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Microsoft Defender for Endpoint vs Tanium comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 18, 2026

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)
4th
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
110
Ranking in other categories
Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (5th), Ransomware Protection (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (1st)
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
7.0
Number of Reviews
214
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (4th), Anti-Malware Tools (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (3rd)
Tanium
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
16th
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
22nd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (4th), Vulnerability Management (25th), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) category, the mindshare of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is 3.6%, down from 3.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is 7.0%, down from 10.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tanium is 2.3%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint7.0%
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks3.6%
Tanium2.3%
Other87.1%
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
 

Q&A Highlights

 

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.
MA
Division Manager, Information Technology at a legal firm with 51-200 employees
Centralized policies have improved remote endpoint control and have simplified data visibility
The integration is not simple and easy. It requires experienced users or people who have done the implementation. When certain policies are applied, they do not immediately push the policies. For example, we manage endpoint device USB access. We set a policy to block it, but it does not come into effect immediately. Sometimes it takes three or four days for it to reflect. That is a pain point. I have raised this issue with support as well, but they said that I need to limit the number of devices in the policy. In terms of application deployment, for us, it was seamless.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cortex XDR is stable, offering high quality and reliable performance."
"This software helps us understand any issues that may arise when someone is not at work."
"One of the main benefits of the solution is its intelligence to correlate the events into an incident."
"We use Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks for its ability to detect based on behavior rather than simple virus scan to prevent malicious activities."
"One of the main benefits of the solution is its intelligence to correlate the events into an incident."
"The ability to kind of stitch everything together and see the actual complete picture is very useful. I guess you'd call it a playbook. Some people call it the forensics analysis of what was happening on particular endpoints when they detected some malicious behavior, and what transpired before that to cause that. It is also very user friendly. The way they have done everything and integrated all the solutions that they've purchased over the years to make it a very seamless, effective product is very good. One thing about Palo Alto is that they take the products or services that they purchase and make them seamless for the end user as compared to some companies that purchase other companies and then just kind of have their products off to the side or keep different interfaces. Palo Alto doesn't do that."
"Its ability to react to cyber data attacks is awesome."
"Cortex XDR is a very capable solution for protecting large networks and a lot of endpoints. It's very useful because the automation is very high, and if you combine it with the features on Palo Alto firewalls, it provides very strong protection."
"It has Kusto Query Language (KQL), so we can use our own queries to find anything."
"The threat hunting service is very useful for a security professional."
"We had Norton Antivirus before, and with Norton, we didn't have a way to centrally manage a lot of features. Defender allowed us to deploy it from our Office 365 admin console. That is probably the biggest thing that made us go with Defender."
"One of the features which differentiates it from other EDR providers is the Automated Investigation and Response, which reduces the workload of SOC analysts or engineers. They don't have to manually investigate each and every alert on the endpoint, since it does so automatically. And you can automate the investigation part."
"It's a stable solution."
"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."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has helped free up the SOC team to work on other projects and tasks."
"Within its class I think, it has a high and decent detection rate."
"Threat hunting is a very good feature on Tanium. We have just started using it and have not used it extensively."
"Tanium is highly scalable."
"Tanium's most valuable features are patch management, inventory, and distribution software."
"I like the fact that you can create patching campaigns depending on the area of your network that you want to address first."
"When I push a quick update, it's done right away, and I can rescan immediately to confirm completion within minutes."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the consolidation of all historical data on device endpoints, security drivers, firmware, and Software version gaps."
"It's definitely not complex, it is pretty user-friendly and it's a solid tool enterprise to use."
"The product is granular and can build complex roles compared to other EDR vendors."
 

