We performed a comparison between Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and SentinelOne based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on our users’ reviews, we would conclude that SentinelOne is a stronger, more secure solution than Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. Reviewers say that SentinelOne offers a deeper and more thorough level of security. Additionally, SentinelOne provides equal protection across Windows, Linux, and macOS. It can also support legacy infrastructure as well as many newer environments. The single-pane feature helps protect numerous endpoints with a very lean team, saving time and money, thereby improving TCO and ROI.
"The visibility and insight this solution gives you into threats is pretty granular. It has constant monitoring. You can get onto the device trajectory to look at a threat, but you can also see what happened prior to the threat. You can see what happened after the threat. You can see what other applications were incorporated into the execution of the threat. For example, you have the event, but you see that the event was launched by Google Chrome, which was launched by something else. Then, after the event, something else was launched by whatever the threat was. Therefore, it gives you great detail, a timeline, and continuity of events leading up to whatever the incident is, and then, after. This helps you understand and nail down what the threat is and how to fix it."
"Device Trajectory is one of the most valuable features. We're able to dig in and really understand how things came to be and where to focus our efforts."
"The entirety of our network infrastructure is Cisco and the most valuable feature is the integration."
"Another of my favorite features is called the Device Trajectory, where it shows everything that's going on, on a computer. It shows the point in time when a virus is downloaded, so you can see if the user was surfing the internet or had a program open. It shows every running process and file access on the computer and saves it like a snapshot when it detects something malicious. It also has a File Trajectory, so you can even see if that file has been found on any of your other computers that have AMP."
"I'm only using the AMP (advanced malware protection) which is protecting my file system from all the malicious things that might happen. It should protect all kinds of things that might happen on the servers, things that I cannot see."
"Among the most valuable features are the exclusions. And on the scalability side, we can integrate well with the SIEM orchestration engine and a number of applications that are proprietary or open source."
"It is extensive in terms of providing visibility and insights into threats. It allows for research into a threat, and you can chart your progress on how you're resolving it."
"The ability to detonate a particular problem in a sandbox environment and understand what the effects are, is helpful. We're trying, for example, to determine, when people send information in, if an attachment is legitimate or not. You just have to open it. If you can do that in a secure sandbox environment, that's an invaluable feature. What you would do otherwise would be very risky and tedious."
"The protection that it provides is quite good."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is scalable. Currently, we have 600,000 users in our organization."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is quite good. We haven't really experienced any issues with it."
"Technical support is good."
"The most valuable features are that it is flexible, and it is integrated with Microsoft products."
"The stability keeps getting better and better."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has been secure and there is zero maintenance required because it updates with Microsoft Windows."
"Microsoft Defender is always running. It is doing its job, so it is fine. I don't have any issues with the way it was implemented or how we are running it. We have been upgrading IT throughout the years, but there have been no issues."
"For me, the most valuable feature is the Deep Visibility. It gives you the ability to search all actions that were taken on a specific machine, like writing register keys, executing software, opening, reading, and writing files. All that stuff is available from the SentinelOne console. I'm able to see which software is permanent on a machine, and how that happened, whether by registry keys or writing it to a special folder on the machine."
"The detection rate for Sentinel One has been excellent and we have been able to resolve many potential threats with zero client impact. The ability to deploy via our RMM allows us to quickly secure new clients and provides peace of mind."
"The most valuable feature varies from client to client but having absolute clarity of what happened and the autonomous actions of SentinelOne are what most people find the most assuring."
"It has a one-click button that we can use to reverse all those dodgy changes made by the virus program and bring the system quickly back to what it was. That's one of the most important features."
"SentinelOne is very simple to install and very simple to manage. It's very aggressive, so it does protection well, and it seems to be stopping attacks that other solutions cannot."
"SentinelOne also provides equal protection across Windows, Linux, and macOS. I have all of them and every flavor of them you could possibly imagine. They've done a great job because I still have a lot of legacy infrastructure to support. It can support legacy environments as well as newer environments, including all the latest OS's... There are cost savings not only on licensing but because I don't have to have different people managing different consoles."
"The customer support for this solution is good."
"The Deep Visibility feature is the most useful part of the EDR platform. It gives us good insights into what is actually happening on the endpoints, e.g., when we have malicious or suspicious activity. We came from a legacy type AV previously, so we didn't have that level of visibility or understanding. For simplifying threat-hunting, it is extremely useful, where traditional techniques in threat hunting are quite laborious. We can put in indicators of compromise and it will sweep the environment for them, then they would give us a breakdown of what assets have been seen and where they have been seen, which is more of a forensics overview."
"Maybe there is room for improvement in some of the automated remediation. We have other tools in place that AMP feeds into that allow for that to happen, so I look at it as one seamless solution. But if you're buying AMP all by itself, I don't know if it can remove malicious software after the fact or if it requires the other tools that we use to do some of that."
"In Orbital, there are tons of prebuilt queries, but there is not a lot of information in lay terms. There isn't enough information to help us with what we're looking for and why we are looking for it with this query. There are probably a dozen queries in there that really focus on what I need to focus on, but they are not always easy to find the first time through."
