We performed a comparison between Microsoft Defender For Endpoint and Sophos Intercept X 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 the parameters we compared, Sophos Intercept X comes out on top. While the Microsoft Defender For Endpoint solution is good, it lacks in certain areas that Sophos Intercept X don’t have to worry about. Overall, users of Sophos Intercept X have mainly positive feedback on the product, agreeing that its set of features is excellent.
"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."
"It doesn't impact the devices. It is an agent-based solution, and we see no performance knock on cell phones. That was a big thing for us, especially in the mobile world. We don't see battery degradation like you do with other solutions which really drain the battery, as they're constantly doing things. That can shorten the useful life of a device."
"The threat Grid with the ability to observe the sandboxing, analyze, and perform investigations of different malicious files has been great."
"Any alert that we get is an actionable alert. Immediately, there is information that we can just click through, see the point in time, what happened, what caused it, and what automatic actions were taken. We can then choose to take any manual actions, if we want, or start our investigation. We're no longer looking at digging into information or wading through hundreds of incidents. There's a list which says where the status is assigned, e.g., under investigation or investigation finished. That is all in the console. It has taken away a lot of the administration, which we would normally be doing, and integrated it into the console for us."
"The solution makes it possible to see a threat once and block it everywhere across all endpoints and the entire security platform. It has the ability to block right down to the file and application level across all devices based on policies, such as, blacklisting and whitelisting of software and applications. This is good. Its strength is the ability to identify threats very quickly, then lock them and the network down and block the threats across the organization and all devices, which is what you want. You don't want to be spending time working out how to block something. You want to block something very quickly, letting that flow through to all the devices and avoiding the same scenario on different operating systems."
"One of the best features of AMP is its cloud feature. It doesn't matter where the device is in regards to whether it's inside or outside of your network environment, especially right now when everybody's remote and taken their laptops home. You don't have to be VPNed into the environment for AMP to work. AMP will work anywhere in the world, as long as it has an Internet connection. You get protection and reporting with it. No matter where the device is, AMP has still got coverage on it and is protecting it. You still have the ability to manage and remediate things. The cloud feature is the magic bullet. This is what makes the solution a valuable tool as far as I'm concerned."
"Integration is a key selling factor for Cisco security products. We have a Cisco Enterprise Agreement with access to Cisco Email Security, Cisco Firepower, Cisco Stealthwatch, Cisco Talos, Cisco Threat Grid, Cisco Umbrella, and also third-party solutions. This is key to our security and maximizing operations. Because we do have the Email Security appliance and it is integrated with Threat Response, we have everything tied together. Additionally, we are using the Cisco SecureX platform, as we were a beta test for that new solution. With SecureX, we are able to pull all those applications into one pane for visibility and maintenance. This greatly maximizes our security operations."
"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."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is scalable. Currently, we have 600,000 users in our organization."
"I like the fact that it has the ransomware solution in there. I'm glad that the ransomware solution is built into it. That's probably the biggest thing that I see in Microsoft Defender."
"Defender is stable, I haven't had any problems with viruses when using it, and it's easy to update."
"Provides good security features and you can view it in the central console."
"It's pretty easy to scale."
"The most valuable features are that it is flexible, and it is integrated with Microsoft products."
"The scalability is good."
"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."
"The thing that I like about it is the synchronized security. You can tie endpoint protection and firewalls and a whole range of other services and products. You can get your servers taken in under this."
"The most valuable features are ease of use and the GUI."
"Sophos Intercept X is a complete endpoint solution."
"The solution is scalable."
"The performance is good."
"This solution is easy to configure."
"This solution offers very good performance and it has great features."
"There do not seem to be any limitations to the scalability of this product."
"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."
"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."
"The thing I hate the most, which they have not fixed, is when it creates duplicate entries within a console. If you have a computer and you upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10, or you upgrade your agent from version 6 to 7, it creates a new instance in there instead of updating the information. Instead of paying a license for one computer, I have to license two computers until I manually go in, search for all the duplicate entries, and clean them out myself."
