We performed a comparison between Crowdstrike Falcon and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: All other things being equal, Crowdstrike Falcon is the favorite when it comes to both ease of deployment and customer service and support.
"The product's initial setup phase is very easy."
"The solution was relatively easy to deploy."
"Exceptions are easy to create and the interface is easy to follow with a nice appearance."
"The console is easy to read. I also like the scanning part and the ability to move assets from one to the other."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the ability to customize it and to reduce its size. It lets you run in a very small window in terms of memory and resources on legacy cash registers."
"We have FortiEDR installed on all our systems. This protects them from any threats."
"Having all monitoring, response, tracking, and mitigation tools in one dashboard provides our analysts and SOC team with a comprehensive view at a glance."
"Additionally, when it comes to EDR, there are more tools available to assist with client work."
"The features I like the most are the response time and the dashboard are both excellent."
"CrowdStrike Falcon's most valuable features are the lightweight agent which has absolutely zero performance issues. There is no performance deterioration on the laptop on the network. It is a signature-less antivirus and anti-malware solution, it doesn't depend on signatures which better protects the systems."
"The most valuable feature is the activity dashboard because it gives you a holistic view of your environment from a security standpoint."
"The ability to execute real-time response, or, that you can connect to the agent and see exactly what processes are operating, is the most important feature of this solution."
"The most valuable features of Crowdstrike Falcon XDR are Spotlight and Discovery, they are helpful. Additionally, the console is user-friendly, with fewer false positives than other solutions."
"The most valuable feature of CrowdStrike Falcon for me is its unified sensor, applicable across all models."
"The solution offers great stability."
"The EDR is amazing and ease of integration with Splunk is a big plus. Integration with BigQuery is also a plus for me and workflow creation is easy. Overall, CrowdStrike Falcon is a great product."
"Technical support is good."
"The performance of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has been a valuable feature."
"I like Defender's reporting and logging features. The email alerts are also helpful. It's hard sometimes to sift through the email, especially if you're an IT firm managing hundreds if not thousands of endpoints, but we find email reporting useful. For example, last Tuesday, we learned of new vulnerabilities that were discovered as a result of the previous patches. The endpoints without those patches triggered alerts in Defender."
"It comes included with the Windows license."
"Provides good vulnerability assessment."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has been secure and there is zero maintenance required because it updates with Microsoft Windows."
"What I like most is the protection against phishing emails and anti-spam."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is free and part of the licensing stack of other Microsoft products."
"We've encountered challenges during API deployment, occasionally resulting in unstable environments."
"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."
"Making the portal mobile friendly would be helpful when I am out of office."
"We find the solution to be a bit expensive."
"Cannot be used on mobile devices with a secure connection."
"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."
"Once, we had an event that was locked and blocked, but information about it came to us two or three days later."
"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."
"We'd like to see more integration capabilities."
"CrowdStrike Falcon sometimes wrongly flags things as malicious. Let's say a user is active on Chrome only. Sometimes, our cross-segmenting will fetch from the backend data and show that it is malicious because of memory or CPU utilization."
"I would like them to improve the correlation of data in the search algorithms. When we run an investigation, malware, phishing, etc., I want to look at multiple endpoints at once to correlate that data to see the likenesses, e.g., how are they not alike or what systems and processes are running across those systems? I don't want to have to run the same search in their Spotlight module five, 10, 15, or 100 times to get 100 different results, copy that data out, and then correlate it on my own. In a very simple way, I want to be able to load up a comma-delimited list giving me the spotlight data on these X amount of hosts, letting me search for it quickly. We have had to go back to CrowdStrike, and say, "Our search are taking far too long for even one host." They did bump up the cores and that did improve performance, but it is still kind of slow to get that Spotlight data. That is probably our biggest pain point. I think that needs some help. I understand this kind of information access is probably not the easiest thing to do. It is probably a big ask depending on how their back-end is setup."
