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Microsoft Defender for Endpoint vs Morphisec comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 9, 2024

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)
5th
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
108
Ranking in other categories
Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (6th), Ransomware Protection (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (2nd)
Microsoft Defender for Endp...
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
2nd
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
213
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (5th), Anti-Malware Tools (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (3rd)
Morphisec
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
49th
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
61st
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (57th), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (31st), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (34th), Threat Deception Platforms (21st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) category, the mindshare of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is 3.5%, down from 4.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is 7.8%, down from 11.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Morphisec is 0.6%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint7.8%
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks3.5%
Morphisec0.6%
Other88.1%
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.
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.
Rick Schibler - PeerSpot reviewer
VP of Information Technology at Kentucky Trailer
Offers in-memory protection at a lower price than competitors
Morphisec's in-memory protection is probably the most valuable feature because it stops malicious activity from occurring. If something tries to install or act as a sleeper agent, Morphisec will detect and stop it. Morphisec's Moving Target Defense is critical to hardening our attack surface. If it detects something, it indicates whether it's valid. That means you've got a breach requiring investigation. It detects anomalies but doesn't necessarily point to what caused them. You still need to do that work. The solution is reasonably easy to administer. They made some changes last year, adding a cloud-based monitoring solution that makes deploying and monitoring our endpoints easy.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cortex covers everything I need. It's a perfect solution. Cortex provides a different level of visibility because it's an extended EDR, allowing you to grab logs from the network and firewalls. Palo Alto invented the concept of the extended EDR or XDR."
"Provides behavior-based detection which offers many benefits over signature-based detection."
"We have a complete overview of all our PCs and it's very easy to handle and to use the interface. It has a lot of benefits for us."
"Palo Alto is constantly adding new features."
"If the user leaves our premises or network, Palo Alto Traps will still be on that endpoint and will still apply our policies."
"The multi-layered approach to the product gives you confidence that it will stop exploits, ransomware, worms, or viruses from compromising endpoints, essentially providing peace of mind."
"Cortex XDR is a simple platform that's easy for administrators and users. You have a lot of flexibility to change or customize the features."
"The one feature of Palo Alto Networks Traps that our organization finds most valuable is the App ID service."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has changed significantly for the better."
"It captures data through machine learning, which is built-in on the back-end. It also provides built-in analytics and a threat intelligence feature. It is a one-stop solution that doesn't require an antivirus because it comes prebuilt into Windows 10."
"Endpoint's most valuable feature is deep analysis."
"We can react to threats faster and stop them from spreading from one machine to another. It protects from suspicious email attachment downloads. It will lock down the SOC and the workstations."
"We had certain compliance and usage issues. For example, our company wanted to go with CIS, but we didn't have a proper way of measuring whether the endpoints have the right standards in place or whether they were compliant with CIS. Microsoft Defender was like a one-stop for most things because it gave us the vulnerability and patching scores so that our vulnerability management teams can focus on covering up the vulnerabilities and the patching team can check the vulnerable versions and deploy the right versions."
"My advice for anybody who is looking into using this product is that it's a good and easy way to secure your PC."
"For securing access, USB security helps us block our USB ports and that ensures that users do not plug USB drives into their computers."
"A few years ago, when I was using a different product, I was affected by a virus that destroyed everything. Since using Microsoft Defender, I have not had this kind of problem."
"The fact that Morphisec uses deterministic attack prevention that does not require human intervention has affected our security team's operations by making things much simpler. We don't have to really track down various alerts anymore, they've just stopped. At that point, we can go in and we can clean up whatever needs to be cleaned up. There are some things that Morphisec detects that we can't really remove, it's parts of Internet Explorer, but it's being blocked anyway. So we're happy with that."
"In a month, we are saving the effort of four to five days, and earlier we used to have a dedicated person and now we don't need a dedicated resource, which has reduced our security spending and we are saving approximately $600 a month."
"Morphisec has given our security team's operations peace of mind and more time for patching."
"Morphisec makes use of deterministic attack prevention that doesn’t require investigation of security alerts. It changes the memory locations of where certain applications run. If you think of Excel, opening a PDF, running an Excel macro, or opening a webpage and clicking on a link, all of those actions run in a certain area of memory. Morphisec changes the memory locations of where those run."
"What's valuable is really the whole kit and caboodle of the Morphisec agent. What it does is genius, in a way, until the bad guys get wise to it. You set it up and then you watch the dashboard. There isn't really much tinkering."
"Morphisec provides full visibility into security events from Microsoft Defender and Morphisec in one dashboard. Defender and Morphisec are integrated. It's important because it lowers the total cost of maintenance on the engineer's time, more or less. So the administrative time is dramatically reduced in maintaining the product. This saves an engineer around four to five hours a week."
"Morphisec is a straightforward solution that is efficient and very stable."
"It provides full visibility into security events and from both solutions in one dashboard. I'm not a big security guy, if I have a threat that looks like there's a problem, I will ask Morphisec to dissect it for me, and tell me what might be happening. Because it tends to be all hash codes, so I can tell what's going on. They've been pretty good with that."
 