"They could improve the main dashboard to more clearly show me the things that I want to see. When I open the dashboard right now, I see a million things and they are not always the things that I need."
"We don't have issues. We think that Cisco covers all of the security aspects on the market. They continue to innovate in the right way."
"It could be improved in connection with artificial intelligence and IoT."
"The connector updates are very easily done now, and that's improving. Previously, the connector had an issue, where almost every time it needed to be updated, it required a machine reboot. This was always a bit of an inconvenience and a bug. Because with a lot of software now, you don't need to do that and shouldn't need to be rebooting all the time."
"We have had some problems with updates not playing nice with our environment. This is important, because if there is a new version, we need to test it thoroughly before it goes into production. We cannot just say, "There's a new version. It's not going to give us any problems." With the complexity of the solution using multiple engines for multiple tasks, it can sometimes cause performance issues on our endpoints. Therefore, we need to test it before we deploy. That takes one to three days before we can be certain that the new version plays nice with our environment."
"The room for improvement would be on event notifications. I have mine tuned fairly well. I do feel that if you subscribe to all the event notification types out-of-the-box, or don't really go through and take the time to filter out events, the notifications can become overwhelming with information. Sometimes, when you're overwhelmed with information, you just say, "I'm not going to look at anything because I'm receiving so much." I recommend the vendor come up with a white paper on the best practices for event notifications."
"I would like to see the next generation of the tool improved to work with other operating systems, like Linux."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is secure but when it comes to security all solutions could improve security."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint could improve by making the reporting better."
"We'd like the stability to be better."
"This solution needs to move beyond relying on virus definitions alone and protect the system using behavioral analysis of the processes that are running."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint could improve by providing more user-friendly dashboards. They may be complicated for some."
"More integration with different platforms is an area for improvement for this product, and should be included in its next release."
"Something that is unique to Microsoft is its licensing model. When you go out and you buy McAfee or Symantec, you know what you're getting out of the box, but with Microsoft, often, when you're looking to achieve a certain set of capabilities, those capabilities are spread across different products. You might try to do something you could do with CrowdStrike, but then find out that you also need to purchase Microsoft Defender for Identity or Microsoft Defender for Azure. You realize that when they talk about what they can offer within the Microsoft platform, it's really the suite of investments. So, sometimes, you may find yourself buying Defender for Endpoint thinking that it matches CrowdStrike, but then you find that Microsoft really needs to sell you something else. One plus one will equal three, but when you have a very concise platform, such as CrowdStrike, you know what you're going to get."
"We are now using an external monitoring tool to monitor the services of SentinelOne, because apparently they don't have any solution for that. When the SentinelOne agent is down, you can go to the interface and see a mark on SentinelOne that something is not correct or the server needs to be rebooted, but you will not get an alert. You will not be warned that there is an issue with the SentinelOne agent. I have found that a little bit disturbing, because then we need to use a third-party monitoring tool to make sure that all services of SentinelOne are up and running."
"We'd like SentinelOne to upgrade automatically. It doesn't automatically update the agent if some system has an older version of the SentinelOne. It has to be triggered from the console."
"There is an area of improvement is agent health monitoring, which would give us the ability to cap and manage resources used by the SentinelOne agent. We had issues with this in our environment. We reached out to SentinelOne about it, and they were very prompt in adding it into their roadmap."
"I would like to improve the reports because they are not so customizable and we would like more info from them."
"They have tiers of support like most companies do. For the first three years, we had the top tier of their support and we would get a response from a technician quickly. We didn't have many things we had to ask of them. They would be very quick. We are now one tier down from that. The SLA for us is no longer within an hour or two. It's within half a day or something like that. As far as if I do ask a question of them, it is a little slower than what it used to be. I understand that we're at a lesser tier, but sometimes it feels like that could be a little better. I have to preface that by specifying that we're no longer paying for their top tier support."
"As a cloud-based product, there is a minimum number of licenses that need to be purchased, which is unfortunate."
"If it had a little bit more granularity in the roles and responsibilities matrix, that would help. There are users that have different components, but I'd be much happier if I could cherry-pick what functions I want to give to which users. That would be a huge benefit."
"One of the areas which would benefit from being improved is the policies. There are still software programs where we need to manually program in the policies to tell the system, "This program is legitimate." Some level of AI-based automation in creating those policies would go a long way in improving the amount of time it takes to deploy the system."
More Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Pricing and Cost Advice →
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is ranked 3rd in Endpoint Protection for Business (EPP) with 114 reviews while SentinelOne is ranked 2nd in Endpoint Protection for Business (EPP) with 28 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is rated 8.0, while SentinelOne is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint writes "Enables ingestion of events directly into your SIEM/SOAR, but requires integration with all Defender products to work optimally". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SentinelOne writes "Made a tremendous difference in our ability to protect our endpoints and servers". Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is most compared with CrowdStrike Falcon, Symantec Endpoint Security, Sophos Intercept X, Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks and Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business, whereas SentinelOne is most compared with CrowdStrike Falcon, Darktrace, Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks and Carbon Black CB Defense. See our Microsoft Defender for Endpoint vs. SentinelOne report.
See our list of best Endpoint Protection for Business (EPP) vendors and best Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) vendors.
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