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Microsoft Defender XDR vs Morphisec comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 9, 2024

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 XDR
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
101
Ranking in other categories
Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (4th), Microsoft Security Suite (3rd)
Morphisec
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
58th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (61st), Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (56th), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (34th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (37th), Threat Deception Platforms (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender XDR is 3.2%, down from 3.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Morphisec is 0.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
 

Featured Reviews

Gabor Nyerd - PeerSpot reviewer
Includes four services and four products, which can help organizations a lot
We found that sometimes integrations work, but testing them can take some time. Sometimes, configurations take much longer than expected. We have a configuration in place that needs to be synchronized with another server. However, the servers are four hours apart, so this can cause delays. In general, I believe that the time it takes to configure and test a service should be shorter. Sometimes, it can take a couple of hours to test a single configuration setting. Other times, it is only ten or fifteen minutes, which is normal. However, sometimes, even immediate actions can be triggered by configuration changes, and some settings can take up to eight hours to complete. I believe that this time can be improved. Microsoft is making a lot of improvements to its services in a short period of time. This is a good thing, as it means that the services are constantly being updated and improved. However, it can be challenging for customers to keep up with the changes. For example, a customer may read about an update, understand it, and share it with their colleagues and boss. However, it may take days or weeks to test the update and get the necessary approvals. This can be especially challenging for large customers with many users or machines. In some cases, Microsoft may change a service before the customer has had a chance to implement the previous update. This can be frustrating for customers, as it means that they have to constantly learn new things and adjust their workflows. On the one hand, it is important for Microsoft to keep updating and improving its services. This helps to ensure that the services are meeting the customers' needs and that they are staying ahead of the competition. Microsoft should also be mindful of the challenges that these changes can create for customers. One way to address this challenge is to provide customers with more time to implement changes. Microsoft could also provide more information about upcoming changes so that customers can plan ahead. Ultimately, Microsoft needs to strike a balance between keeping its services up-to-date and providing customers with a smooth transition to new features.
Islam Shaikh - PeerSpot reviewer
Lightweight, detects everything quickly, and takes corrective action
We sometimes have to depend on the support team to know what action we should take. If the solution for an alert can be built into the report that we are getting, it will save time, and the interaction with support would be less. At times, corrective action is required, but at times, we don't need to take any action. It would be good if we get to know in the report that a particular infection doesn't require any action. It will save us time and effort. Other than that, nothing else is required. They have taken care of everything. We are getting alerts, and we can have multiple admins. We get a good model with this view.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"A crucial aspect for our team is the inclusion of identity and access management tools from the vendor."
"Microsoft 365 Defender is simple to upgrade."
"I rate Microsoft Defender XDR 10 out of 10."
"The integration, visibility, vulnerability management, and device identification are valuable."
"The integration with other Microsoft solutions is the most valuable feature."
"The product integrates security into one tool instead of having third-party security tools."
"The most valuable feature is probably the aggregation and correlation of the different telemetry points with Defender for Identity, Defender for Endpoint, and Defender for Cloud Apps. All of these various things are part of that portal. We've wanted that single pane of glass for years."
"In Microsoft 365 vendor products, monitoring and connectivity across all Microsoft and third-party connectors enable viewing of all activity within those environments."
"We have seen it successfully block attacks that a traditional antivirus did not pick up."
"Morphisec makes it very easy for IT teams of any size to prevent breaches of critical systems because of the design of their tool. When we evaluated Morphisec, the CIO and I sat and listened. What attracted us to them is the fact that it stops activity at the point of detection. That saves a lot of time because now we are not investigating and trying to trace down what to turn off. We have already prevented it, which makes it very much safer and more secure."
"Morphisec Guard enables us to see at a glance whether our users have device control and disk encryption enabled properly. This is important because we are a global company operating with multiple entities. Previously, we didn't have that visibility. Now, we have visibility so we can pinpoint some locations where there are machines that are not really protected, offline, etc. It gives us visibility, which is good."
"Morphisec has absolutely helped save money on our security stack. The ransomware at the end of the day can cost organizations millions upon millions of dollars. Investing in tools like Morphisec is a great reduction in that cost. If I can spend $10,000 in a year to protect assets that could be ransomed for $20,000,000, that's definitely a bet that one should pursue. Morphisec absolutely it's worth the investment."
"Since using Morphisec we have seen a downturn in attacks because Morphisec protects us versus Defenders and whatnot that are signature-based. I know we have not had any issues with ransomware or other zero-day attacks that we've seen with machines that, all of a sudden, have become before we instituted the product. Now the machine had to be re-imaged and there was a loss of data because something was on the machine. You couldn't really determine what was on the machine because nothing was picking it up. The products we were using weren't picking it up."
"Morphisec also provides full visibility into security events for Microsoft Defender and Morphisec in one dashboard... in the single pane of glass provided by Morphisec, it's all right there at your fingertips: easy to access and easy to understand. And if you choose to go down further to know everything from the process to the hash behind it, you can."
"What's valuable is really the whole kit and caboodle of the Morphisec agent. What it does is genius, in a way, until the bad guys get wise to it. You set it up and then you watch the dashboard. There isn't really much tinkering."
"It provides full visibility into security events and from both solutions in one dashboard. I'm not a big security guy, if I have a threat that looks like there's a problem, I will ask Morphisec to dissect it for me, and tell me what might be happening. Because it tends to be all hash codes, so I can tell what's going on. They've been pretty good with that."
 

