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Microsoft Defender for Endpoint vs Microsoft Entra Permissions Management [EOL] 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

Microsoft Defender for Endp...
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
212
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (2nd), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (4th), Anti-Malware Tools (1st), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (3rd), Microsoft Security Suite (3rd), Agentic Endpoint Security (1st)
Microsoft Entra Permissions...
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Sameer Bhat - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President at Goldman Sachs
Provides resource-based access and security, but time-bound access can be a problem
Entra ID is the core of the identity management that we have. This is the key product that we are using. I am currently also looking into Entra Private Access because we are planning to deploy about 50,000 desktops into Azure and use Azure Virtual Desktop. We would like to give access to the users from the desktop to on-premises applications. I learned that Entra Private Access is a good solution. That is not yet GA, but that is what we are looking for. Entra provides a single pane of glass for managing user access, but because our company also integrates with Nebula API, only administrators use Entra's pane. A normal person who wants to get onboarded can do self-service using Nebula. The features for whitelisting and other things are definitely there. That is what we use specifically. Application IDs, enterprise applications, and all those things are already there, so we have more efficiency. There is also security because we usually do not allow user identities to get direct access to Azure resources. Usually, we use the service principles from Entra ID, so this way, it increases security. Entra has helped to save time for our IT administrators. We tend to automate a lot of things. We can do automation using Graph APIs and save time. It is hard to quantify the time savings, but there has been a medium amount of time savings. Entra has helped to save our organization money. We care about security and risk more than money, but it also saves money. We are premium customers, and because we have a commit-to-consume contract with Microsoft of multi-million dollars, the money does not come into it because we have to consume those resources.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's free. There is no additional cost. It's part of Windows."
"When it comes to technical support, I have found Microsoft to be outstanding."
"The detection features are valuable, as is the fact that it is easier to port these logs into Sentinel. That is also useful for us. It is more comprehensive."
"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."
"Microsoft Defender has been around for many years, and since Windows 10, they've really ramped it up, and it has gotten a lot better."
"Microsoft Defender has saved us hours and hours; it has probably paid for itself many times over, and I estimate it probably saved us the equivalent of two people working full-time."
"We are totally satisfied with performance and price."
"Microsoft covers every aspect of security and the global challenges we face."
"The solution integrates well with our infrastructure and other systems without any issues."
"Multifactor authentication is valuable."
 

Cons

"It is not very scalable from the eyes of an MSP because there is no dashboard that you can use to see all of your devices that have Windows Defender unless you have your own dashboard or an RMM tool to actually look at it. So, you might not get to know that a particular computer of a client is doing something, and it might have got a virus. That person might know that, but unless you set it up to actually send you the information, you won't get to know that. That's one of the things that is hard with Microsoft Defender. It is not made for the MSP world where you have one pane of glass to see all of your clients with Microsoft Defender on it unless your RMM tool already has that built-in and it can see the telemetry from Microsoft Defender."
"I would like to see improvements made to how it secures activities on web pages."
"The application control feature requires improvement."
"A challenge is that it is not a multi-tenant solution. Microsoft's tenant is a licensed tenant. I'm an MSSP. So, I have multiple customers. In Microsoft's world, that means that I can't just buy an E5 license and give that out to all my customers. That won't work because all of the customer data resides within a single tenant in Microsoft's world. Other products—such as SentinelOne, Palo Alto Cortex, CrowdStrike, et cetera—are multi-tenant. So, I can have it at the top of the pyramid for my analyst to look into it and see all the customers, but each customer's data is separate. If the customer wants to look at what we see, they would only see their data, whereas in the Microsoft world, if I've got multiple customers connected to the same Microsoft tenant, they would see everybody else's data, which is a privacy problem in Europe. It is not possible to share the data, and it is a breach of privacy."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint could improve by making the reporting better."
"I would like to see integrations with other products, such as Spunk and other CM solutions."
"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."
"It would be helpful if they included XDR features, on top of the EDR functionality."
"The solution's pricing and support services need improvement."
"We use a third-party API called Nebula API to integrate the account for authorization. The time-bound access area in Entra can be a problem. It can be improved in terms of the granularity of the permissions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Because Microsoft Defender comes as an add-on, it can be a bit expensive if you're trying to buying it separately. Another option is to upgrade, but the enterprise licenses for Microsoft can also be quite a bit pricey. Overall, the cost of Microsoft Defender compared to that of other endpoint detection solutions is slightly higher."
"We are using the free version."
"Its price is fair. It has approximately the same price as the other products such as Kaspersky. It is much cheaper than Malwarebytes."
"The base price for an E5 license, which includes Enterprise Mobility + Security E5, is $57 per user per month."
"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."
"There is no licensing fee."
"The price for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is about three euros, which is considered reasonably priced."
"We sell this product as part of Office 365 and it is not expensive."
"The product cost is in the mid to high range."
"We are a Fortune 500 company, so we always negotiate with Microsoft."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

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

Questions from the Community

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 ...
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Also Known As

Microsoft Defender ATP, Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection, MS Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender Antivirus
CloudKnox Permissions Management
 

Interactive Demo

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Petrofrac, Metro CSG, Christus Health
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft and others in Microsoft Security Suite. Updated: October 2026.
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