We performed a comparison between Cortex XDR By Palo Alto Networks and Microsoft Defender for Cloud based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: The main difference between the two solutions is that Cortex XDR users say the solution is expensive while Microsoft Defender for Cloud users consider the solution to be fairly priced.
"Fortinet has helped free up around 20 percent of our staff's time to help us out."
"Fortinet is very user-friendly for customers."
"It is a scalable solution...The initial setup of Fortinet FortiEDR was straightforward."
"The product detects and blocks threats and is more proactive than firewalls."
"Ability to get forensics details and also memory exfiltration."
"Forensics is a valuable feature of Fortinet FortiEDR."
"Exceptions are easy to create and the interface is easy to follow with a nice appearance."
"The setup is pretty simple."
"Traps has drastically reduced our endpoint attack surface via advanced detection capabilities, sandboxing of never before seen programs, and by drastically limiting where executables can launch in the first place."
"The multi-layered approach to the product gives you confidence that it will stop exploits, ransomware, worms, or viruses from compromising endpoints, essentially providing peace of mind."
"The solution allows control over the user and his machine through Cortex XDR security policies."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks should be a stable solution."
"Its ability to react to cyber data attacks is awesome. That is pretty much the use of it. What blows your mind is the ability to access your assets remotely and see what is actually going on with them. You can not only see them in a console. You can also react very rapidly to your assets that are compromised."
"It'll not slow down your system when compared to others."
"From a single pane of glass, you can easily manage all of your endpoints."
"If the user leaves our premises or network, Palo Alto Traps will still be on that endpoint and will still apply our policies."
"It has seamless integration with any of the services I mentioned, on Azure, such as IaaS platforms, virtual machines, applications, or databases, because it's an in-house product from Microsoft within the Azure ecosystem."
"DSPM is the most valuable feature."
"One important security feature is the incident alerts. Now, with all these cyberattacks, there are a lot of incident alerts that get triggered. It is very difficult to keep monitoring everything automatically, instead our organization is utilizing the automated use case that we get from Microsoft. That has helped bring down the manual work for a lot of things."
"When you have commissioned Defender, you have these things visible already on your dashboard. This gives the efficiency to the people to do their actual work rather than bothering about the email, sorting out the email, or looking at it through an ITSM solution, whey they have to look at the description and use cases. Efficiency increases with this optimized, ready-made solution since you don't need to invest in something externally. You can start using the dashboard and auditing capability provided from day one. Thus, you have fewer costs with a more optimized, easier-to-use solution, providing operational efficiency for your team."
"Technical support is helpful."
"It takes very little effort to integrate it. It also gives very good visibility into what exactly is happening."
"It's quite a good product. It helps to understand the infections and issues you are facing."
"Good compliance policies."
"The security should be strong for the cloud. Some applications are on-prem and some are on the cloud. Fortinet should also have strong security for the cloud. There should be more security for the cloud."
"The only minor concern is occasional interference with desired programs."
"To improve Fortinet, we need to see more features and technology areas at the endpoint level introduced."
"They can include the automation for the realtime updates. We have a network infrastructure with remote sites. Whenever they send updates, they are not automated. We have to go into the console and push those updates. I wish it was more automated. The update file is currently around 31 MB. It could be smaller."
"The solution should address emerging threats like SQL injection."
"Integration with Azure and SaaS provisioning tools could improve Fortinet FortiEDR."
"I think cloud security and SASE are areas of concern in the product where improvements are required. The tool's cloud version has to be improved in terms of the security it offers."
"FortiEDR could add a separate scanning dashboard. In incident management, we prefer to remove the endpoint system from the environment and scan the system. We typically use Symantec for that, but if we want to use FortiEDR for that, then we need a scanning tab to clarify things."
"Being able to filter the events to see those that are related to the actual alert would save time spent by the engineer."
"There are some third-party solutions that are difficult to integrate with, which is something that can be improved."
"I would like to see some additional features related to email protection included."
"It is an enterprise-level solution. Its price could be less expensive."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks could improve by offering remote management. It would be useful to look at the client's issue to fix it."
"It would be good to have a better way to search for a file within the UI."
"The solution lacks real-time, on-demand antivirus."
"Currently, if you use Palo Alto endpoint protection as the only solution it's very complicated to remove pre-existing threats."
"It needs to be simplified and made more user-friendly for a non-technical person."
"Microsoft Defender could be more centralized. For example, I still need to go to another console to do policy management."
"The overview provides you with good information, but if you want more details, there is a lot more customization to do, which requires knowledge of the other supporting solutions."
"I would suggest building a single product that addresses endpoint server protection, attack surface, and everything else in one solution. That is the main disadvantage with the product. If we are incorporating some features, we end up in a situation where this solution is for the server, and that one is for the client, or this is for identity, and that is for our application. They're not bundling it. Commercially, we can charge for different licenses, but on the implementation side, it's tough to help our end-customer understand which product they're getting."
"The documentation could be much clearer."
"The solution could extend its capabilities to other cloud providers. Right now, if you want to monitor a virtual machine on another cloud, you can do that. However, this cannot be done with other cloud platform services. I hope once that is available then Defender for Cloud will be a unified solution for all cloud platform services."
"The initial setup is not actually so complex but it feels complex because there are many add-ons. There are many options and my team needs to be aware of all of these changes happening on the backend which is a distraction."
"Another thing that could be improved was that they could recommend processes on how to react to alerts, or recommend best practices based on how other organizations do things if they receive an alert about XYZ."
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Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is ranked 4th in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 80 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 3rd in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) with 46 reviews. Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is rated 8.4, while Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks writes "Perfect correlation and XDR capabilities for network traffic plus endpoint security". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Cloud writes "Provides multi-cloud capability, is plug-and-play, and improves our security posture". Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, CrowdStrike Falcon, Darktrace, Symantec Endpoint Security and Trend Vision One, whereas Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with AWS GuardDuty, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Defender XDR, Wiz and Cloudflare. See our Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud report.
We monitor all Endpoint Protection Platform (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.