Cons

"Microsoft Defender XDR could be improved with a lower price."
"The capability to not only thwart attacks but also to adapt to evolving threats is crucial."
"For some scenarios, it provides good visibility into threats, and for some scenarios, it doesn't. For example, sometimes the URLs within the emails have destinations, and you do get a screenshot and all further details, but it's not always the case. It would be good if they did a better job of enabling that for all the emails that they identified as malicious. When you get an email threat, you can go into the email and see more details, but the URL destination feature doesn't always show you a screenshot of the URL in that email. It also doesn't always give you the characteristics relating to that URL. It would be quite good if the information is complete where it says that we identified this URL, and this is what it looks like. There should be some threat intel about it. It should give you more details."
"Intrusion detection and prevention would be great to have with 365 Defender."
"I would like more of the features in Defender for 365 to be included in the smaller licenses. Even if I buy a small license and don't need everything, security shouldn't be a question. Security is one of the main aspects of all projects from our side, so it would be nice to have more features in the smaller licenses."
"The interface could be improved. For example, if you want to do a phishing simulation for your employees, it can take a while to figure out what to do. The interface is a bit messy and could be updated. It isn't too bad, but doing some things can be a long process."
"Offboarding latency should be reduced. Even after a device has been successfully offboarded using a particular offboarding script, it still shows up as onboarded."
"Sometimes, digging into the information and knowing where to go can be difficult. It would be better if much of that information were immediately visible, especially when looking at endpoints or users."
"Automating reports needs improvement. I would like to have better reporting capabilities within it or automated reporting to be a little bit more dynamic. That's something I know they're working on. We literally are in the process. We started the process a week and a half ago of going to their latest version, so I've not seen their latest one up and running yet."
"The dashboard is the area that requires the most improvement. We have about, I would say 5,500 computers currently, and searching through all of those takes some time to filter. So as soon as you apply the filter, it takes a few seconds. It crunches, it thinks, and then it brings up the clients that match."
"I haven't been able to get the cloud deployment to work. When there's an update, I'm supposed to be able to roll it out for the cloud solution, but right now I'm continuing to use our SCCM solution to update it."
"If anything, tech support might be their weakest link. The process of getting someone involved sometimes takes a little time. It seems to me that they should have all the data they need to let me know whether an alert is legitimate or not, but they tend to need a lot of information from me to get to the bottom of something. It usually takes a little longer than I would expect."
"The weakest point of this product is how difficult it is to understand the reasons for an alert. This is a problem because it is hard to determine whether an attack is real or not."
"It would be useful for them if they had some kind of network discovery. That kind of functionality I think would give IT administrators a little bit more confidence that they have 100 percent coverage, and it gives them something to audit against. Network discovery would be one area I would definitely suggest that they put some effort into."
"In the Windows Defender integration, they have put in a report of computers that need Windows Defender updates. If those updates could be kicked off directly from the dashboard, instead of having to go to another system entirely, that would be good."
"It would be nice if they could integrate Morphisec with other traditional antivirus solutions beyond Microsoft Defender. That is probably my biggest gripe."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is 15 dollars per server per month. It is worth it, but it can be costly. It depends on the company's size."
