks and malicious activities while providing excellent support
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is very good, but one suggestion is that in some products, we may need to configure security-related settings, whereas Microsoft Defender for Endpoint works completely differently, providing automatic recommendations and actions that we may need to perform ourselves. Regarding the pricing of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, during the last three years, we set up the product and sold it, but we faced difficulties because Microsoft pricing is always the same. For example, whether I purchase Microsoft Defender for Endpoint for one year or for the next three years, the pricing remains constant with no discounts available. In contrast, competing products offer reduced pricing for long-term commitments, which makes it difficult for us in that environment. Microsoft should consider this option to remain competitive, but otherwise, everything else is fine.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"When it comes to frontend protections, it has some of the best definitions. In addition, they do traditional signature and heuristic detection a lot better than Microsoft and some other players in that space."
"The most valuable features of Malwarebytes are the agents, user experience, efficiency of the findings, and MDR features."
"It is intuitive and easy to use. For the most part, it does a good job of catching things. It is good at stopping stuff. I did a couple of tests with a password cracker. I tried to load that on, and Malwarebytes didn't let me do that, which was pretty good. It has a rollback feature that I haven't seen with any other company. If one of your endpoints are hit with mass ransomware, you could actually roll it back. I watched a demo of them do that, and it was pretty sweet."
"The central management of devices from different sites is a very good feature; this has made them much easier to manage."
"This solution helps us by providing central management of anti-malware and anti-exploit functionality."
"The most valuable features of Malwarebytes are the EDR and the complete feature set provided."
"I like the solution's ability to detect potentially unwanted programs. For some reason, it seems superior to other solutions, or at least in comparison to McAfee."
"The most valuable feature is that it stops malware, which is important."
"You have endpoint security to keep your devices safe. That's the feature that we're interested in."
"The most valuable feature is ransomware protection, which can detect malicious activity from IPs or a malicious payload in DLLs, or other things that can corrupt the system."
"This solution definitely increases our security posture. When you are reviewing your existing fleet or endpoints and based on the configuration that you put out of your Defender for Endpoint, you then receive a security score from Microsoft. Depending on what rules you have configured, what policies you have deployed, and what attack surface reduction rules that you have set up and deployed, it is almost gamifying information security in the sense that you are always trying to achieve a higher score. The more hardening you perform on your endpoints, the better score you receive. This generally tends to give you a better peace of mind, but also makes you secure at the same time."
"We had Norton Antivirus before, and with Norton, we didn't have a way to centrally manage a lot of features. Defender allowed us to deploy it from our Office 365 admin console. That is probably the biggest thing that made us go with Defender."
"I am using it for very simple purposes. It is perfect and quite effective. I have been using it for a while, and I have never had any virus infection, data leak, or other security breaches. It works fine for standalone purposes. If you log on to OneDrive, it has ransomware protection."
"We can run the virus scan across our entire environment."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has changed significantly for the better."
"Overall, I recommend Microsoft Defender for Endpoint due to its features and capabilities, which cover more loopholes than other EDR solutions."
 

Cons

"The online reporting needs to be improved. Currently, we have to look at it online, and if we want to download a report, it just downloads as an Excel file. It's just raw information. There needs to be some way to better display it when it's downloaded."
"We had a little performance problem with the solution, but that's been resolved. Since then, it's been running well."
"They can include advanced scanning and improve reporting. I scan malware on the pen drive. Some more reports need to be added for that. It should also provide better protection because we have a new version of the malware."
"They could come up with better reporting capabilities."
"The reporting is not as flexible as you would find with other antivirus software."
"The interface could be improved. Currently, you need to really dig around to find the elements you need."
"We experience a lot of false positives."
"The EPP solution lacks the sophisticated artificial intelligence required for automating reports and letting you know about things in real-time. It stops a suspicious activity in real-time, but it doesn't let you know in real-time. You have to look at a report, and then you find out that something is wrong. You have to manually kick off a scan. With the Advanced EDR solutions, Malwarebytes has the ability to alert you in real-time, but they still don't do automatic remediation or quarantining of devices. That is something that you still have to do manually. So, the endpoint protection piece, which is just like their basic endpoint protection, lacks AI. For the advanced detection and response piece, there is an add-on that comes with it, but it still doesn't go far enough in terms of automatic remediation of viruses. It won't separate that virus from your network if something happens. You have to manually go there and do it."