Cons

"Every 30 or 40 days, there's a new version and we need to go and make sure our customer's laptops are upgraded."
"Basically, they don't provide customer support tools just to investigate the logs."
"Currently, if you use Palo Alto endpoint protection as the only solution it's very complicated to remove pre-existing threats."
"The price could be a little lower."
"If you compare it to SentinelOne, which has more functionalities and detection capabilities on an open platform, the pricing on SentinelOne is far more reasonable and cheaper than Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks."
"It would be better if they could educate the customers more. Some sort of seminars and roadshows will help educate the customers and show what the product can do."
"The dashboard could use some significant improvement, just making it more useful with more information. It has a limited amount of information right now. It is customizable, but I'd love to see a better out-of-box dashboard."
"Initially, we got to have a lot of false positives when we onboarded, but nowadays it's quite smooth."
"It is not very scalable from the eyes of an MSP because there is no dashboard that you can use to see all of your devices that have Windows Defender unless you have your own dashboard or an RMM tool to actually look at it. So, you might not get to know that a particular computer of a client is doing something, and it might have got a virus. That person might know that, but unless you set it up to actually send you the information, you won't get to know that. That's one of the things that is hard with Microsoft Defender. It is not made for the MSP world where you have one pane of glass to see all of your clients with Microsoft Defender on it unless your RMM tool already has that built-in and it can see the telemetry from Microsoft Defender."
"The log searches for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint are pretty difficult to navigate. It needs a better UI or more intuitive search and filter mechanisms to make it easy to get through and filter through all the data logs."
"Windows Firewall is integrated with Windows Defender. Over the last few days, I have had a problem with defining a wildcard on Windows Firewall."
"The product itself does not necessarily need improvement, but the support and implementation of the product are the disaster cases."
"I want Microsoft Defender to have the ability to deal with some issues automatically, so I don't need to address that issue manually."
"A single dashboard would be a significant improvement."
"There is no behavior analytics for devices and endpoints."
"Its user interface can be improved; currently, in the console, you have to dig down through many different layers to get to specific functionality instead of having it all on the surface."
"We had some issues with the solution's OS upgrade."
"The performance could improve in future releases. We have had performance issues in specialized web environments, but overall I think the problems are less than 2% of the computer systems being used."
"Tanium’s scalability could be improved."
"Tanium's limitations should be improved because although it is a great tool, it is limited to only a few classes during a session."
"I would like to have more integrations and custom plugins to input. Integration is always a big deal in a lot of different environments."
"There are some bugs in the product. The tool needs to improve in the area of reporting."
"The main issues are the network connection because different customers have issues with their networks."
"When working with Tanium, there are some older devices that haven't been patched for a long time, and certain patches are not included in Tanium. I have to search outside to download patches, create bundles, and then perform the task."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is on the higher side, but it's okay."
"The return on investment is from the user side because we have seen the performance of it increase the delivery time of the product if we are using too many web-based and on-premise applications. In indirect ways, we saw the return of investment in terms of performance and user satisfaction increase."
"Its pricing is kind of in line with its competitors and everybody else out there."
"The price of the product is not very economical."
"Licensing for Palo Alto Networks Cortex XDR can be costly, especially when it comes to a hundred users. A license is required for each user, and the subscription must be renewed on a yearly basis."
"I feel it is fairly priced."
"It is cost-effective compared to similar solutions. It fits for the small businesses through to the big businesses."
"Every customer has to pay for a license because it doesn't work with what you get from a managed services provider."
"There is not a license required for this particular solution."
"The price for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is about three euros, which is considered reasonably priced."
"We have been using the free version."
"We have an enterprise agreement so from my perspective, this is a product that ships with Windows and it is not priced standalone."
"The license cost is around $35 per machine, which is not expensive compared to other products."
"Microsoft has different plans for buying this product. The price depends on the configuration of the full set of products that you buy and on the licensing program in your contract."
"I got it with the Microsoft Windows license."
"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 solution offers value for money."
"The product's pricing differs from region to region depending on negotiations and the number of endpoints."
"Tanium is a more expensive solution in Latin America than some of the competitors, such as BigFix."
"It is higher than some competitors in the market."
"The solution is expensive but it's a good investment."
"There is an annual license required to use this solution."
"It's an expensive solution. It would be nice if the cost were lower."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise49
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business82
Midsize Enterprise44
Large Enterprise96
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise12
 

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?
We have been discussing pricing, setup cost, and licensing, and we are currently on an E3. We are discussing going to...
What needs improvement with Tanium?
While there is always room for improvement, I am pleased with Tanium.
What is your primary use case for Tanium?
The primary use case for Tanium ( /products/tanium-reviews ) is compliance, patching, and inventory as part of the co...
What advice do you have for others considering Tanium?
For smaller companies, Tanium is quite a big investment, and one needs to have a considerable setup to make it econom...
 

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
Tanium Inc Cloud, Tanium XEM
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
Petrofrac, Metro CSG, Christus Health
JPMorgan Chase, eBay, Amazon, US Bank, MetLife, pwc, Cerner, Delphi, MGM Grand, New York Life
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Defender for Endpoint vs. Tanium and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.