Cons

"If he is using a smaller company, he can depend on some other tools because Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is a bit expensive."
"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."
"It's not an ideal choice for smaller businesses, as you need a minimum of 200 endpoints to even use the solution at all."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks can improve mobile integration to allow access to the console."
"The downside to the solution is that there are a large number of false positives."
"Product might have some bugs."
"We would also like to have advanced tech protection and email scanning."
"The solution needs better reports. I think they should let the customer go in and customize the reports."
"Notifications are always popping up — I hate that."
"We'd like to see integrations with more vulnerability scanning solutions like Tenable."
"The solution can be more user-friendly."
"I want Microsoft Defender to have the ability to deal with some issues automatically, so I don't need to address that issue manually."
"It's a good product but it is limited in some cases."
"Integration with third-party vendors could be better. It would be better if it integrates with other protection solutions or other products outside of Microsoft. Nowadays, anti-virus protection doesn't really have to be planned as overall protection for your environment in terms of security. There are really different avenues that bad actors can take to wreak havoc on your machine."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint could improve by adding more security features."
"Notifications are always popping up — I hate that."
"We started in the Linux platform and we deployed to Linux. The licensing of that has been kind of confusing between Linux licensing and Windows licensing. The overall simplicity of licensing or offering an enterprise license to just cover everything and then we don't have to count needs improvement."
"Some of the filters for the console need improvement. There are alerts that show up and just being able to acknowledge that we've seen those and not turn them off, but dismiss them, would be a huge benefit."
"We sometimes have to depend on the support team to know what action we should take."
"Automating reports needs improvement. I would like to have better reporting capabilities within it or automated reporting to be a little bit more dynamic."
"The weakest point of this product is how difficult it is to understand the reasons for an alert."
"If anything, tech support might be their weakest link. The process of getting someone involved sometimes takes a little time. It seems to me that they should have all the data they need to let me know whether an alert is legitimate or not, but they tend to need a lot of information from me to get to the bottom of something. It usually takes a little longer than I would expect."
"We started in the Linux platform and we deployed to Linux. The licensing of that has been confusing between Linux licensing and Windows licensing."
"In the Windows Defender integration, they have put in a report of computers that need Windows Defender updates. If those updates could be kicked off directly from the dashboard, instead of having to go to another system entirely, that would be good."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution has one subscription for endpoint protection and one subscription for detection and response. The two licenses combined give you the BRO version."
"I don't recall what the cost was, but it wasn't really that expensive."
"It is present, but when compared to other competitive products, I would say it is not less expensive; however, when all of the other added values are considered, the price is reasonable."
"The price of the solution is high for the license and in general."
"It is "expensive" and flexible."
"Our customers have expressed that the price is high."
"Compared to CrowdStrike, Cortex XDR is an expensive solution."
"Cortex XDR's pricing is ok."
"The price is fair for the features Microsoft delivers. If you want tailor-made features, you have to mix different licenses. It isn't straightforward."
"The subscription is part of Windows, so we don't have to pay anything extra for this product."
"The E5 license is the one that I recommend because it comes with Cloud App Security, which is a good thing to have on top of Microsoft Defender."
"We have seen ROI. Most of the other competing alternatives will cost up to around $30 per user device. We average 400 devices. Therefore, the amount that we save each year is 400 times $30."
"Most people don't realize M365/E5 licenses are an amazing deal. They think "Oh, it's expensive," and I'll ask, "Compared to what?" If you don't have it you will have to buy licenses for multiple products to fill the same security space that you would have gotten with the Microsoft product. Go figure out how much it costs you per product, per user, and then come back and tell me how things add up financially."
"It came with Windows."
"There is not a license required for this particular solution."
"Licensing fees are paid annually through a partner."
"It is a little bit more expensive than other security products that we use, but it does provide us good protection. So, it is a trade-off."
"Morphisec is reasonably priced because our parent company's other subsidiaries use different products like CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike is four or five times more expensive than Morphisec. The competitive pricing saves us money in our overall security stack."
"Licenses are per endpoint, and that's true for the cloud version as well. The only difference is that there is a little extra charge for the cloud version."
"It is priced correctly for what it does. They end up doing a good deal of discounting, but I think it is priced appropriately."
"It is an annual subscription basis per device. For the devices that we have in scope right now, it is about $25,000 a year."
"We are still using a separate tool. I know for our 600 or I think we're actually licensed for up to 700 users, it runs me 23 or $24,000 a year. When you're talking to that many users plus servers being protected, that's well worth the investment for that dollar amount."
"The pricing is definitely fair for what it does."
"Price-wise, it's on the higher side. A traditional antivirus solution is cheaper, but in terms of security and manageability, its ROI is better than a traditional antivirus. I would recommend it to anybody evaluating or considering an antivirus solution. If your system gets compromised, the cost of ransom would be a lot more. This way, it saves a lot of cost."
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Top Industries

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

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 Business81
Midsize Enterprise40
Large Enterprise95
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise8
 

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,...
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?
I'm not too familiar with the pricing, setup costs, and licensing for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint; it wasn't some...
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Also Known As

Cyvera, Cortex XDR, Palo Alto Networks Traps
Microsoft Defender ATP, Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection, MS Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender Antivirus
Morphisec, Morphisec Moving Target Defense
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
Petrofrac, Metro CSG, Christus Health
Lenovo/Motorola, TruGreen, Covenant Health, Citizens Medical Center
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Defender for Endpoint vs. Morphisec and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,264 professionals have used our research since 2012.