"The GUI needs improvement, it's not good."
"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."
"We had a lot of noise at the beginning, and we had to turn it down based on exclusions, application whitelisting, and excluding unknown benign applications. Cisco should understand the need for continuous updates on the custom Cisco exclusions and the custom applications that come out-of-the-box with the AMP for Endpoints."
"...the greatest value of all, would be to make the security into a single pane of glass. Whilst these products are largely integrated from a Talos perspective, they're not integrated from a portal perspective. For example, we have to look at an Umbrella portal and a separate AMP portal. We also have to look at a separate portal for the firewalls. If I could wave a magic wand and have one thing, I would put all the Cisco products into one, simple management portal."
"The one challenge that I see is the use of multiple endpoint protection platforms. For instance, we have AMP, but we also have Microsoft Windows Defender, System Center Endpoint Protection, and Microsoft Malware Protection Engine deployed. So, we have a bunch of different things that do the same thing. What winds up happening is, e.g., if I get an alert for a potential incident or malware and want to pull the file, I'll go to fetch the file to analyze it. But, one of these other programs has already gotten it, so the file has already been quarantined by another endpoint protection system. AMP doesn't realize that and the file fetch fails, then you're left wondering what's going on."
"The solution could use improvement on the interface."
"Notifications are always popping up — I hate that."
"With regards to the interface, a challenge I found was that there was not enough documentation on how to tune it. I had to read multiple sources on the internet to learn how to configure the tool appropriately."
"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."
"Monitoring can always be better, onboarding can be a little bit faster, log collection could be easier, they could streamline the dashboard. They could maybe split it up into different workspaces and have the ability to segment groups a little bit more."
"The solution could be even more secure and provide an even higher level of security."
"Its user interface (UI) can be improved. Currently, in the console, you have to dig down for certain things. They've got many different layers to get to things instead of having it all on the surface. You have to go three folds lower to get to specific functionality or click a particular option. It would be good if we can manage the console through menus and instead of three clicks, we can do things in one click. They need to change the UI and work on it in terms of a better user experience."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint could improve by making the reporting better."
"Installing Sophos Intercept X was not as straightforward, as we had to ask support and had to work with an integrator, though the process didn't take much time, e.g. it was completed within one hour."
"We've had difficulty with uninstalling the solution. When we try to uninstall an old version of the basic Sophos Antivirus, it doesn't seem to uninstall completely."
"I would like to have a built-in firewall, rather than having to integrate one."
"We would like more application control in order to be able to schedule times and access."
"We would like to deploy across a variety of machines simultaneously through the network."
"Should include additional integration."
"The majority of our systems are MacBooks and their solution release cycle is slow to endorsing or support the MacBook's latest OS or hardware platform. For example, when Sophos macOS Big Sur version 11 was released, it took them a while to support this version of OS. A similar situation occurred when the MacBook M1 hardware CPU was released. They have not fully supported the native M1 CPU to this day. They need to speed up the solutions release cycle."
"Features that should be improved in the upgrade involve the excessive consumption of the the solution's processor, RAM and resources."
More Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Pricing and Cost Advice →
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is ranked 3rd in Endpoint Protection for Business (EPP) with 112 reviews while Sophos Intercept X is ranked 6th in Endpoint Protection for Business (EPP) with 64 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is rated 8.0, while Sophos Intercept X is rated 8.6. 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 Sophos Intercept X writes "Great reporting and good training with a pretty straightforward setup". Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is most compared with CrowdStrike Falcon, Symantec Endpoint Security, Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks, SentinelOne and Malwarebytes, whereas Sophos Intercept X is most compared with CrowdStrike Falcon, SentinelOne, Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks, Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business and Bitdefender GravityZone Ultra. See our Microsoft Defender for Endpoint vs. Sophos Intercept X report.
See our list of best Endpoint Protection for Business (EPP) vendors and best Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) vendors.
We monitor all Endpoint Protection for Business (EPP) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
