We performed a comparison between Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Symantec Endpoint Detection and Response based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The product's initial setup phase is very easy."
"It is very easy to set up. I would rate my experience with the initial setup a ten out of ten, with ten being very easy to set up."
"Forensics is a valuable feature of Fortinet FortiEDR."
"Additionally, when it comes to EDR, there are more tools available to assist with client work."
"The ease of deployment and configuration is valuable. It's very easy compared to other vendors like Sophos. Sophos' configuration is complex. Fortinet is a lot easier to understand. You don't need a lot of admin knowledge to do the configuration."
"Impressive detection capabilities"
"It notifies us if there's any suspicious file on any PC. If any execution or similar kind of thing is happening, it just alerts us. It doesn't only alert. It also blocks the execution until we allow it. We check whether the execution is legitimate or not, and then approve it or keep it blocked. This gives us a little bit of control over this mechanism. Fortinet FortiEDR is also very straightforward and easy to maintain."
"This is stable and scalable."
"The most valuable feature is ransomware protection, which can detect malicious activity from IPs or a malicious payload in DLLs, or other things that can corrupt the system."
"One of the main features is the solution is very light on resources and we do not have any problems with it."
"The most valuable aspect lies in its automation capabilities, particularly within security automation."
"A few years ago, when I was using a different product, I was affected by a virus that destroyed everything. Since using Microsoft Defender, I have not had this kind of problem."
"In my opinion, the most valuable aspects are the reporting analytics and integration with Sentinel. Defender does an excellent job of correlating the different entities that comprise threat analysis, analytics data, and log analytics. It helps to piece together investigations into any exploit or malicious activity within a specific tenant. AI and analytics tools are probably the most valuable components."
"Auto-remediation: When the product sees malware, it resolves the issue immediately. This protects the machine."
"It's absolutely free to use."
"It's pretty easy to scale."
"I've mainly found the antivirus and antispyware features valuable. The documentation is okay as well."
"The most valuable features of Symantec Endpoint Detection and Response are its immediate response and investigation."
"The Detection vulnerability is very effective."
"The setup is quite easy."
"The most valuable features of this product include network isolation for machines and the ability to work with a consistent and defined set of virtual machines."
"The solution is scalable."
"IPS and the user interface are good features."
"The solution is stable."
"To improve Fortinet, we need to see more features and technology areas at the endpoint level introduced."
"FortiEDR can be improved by providing more detailed reporting."
"We've had a lot of false positives; things incorrectly flagged that require manual configuration to allow. Even worse, after we allow a legitimate program, it sometimes gets flagged again after an update. This has caused a lot of extra work for my team."
"We'd like to see more one-to-one product presentations for the distribution channels."
"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."
"Intelligence aspects need improvement"
"There's room for improvement in the quick response time and technical support for integration issues, especially when dealing with multiple vendors."
"The solution is not user-friendly."
"On the Mac OS platform, there is no parity between Windows and Mac OS. The solution is very feature-rich and very well-integrated into Windows, and I guess baked into Windows 10 and Windows 11. Whereas, on the Mac OS platform, there is still some work there to give it a more feature-reach platform."
"This solution needs to move beyond relying on virus definitions alone and protect the system using behavioral analysis of the processes that are running."
"The solution needs to improve its ransomware. It's not so good. It could also use some general performance optimization for the computers the solution operates on, to ensure it does not slow down the devices."
"If you have multi-cloud like Google and AWS, the native solutions are better for those particular cases."
"The solution could be even more secure and provide an even higher level of security."
"Windows Firewall is integrated with Windows Defender. Over the last few days, I have had a problem with defining a wildcard on Windows Firewall. For example, I wanted to pull out the connection of my program and install a software package with a lot of executable files. I wanted to prevent it from accessing the internet. I could not select executables by using a wildcard. I had to select a single executable with its full name."
"I have accounts for administrators and corporate employees, but I also have accounts for students. I can't split these types of accounts. I need a separate configuration for both... I need to research how I can get alerts for only the administrative machines."
"It can get a bit laggy sometimes. Other than that, we don't have any issues. They constantly tweak it and fix it up based on users' feedback. It has improved a lot over the past four years. Defender for Endpoint never really used to be a good endpoint security solution, but over the past couple of years, Microsoft has invested heavily in it. So, it has come a long way in all aspects of endpoint security. If they want to make it better, they should just continue investing in the current path of what they've been doing over the past couple of years."
"They need to improve their cloud presence."
"It should be easier to deploy Symantec's client for end-users."
"Reporting is a major issue, as it is not user friendly."
"It is not possible to buy it from the company itself, or resellers in other countries. If it is available, I see that it is offered as part of a larger service. For me, this was not suitable."
"In the future, it would be nice to have playbooks in the tool, to allow for some of the common activities to be automated. For example, some of the scannings of the malware can be too manual for a specific device. Additionally, a vulnerability manager would be beneficial."
"The solution’s scalability and stability could be improved."
"While they are quite dynamic, they need to ensure they are detecting threats faster in the future to keep people safer."
"The network forensics feature could be improved."
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Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is ranked 1st in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) with 182 reviews while Symantec Endpoint Detection and Response is ranked 25th in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) with 28 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is rated 8.0, while Symantec Endpoint Detection and Response is rated 7.6. 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". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Symantec Endpoint Detection and Response writes "A highly stable and affordable solution for detecting and preventing security threats". Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is most compared with Symantec Endpoint Security, Intercept X Endpoint, CrowdStrike Falcon, SentinelOne Singularity Complete and Microsoft Intune, whereas Symantec Endpoint Detection and Response is most compared with Trend Vision One, Kaspersky Endpoint Detection and Response Expert, Bitdefender GravityZone EDR, CrowdStrike Falcon and Trellix Endpoint Security (ENS). See our Microsoft Defender for Endpoint vs. Symantec Endpoint Detection and Response report.
See our list of best Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) vendors.
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