"Microsoft Defender in the basic form is not very useful for managing the security environment. The free version is not capable of covering the needs of centralized management, EDR, and behavioral analysis. If you don't have the commercial version, you can't have centralized management and set up the policies and other things. Each client is a standalone installation, which is not useful for security in an enterprise model."
"Alerts need to be sent immediately because as it is now, you see some of them without delay and others arrive perhaps 30 minutes later, and it leaves important gaps in terms of information gathering."
"If there were more template queries in the library, that would make it much easier. They could have basic things, like, "Where's the IP for this user?" or, "What file was downloaded from this user?" If there were more of those basic queries that would help."
"More integration with different platforms is an area for improvement for this product, and should be included in its next release."
"Where we stand right now, compared to other products that are there in the market, they still have to work on their threat intelligence and the overall maturity of detecting the malware."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is effective for validating work, but not ideal for investigations."
"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."
"Initially, I experienced performance issues that hampered our servers. However, after setting appropriate exclusions, everything seemed to work fine."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would say that it's affordable. It costs much less than Sentinel One, CrowdStrike, or anything of that nature. But, at the same time, you are getting what you pay for. So I would say it's one of the best when you're comparing traditional NextGen AVs like Webroot that aren't the best in the bunch."
"The cost may be something in the ballpark of $20-25 a year per computer."
"We expect to pay $1,000 USD a month, depending on the number of users."
"Malwarebytes is a cost-effective product."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price and ten is a high price, I rate the product's pricing a seven."
"The licensing is per seat, with clients being a little less expensive than servers. If we need more licenses, we can accomplish that within a day. As Malwarebytes adds new features to their product, such as DNS filtering and a patching module, they want to charge us more even though we're a premium user, which isn't ideal."
"Yearly, it is around $50 per client."
"It is really expensive. We've got between 30 and 40 licenses every year, and for the number of licenses that we have, we're finding that Malwarebytes on average costs between $900 and $1,000 more per year than comparable options. We're paying about $3,300 per year for these licenses. There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fee."
"The normal, standalone model, is not expensive, but the enterprise model that includes the bundle with email and some web protection, is a bit more expensive."
"The nice thing about Defender and Sentinel is that the cost is based on the data logs that you ingest from the Defender endpoints and data connectors. I don't have to buy a 25- or 50- or 1,000-user or enterprise license. I can buy one license at a time."
"I recently switched from education to private business, and all I can say is that private business licensing from Microsoft is not cheap until you hit certain quantities or scale. That does not mean that it is not comparable to other industries. It is similar pricing, but it is still crazy to me how much you pay for a client. I feel it is high, but it is in line with other vendors."
"The solution is included with Microsoft Windows."
"They are now doing it on an endpoint basis. It is based on the number of endpoints, which is good."
"The price was a problem for me three years ago, but they improved their E3, E5, and a la carte licensing. In other words, you have to get all of E5. That used to be a problem because you had E3, Defender, and guardrails, but you needed an E5 license to get the management suite and the analytics. It's more flexible now. You can switch from a la carte to the entire suite when it starts to make sense. It's becoming more economically competitive to go that route."
"The pricing is competitive."
"As we operate in the educational sector, we are eligible for an educational discount."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
University
8%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business79
Midsize Enterprise34
Large Enterprise87
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Malwarebytes?
Ten times a day, improved signatures will be downloaded, so it is very up-to-date in terms of malware experience.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Malwarebytes?
I really hate the automatic rebilling without officially confirming it with me. It's an annoyance and they should at least confirm with me, like a month before they bill me.
What needs improvement with Malwarebytes?
It takes up too much space when it's trying to run in the background.
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, applies behavioral-based endpoint protection and response, and includes risk-ba...
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 solution. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a cloud-delivered endpoint security s...
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 push your machine hardware to "test", you don't have the usual "scan now" feature ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Microsoft Defender ATP, Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection, MS Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender Antivirus
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Knutson Construction
Petrofrac, Metro CSG, Christus Health
Find out what your peers are saying about Malwarebytes Teams vs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
873,209 professionals have used our research since 2012.