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Microsoft Defender for Endpoint vs Qualys Multi-Vector EDR 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

Microsoft Defender for Endp...
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
210
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (2nd), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (3rd), Anti-Malware Tools (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (3rd)
Qualys Multi-Vector EDR
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
71st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Network Detection and Response (NDR) (27th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is 7.9%, down from 11.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Qualys Multi-Vector EDR is 0.3%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint7.9%
Qualys Multi-Vector EDR0.3%
Other91.8%
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
 

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.
reviewer1668453 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, Security Innovation at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
Provides contextual alerts and risk ratings on findings
It's kind of difficult to quantify areas for improvement. In the larger picture, one challenge is that the NDR space is very crowded today. I can mention half a dozen names just off the top of my head. There are at least 12 to 20 different players. All of them are well-known brand names, and it's difficult to compare them. They all claim to be giving you the same network difference capability: catching malware, dealing with all the minor taxonomy of attack, all that. Still, it's very difficult to compare them side by side because they all do things a little differently, and they all have different presentations and output. We haven't deployed it, so I can't give you what we felt about it exactly. But in the larger perspective, the critical feature is really giving a clear separation between a low, high, and medium criticality. You need a rating that is really true to the actual attack. There's one other capability we are evaluating them for, and it's for custom alerts detection. A lot of these products are trying to profile the threats that are already out there in the industry. They're very well known and published. Today, there are targeted acts being played against organizations, so you have to be sensitive to how your firewalls, protocols, and your HTTP are all operating. You might have some fine-tuned threats that are targeting you, and you should be able to build custom defenses. They should have some openness in terms of how you specify your threats. You get a standard library of threats. On top of it, every organization builds its own.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"The performance of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has been good."
"Defender is stable. The performance is good."
"This is a very go, proactive solution to threat protection using advanced analysis."
"Microsoft Defender can block some viruses or malware. So, it can protect my files. It can save files on Office 365 OneDrive. I use encryption for some files, then I can recover them from OneDrive."
"Technical support has been great."
"Stable endpoint manager, antivirus, and antimalware, with fast technical support and a straightforward setup."
"The notification and reporting features are most valuable because we are part of a compliance project, and maintaining SOC 2 compliance is critical."
"They can provide you very contextual alerts on if something bad is happening—coming into your network or going out of your network. As part of that, they gather a lot of threat intelligence and map your connections against that. The larger benefit is that they give you a risk rating on their findings."
 

Cons

"We were not happy that Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, as a Microsoft product, along with Intune to manage devices, charges this much and still does not provide the information that we are looking for."
"I would just like them to have more consistency, and that's a comment that's across the board with Microsoft. They change things a lot."
"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."
"There is no behavior analytics for devices and endpoints. There is no behavior-based protection."
"We encountered some misbehavior between Microsoft Office Suite and Defender. We had issues of old macros being blocked and some stuff going around the usage of Win32 APIs. There is some improvement between the Office products and Defender, and there is a bunch of stuff that you can configure in your antivirus solutions, but you have several baselines, such as security baselines for Edge, security baselines for Defender, and security baselines for MDM. You have configuration profiles as well. So, there a lot of parts where we can configure our antivirus solution, and we're getting conflicting configurations. This is the major part with which we're struggling in this solution. We are having calls and calls with Microsoft for getting rid of all configuration conflicts that we have. That's really the part that needs to be improved."
"The onboarding and deployment could be more user-friendly, and there is room to grow in some of the reports. I don't want them to be oversimplified or overly complex, but there is room for improvement in the reporting it can do. It's relatively minor."
"Microsoft support could be more knowledgeable."
"The frequency of the patching, and the frequency of the updates, are not included with the free version."
"My challenge is actually comparing offerings from different vendors across a threat spectrum that is very large. We are talking about millions of threats. How are you confident that Blue Hexagon is catching all one million of them and Palo Alto is doing the same thing? They all have their strengths. Within that, Blue Hexagon might cover 990,000 of them. Palo Alto might cover another 990,000. It's a bit difficult to compare them and say, "Oh, are they catching the same 990,000?" I don't know."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is no licensing fee."
"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."
"Currently, for us, Windows Defender is free with the purchase of Windows Server. Pricing is an important point for us when we are looking at the competitors of this solution. If we choose to go with another vendor, we will have to pay some license fees."
"Given our extensive Microsoft licensing, transitioning to Defender for Endpoint did not affect licensing costs."
"The license cost is around $35 per machine, which is not expensive compared to other products."
"When customers haven't deployed the solution and don't have licenses, it can be expensive to start from scratch."
"It is affordable and comes in the Office 365 bundle."
"We have been using the free version."
"It's difficult to state the setup cost. All the NDRs range anywhere between $500,000, plus or minus, to $2 million. There's a spread of pricing here, depending on who you are talking to. Obviously the major brand names want more money. They typically bundle it with their other offerings. With Cisco, for example, you don't just buy an NDR. So, typically it gets rolled into the cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Retailer
9%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business80
Midsize Enterprise40
Large Enterprise92
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
Blue Hexagon
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Petrofrac, Metro CSG, Christus Health
Pacific Dental Services, Greenhill and Co, Heffernan Insurance Brokers
Find out what your peers are saying about CrowdStrike, Microsoft, SentinelOne and others in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR). Updated: December 2025.
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