Microsoft Defender (Office 365) and Palo Alto Networks WildFire offer threat protection, however, they target different areas of security. Defender focuses on cloud-based threats within Microsoft 365 applications, while WildFire is a broader network security solution with sandboxing capabilities for analyzing suspicious files. They can be considered complementary solutions.
The summary above is based on 99 interviews we conducted recently with Palo Alto Networks WildFire and Microsoft Defender for Office 365 users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"The solution is very easy to use. All you have to do is to assign the license to the end-user and it's done. The customer will only have the feature activated, and the solution will monitor the emails to determine if they are a threat or not."
"There are several features that I consider valuable."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 has improved my organization's security. It makes it easier to manage the infrastructure without the help of third-party applications."
"Defender helps us prioritize threats across our organization."
"Some of the valuable features on the email side are anti-phishing, anti-malware, and Safe Links."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is a stable solution."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365's most valuable feature is its performance."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365's most valuable features are safe attachments and safe links."
"WildFire's application encryption is useful."
"The most effective feature of WildFire for threat analysis is its collaboration with other security profiles on our Palo Alto firewall."
"What I like about Palo Alto is that it is a complete product, with everything in it."
"I give the initial setup an eight out of ten."
"Scalable ATP solution that's quick to set up. It demonstrates good performance and stability."
"We get support in the free version."
"I love the idea of Palo Alto Networks WildFire. It's more geared toward preventing malware. If someone's laptop or phone is malware-infected, the tool prevents it from uploading valuable corporate data outside the corporate network. That's what I love about Palo Alto Networks WildFire. It stops malware in its tracks."
"Their technical support is outstanding and top-notch."
"The company should focus on adding threats that the solution is currently unable to detect."
"Microsoft should provide more documentation for users so they can self-educate. I would like to see more documentation for advanced security features."
"You should be able to deploy Defender for every subscription without the need to add servers."
"The pre-sales cost calculations could be more transparent."
"The certification training for Defender for 365 needs to be deeper and incorporate Sentinel. I took all the security courses except one, and Sentinel isn't included."
"Microsoft sometimes has downtime, and we'll get several incidents coming in back to back. We have a huge backlog of notifications, many of which may be false positives. However, there might be serious alerts, so we can't risk dismissing all of them at once."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 should be more proactive."
"They have moved features from one console to another. Things have been moved around in the interface and it takes me time to find where certain features are."
"It's not really their problem, it's a problem across the board. There will always be problems with interrupted traffic. We have to set it up where we're playing a middle man game where we're stripping it out, looking at it, and then putting it back together and sending it on its way. That requires CPU cycles. And there's some overhead with that."
"As a firewall and 360 degrees of security, there needs to be more maturity."
"There are more specialized solutions that compete with Wildfire. Therefore, they need to work on their machine learning and AI to be more competitive."
"The product fails to offer protection when dealing with high-severity vulnerabilities, making it an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The price could be better."
"The deployment model could be better."
"When comparing this solution to others it is not as good overall."
"I don't think it needs to improve anything, except maybe the speed to deploy the changes."
More Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Pricing and Cost Advice →
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is ranked 1st in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) with 41 reviews while Palo Alto Networks WildFire is ranked 3rd in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) with 58 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is rated 8.4, while Palo Alto Networks WildFire is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 writes "Allows for easy reporting of problems, valuable anti-phishing, and anti-malware support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks WildFire writes "Good technical support and provides automatic analysis that saves us time in filtering email". Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is most compared with Proofpoint Email Protection, Mimecast Email Security, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Barracuda Email Security Gateway and Cisco Secure Email, whereas Palo Alto Networks WildFire is most compared with Cisco Secure Firewall, Fortinet FortiGate, Proofpoint Email Protection, Juniper SRX Series Firewall and Cloudflare. See our Microsoft Defender for Office 365 vs. Palo Alto Networks WildFire report.
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