"CrowdStrike needs to quit making up stuff about its features and functionality to bash its competition."
"It is cloud-based, and this does make some weary of the data being held on the cloud. Privacy requirements must be taken into account."
"If we have a dashboard capability to uninstall agents, I think that would be great."
"The technical support could improve because I am in India and the support I receive is from the UK or Australia. It is difficult to manage the time difference. The service could be faster. However, when we do have the support they are knowledgeable."
"Unfortunately, native applications are not supported."
"Sometimes, there are different skews. In a basic skew, they should have basic log analysis without the need to integrate with any third-party or SIEM solutions, like Sentinel. This would make it so much easier for users who don't have log collection or log analysis."
"The frequency of the patching, and the frequency of the updates, are not included with the free version."
"The time it takes to implement policies has room for improvement."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is effective for validating work, but not ideal for investigations."
"The biggest issue I had with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint was the antivirus and ransomware. I wanted central visibility over all the machines that we operate."
"They should bring back the feature of a dedicated proxy device for communication to the cloud. As of now, all the agents are required to send the logs directly to the cloud. There should be a solution where you can put a proxy and all the logs are consolidated, like a forwarder."
"A challenge is that it is not a multi-tenant solution. Microsoft's tenant is a licensed tenant. I'm an MSSP. So, I have multiple customers. In Microsoft's world, that means that I can't just buy an E5 license and give that out to all my customers. That won't work because all of the customer data resides within a single tenant in Microsoft's world. Other products—such as SentinelOne, Palo Alto Cortex, CrowdStrike, et cetera—are multi-tenant. So, I can have it at the top of the pyramid for my analyst to look into it and see all the customers, but each customer's data is separate. If the customer wants to look at what we see, they would only see their data, whereas in the Microsoft world, if I've got multiple customers connected to the same Microsoft tenant, they would see everybody else's data, which is a privacy problem in Europe. It is not possible to share the data, and it is a breach of privacy."
"The UI for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint needs to be better. Integration with client dashboards is also lacking in this product, e.g. client dashboards shouldn't just be viewable from the cloud, because when the client's computer is offline, you won't be able to see the client dashboard."
More Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Pricing and Cost Advice →
CrowdStrike Falcon is ranked 3rd in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 107 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is ranked 1st in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 182 reviews. CrowdStrike Falcon is rated 8.8, while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of CrowdStrike Falcon writes "Easy to set up with good behavior-based analysis but needs a single-click recovery option". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint writes "Eliminates the need to look at multiple dashboards by automatically providing one XDR dashboard to show the security score of each subscription". CrowdStrike Falcon is most compared with Microsoft Defender XDR, Darktrace, Trend Micro Deep Security, Trend Vision One and VMware Carbon Black Endpoint, whereas Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is most compared with Symantec Endpoint Security, Intercept X Endpoint, SentinelOne Singularity Complete, Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks and Microsoft Intune. See our CrowdStrike Falcon vs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint report.
See our list of best Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) vendors and best Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) vendors.
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.
The CrowdStrike solution delivers a lot of information about incidents. It has a very light sensor that will never push your machine hardware to "test", you don't have the usual "scan now" feature but on the platform, you can drill down the events to find the starter of a blocked event.
It does have basic features to whitelist programs and paths, does show you information about what kind of threat was blocked, gives you information about user logged, machine details (SO, version, serial, Mac Address, Local and WAN IP,...) and grants you with the time, the file that executed the event, allows you to group devices and define exclusion, detection, response policies based on them.
It does allow you to create specific profiles for each type of user like helpdesk analysts, managers, etc (with different access, etc).
The solution is pretty good, actually and I'm pretty happy with it. I don't have experience with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint but will do in a couple of months to update this. =]
Depends on your budget and on the conditions of a Microsoft license. If you have an M365 license (like E3 or E5), Microsoft is cheaper.
In terms of functionality, CrowdStrike is better.