"The most valuable licensing option is expensive, so pricing could be improved. Licensing options for this solution also need to be consolidated, because they frequently change."
"There are no issues with pricing, but sometimes, the clarity in licensing is a concern."
"The price of the solution is high compared to others and we have lost some customers because of it."
"Microsoft Defender XDR's licensing is complicated."
"Microsoft purposely makes its license combinations complex and includes combinations like Microsoft 365 E3 and Microsoft 365 E5, Office 365 E3, Office 365 E5, and Office 365 E1, so you get confused. Microsoft tries to sell you a bundle of a lot of things together."
"365 Defender can get expensive because you pay per gigabyte of data ingested. On the other hand, much of the data available in the other Microsoft security solutions are made available relatively cheaply—sometimes at cost or for free. Integrating only a limited set of third-party solutions with Sentinel would be cost-effective. It's much more affordable if companies only have Microsoft stuff."
"While the standalone price of Defender XDR might seem high, its value becomes clear when considering the ease of implementation and smooth integration with our existing Microsoft infrastructure, especially when bundled with other Microsoft products."
"It is an annual subscription basis per device. For the devices that we have in scope right now, it is about $25,000 a year."
"Licenses are per endpoint, and that's true for the cloud version as well. The only difference is that there is a little extra charge for the cloud version."
"Price-wise, it's on the higher side. A traditional antivirus solution is cheaper, but in terms of security and manageability, its ROI is better than a traditional antivirus. I would recommend it to anybody evaluating or considering an antivirus solution. If your system gets compromised, the cost of ransom would be a lot more. This way, it saves a lot of cost."
"The pricing is definitely fair for what it does."
"It is priced correctly for what it does. They end up doing a good deal of discounting, but I think it is priced appropriately."
"It is a little bit more expensive than other security products that we use, but it does provide us good protection. So, it is a trade-off."
"We are still using a separate tool. I know for our 600 or I think we're actually licensed for up to 700 users, it runs me 23 or $24,000 a year. When you're talking to that many users plus servers being protected, that's well worth the investment for that dollar amount."
"It does not have multi-tenants. If South Africa wants to show only the machines that they have, they need their own cloud incidence. It is not possible to have that in a single cloud incidence with multiple tenants in it, instead you need to have multiple cloud incidences. Then, if you have that, it will be more expensive. However, they are going to change that, which is good."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Outsourcing Company
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Microsoft 365 Defender?
Microsoft Defender XDR provides strong identity protection with comprehensive insights into risky user behavior and potential indicators of compromise.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft 365 Defender?
Licensing is somewhat confusing, particularly when presenting our pitch decks to stakeholders and leveraging key features in premium SKUs, but we managed with some assistance from Microsoft.
What needs improvement with Microsoft 365 Defender?
There is nothing I can think of at the moment that needs improvement. I am a contractor and finishing up soon, so I haven't encountered any issues requiring enhancements.
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Also Known As

Microsoft 365 Defender, Microsoft Threat Protection, MS 365 Defender
Morphisec, Morphisec Moving Target Defense
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Accenture, Deloitte, ExxonMobil, General Electric, IBM, Johnson & Johnson and many others.
Lenovo/Motorola, TruGreen, Covenant Health, Citizens Medical Center
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Defender XDR vs. Morphisec and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,236 professionals have used our research since 2012.