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Microsoft Defender for Endpoint vs Sophos Home 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...
Ranking in Anti-Malware Tools
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
212
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (1st), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (4th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (3rd), Microsoft Security Suite (3rd)
Sophos Home
Ranking in Anti-Malware Tools
16th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.1
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Anti-Malware Tools category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is 6.0%, down from 14.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Sophos Home is 1.3%, down from 1.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Anti-Malware Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint6.0%
Sophos Home1.3%
Other92.7%
Anti-Malware Tools
 

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.
GC
IT at a retailer with 11-50 employees
Ease of application management and feature richness impress
With Sophos Home, it's easy to implement; you just log in and manage the various computers as to what you want to detect. You can set up the type of security you want and reject things such as firearms, drugs, and porn, so I find it's very easy to use, very reasonably priced, and they give you Sophos Home for free when we use some of the other products that they recently changed over on the commercial side. I really don't have much comment on the banking protection or keylogger security feature, but I do realize that Sophos Home is good protection for us, and I'm just about to install a Sophos hardware firewall in our company as well.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It definitely improves the organization in terms of security and productivity."
"Defender for Endpoint is a good competitor for those looking for an EDR solution, and for those looking for a complete security suite, it's one of the better choices."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a robust platform."
"It is stable and easy to use. Everything is okay, and there are no performance issues."
"The most valuable features are that it's easy to use and the updates are very simple."
"Automatic scanning and cleaning of viruses is the best and most valuable feature helping this tool to thrive. If any viruses are found, they are cleaned automatically."
"The whole bundle of the product, which is similar to other Microsoft products, is valuable. Ten years ago, you had third-party stuff for different things. You had one solution for email archiving and another third-party one for something else. Nowadays, Microsoft Office covers all the stuff that was formerly covered by third-party solutions. It is the same with antivirus. The functionality is just basic. You have the scanning, and then you also have a kind of cloud-based protection and reporting about your environment. With Microsoft Security Center, you have a complete overview of your environment. You know the software inventory, and you have security recommendations. You can not only see that the antivirus is up to date; you can also see where are the vulnerabilities in your system. Microsoft Security Center tells you where you have old, deprecated software and what kind of CVEs are addressed. It's really cool stuff."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is scalable. Currently, we have 600,000 users in our organization."
"With Sophos Home, it's easy to implement; you just log in and manage the various computers as to what you want to detect."
"The tool's most valuable feature is ransomware protection. Its integration with other Sophos security products is good, and the AI features have made it an efficient product."
 

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."
"Microsoft Defender could be improved with features more like the McAfee ePO. It would be better if I had a console to get all the information for my endpoints. Maybe this is too much for it, but it would be better if it could handle those non-signature-based malicious codes or viruses."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint can have more options and more AI capabilities in the future, because everything keeps changing."
"The time it takes to restore the application could be improved. It has a lot of dependencies. It's not like the Microsoft security that comes with the OS. Updating through the command prompt, most of the time, it takes some time to download some of these dependencies."
"We'd like to see integrations with more vulnerability scanning solutions like Tenable."
"My main issue with the tool is that there are too many menus. This causes a steep learning curve for those without training or unfamiliar with Defender for Endpoint. From an end-user perspective, the solution is there on the machine and does its job; it works seamlessly. However, as a security professional dealing with it behind the scenes, the learning curve can be steep, but not too steep. Still, it has taken some of my analysts up to a month to get familiar with the product."
"The end-user also cannot do some advanced actions on it. It's a little bit complicated for our end-user, so it needs to be simplified."
"It can get a bit laggy sometimes. Other than that, we don't have any issues. They constantly tweak it and fix it up based on users' feedback. It has improved a lot over the past four years. Defender for Endpoint never really used to be a good endpoint security solution, but over the past couple of years, Microsoft has invested heavily in it. So, it has come a long way in all aspects of endpoint security. If they want to make it better, they should just continue investing in the current path of what they've been doing over the past couple of years."
"I expect an improvement with mobile integration. I want mobile devices to have better security, like Sophos Home's total security. Users often need to connect to a cloud platform to manage or change settings, which can be difficult. To improve this, providing minimal local settings could help users."
"For homeowners, determining ROI is challenging. With personal emails or maybe a few business emails, if you don't get hacked, then you're good."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost is high, compared to other products in the market, if you look at it as a separate product. If you look at the cost where it is part of a bundle, the cost is okay."
"The cost is high for E5 licenses, but if we go with the E3 license, most of the features are not covered."
"It is within the same range as other products. It is not too expensive, and it is also not cheap. Its price can be better, but, well, it is Microsoft."
"Even if you are not registered as a not-for-profit, the offering that they have is definitely worth consideration. This is in the sense that the E5 stack just gives you so many benefits. You get your entire productivity suite through Microsoft 365 apps. You get all your security and identity protection. You get the Defender for Endpoint and Defender for Identity. You get the cloud access security broker as well. You get Azure Active Directory Premium P2, which gives you so many good things that you can configure and deploy. You don't have to configure them on day one, but you have access to so many different tools that will protect your data, security, endpoints, and identities that you could build out a security strategy 18 months long, and slowly work your way through it, based on what you have available to you through your license."
"We have an enterprise agreement so from my perspective, this is a product that ships with Windows and it is not priced standalone."
"When customers haven't deployed the solution and don't have licenses, it can be expensive to start from scratch."
"I pay for it through the Windows Professional or Standard license. It is a one-time cost for me, and I use the same license."
"The subscription is part of Windows, so we don't have to pay anything extra for this product."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
17%
Retailer
9%
Construction Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

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 ...
What needs improvement with Sophos Home?
For homeowners, determining ROI is challenging. With personal emails or maybe a few business emails, if you don't get hacked, then you're good. If you do get hacked, then your return on investment ...
What advice do you have for others considering Sophos Home?
I would have to check the new features because AI is constantly evolving, and a lot of these companies come out with their AI products now. For the enterprise side of Sophos, AI MDR is your best op...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Sophos Home?
Sophos Home is very cheap, and I find it to be a no-brainer for that type of security.
 

Also Known As

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

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Petrofrac, Metro CSG, Christus Health
1. Acer 2. Adidas 3. Aetna 4. Aflac 5. Airbus 6. AIG 7. Amazon 8. American Express 9. American Airlines 10. Amex 11. Apple 12. AT&T 13. Audi 14. Avaya 15. Bank of America 16. Barclays 17. Bayer 18. Ben & Jerry's 19. BMW 20. Boeing 21. Bristol-Myers Squibb 22. Cadbury 23. Campbell Soup 24. Capital One 25. Caterpillar 26. Cisco 27. Coca-Cola 28. Comcast 29. ConocoPhillips 30. Dell 31. Disney 32. Dominion Energy 33. DuPont 34. eBay 35. ExxonMobil 36. FedEx 37. Ford 38. General Electric 39. General Motors 40. Google 42. Halliburton 43. Home Depot 44. Honda 45. Intel 46. Johnson & Johnson 47. JPMorgan Chase 48. Kellogg's 49. KeyCorp 50. Kraft Heinz 52. L'Oréal 53. Lockheed Martin 54. McDonald's 55. Merck 56. Microsoft 57. Morgan Stanley 58. Nike 59. PepsiCo 60. Pfizer 61. Qualcomm 62. RBC 63. Red Bull 64. Reebok 65. Siemens 66. Tesla 67. Toyota 68. Visa 69. Wells Fargo 70. Xerox 71. Yum! Brands
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Defender for Endpoint vs. Sophos Home and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
914,262 professionals have used our research since 2012.