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Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks 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

Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Net...
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
5th
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
8th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
103
Ranking in other categories
Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (7th), Ransomware Protection (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (2nd)
Morphisec
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
52nd
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
60th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (53rd), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (34th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (34th), Threat Deception Platforms (19th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) category, the mindshare of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is 3.3%, down from 4.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Morphisec is 0.6%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks3.3%
Morphisec0.6%
Other96.1%
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
 

Featured Reviews

ABHISHEK_SINGH - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Process Expert at A.P. Moller - Maersk
Gained full visibility and streamlined threat detection through behavior-based insights and AI integration
Initially, we got to have a lot of false positives when we onboarded, but nowadays it's quite smooth. We have fine-tuned our security policies and allowed different levels of policies to get rid of those false positives. Currently, we are getting a fairly good amount of incidents that are not false positives or benign, but actionable items. The process is streamlined. In the initial days, the operations used to get involved in a lot of benign and other activities, but now the process is streamlined. We are leveraging the auto-detection and remediation plans. The operations teams are now more involved in other business roles as well, not just looking into the logs and fetching out what's happening there. They have fixed a lot of things. Initially, they didn't have IAC code drift detection, cloud posture management, or security posture management, but they have those now. They purchased different vendors and did a merger with that. They have now Prisma Cloud that gets integrated and now they are working with Cortex Cloud. Everything that was negative has now been addressed, and the product altogether looks to be in a very better and mature shape now. Currently, it's more or less detecting the workloads with AI-based best practices. Since most organizations are consuming AI agents and other things, we are looking forward to seeing what other feature enhancements Palo Alto can support in that.
Rick Schibler - PeerSpot reviewer
VP of Information Technology at Kentucky Trailer
Offers in-memory protection at a lower price than competitors
Morphisec's in-memory protection is probably the most valuable feature because it stops malicious activity from occurring. If something tries to install or act as a sleeper agent, Morphisec will detect and stop it. Morphisec's Moving Target Defense is critical to hardening our attack surface. If it detects something, it indicates whether it's valid. That means you've got a breach requiring investigation. It detects anomalies but doesn't necessarily point to what caused them. You still need to do that work. The solution is reasonably easy to administer. They made some changes last year, adding a cloud-based monitoring solution that makes deploying and monitoring our endpoints easy.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The anti-exploit is impenetrable. We chose Traps because it is the only product that we were not able to get anything past."
"The most valuable features are the fact that it was running in the background and it would intercept any weird stuff, and the fact that it would send things directly to the cloud for sandboxing. It's quite practical."
"The stability of the solution is very good. We have about 100 users on it right now, and we use it twice a week."
"The most valuable feature of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is its machine-learning capabilities. Additionally, there is full integration with other solutions."
"The product's initial setup phase is very easy."
"Cortex XDR lets us manage several clients from the same console, and its endpoint defense is more advanced than traditional antivirus."
"The tool is easy to use."
"Cortex covers everything I need. It's a perfect solution. Cortex provides a different level of visibility because it's an extended EDR, allowing you to grab logs from the network and firewalls. Palo Alto invented the concept of the extended EDR or XDR."
"I really like the integration with Microsoft Defender. In addition to having third-party endpoint protection, we're also enabling Defender... I like the reporting that we get from Defender, when it comes in. I like that it's one console showing both Morphisec and Defender where it provides me with full visibility into security events from Defender and Morphisec."
"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."
"It also provides full visibility into security events from Microsoft Defender and Morphisec in one dashboard. We've always had that capability with Morphisec. The more recent version appears to do that even a little bit more natively and it's given us visibility that we didn't have otherwise."
"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."
"Morphisec is a straightforward solution that is efficient and very stable."
"We have seen it successfully block attacks that a traditional antivirus did not pick up."
"The simplicity of the solution, how easy it is to deploy and how small it is when deployed as an agent on a device, is probably the biggest aspect, given what it can do."
"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."
 

Cons

"A little bit more automation would be nice."
"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."
"The complexity and confusion regarding product variants, such as XDR, Forexiant, and Forexon, must be addressed."
"There are a large number of false positives."
"The playbooks could be improved to include more functionalities or actions."
"Technology evolves every day, so it would be nice if it gets more secure. It can also have more integration with other platforms."
"I don't like that they have different types of licenses. For example, if users select a license, they think they will have all the platforms they need to improve their network or security. But after some time, Palo Alto Networks changed their licensing, and some of the features that, for example, were free at the beginning now have a cost. I think the integration can be improved. For example, a lot of tools are just integrated through APIs."
"The server sometimes stops continuously to check things so it would be helpful to receive access updates or technical reasons."
"We started in the Linux platform and we deployed to Linux. The licensing of that has been kind of confusing between Linux licensing and Windows licensing. The overall simplicity of licensing or offering an enterprise license to just cover everything and then we don't have to count needs improvement."
"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."
"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."
"Right now, it's just their auto-update feature. I know they are currently working on that. When they release a new version of the threat prevention platform, I do have to update that, rolling out to every computer. They have said, "From version 5, you would be able to do an auto-update." While this is very minor, that is the only thing that I would say needs to be upgraded. It would just make life a lot easier for other IT teams. However, I have simplified the process, so all I need to do is just download one file."
"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."
"We have only had four attacks in the last year, "attacks" being some benign PDF from a vendor that, for some reason, were triggered. There were no actual attacks. They were just four false positives, or something lowly like adware. There have been false positives with both the on-premises solution and the cloud solution."
"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."
"Those are some of the features that I was looking for on my on-prem platform that they've already instituted in the cloud and that I'm sure will be instituting on their on-prem platform as well. Having to have an on-prem server required a lot of administration. Being able to push that to the cloud and have it managed up there for us is a real nice addition."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I don't like that they have different types of licenses."
"Compared to CrowdStrike, Cortex XDR is an expensive solution."
"The cost depends on your chosen license type, like Pro or other licenses."
"The pricing is a little bit on the expensive side."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is an expensive solution."
"This is an expensive solution."
"I did PoCs on products called Cylance and CrowdStrike. Although, I consider these products and they were also good, when it come to cost and budgetary factors, Traps has been proven to be better than the other two products. It is quite cost-effective and delivers all the entire solution which we require."
"The price is on the higher side, but it's okay."
"The pricing is definitely fair for what it does."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Morphisec is reasonably priced because our parent company's other subsidiaries use different products like CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike is four or five times more expensive than Morphisec. The competitive pricing saves us money in our overall security stack."
"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."
"It is priced correctly for what it does. They end up doing a good deal of discounting, but I think it is priced appropriately."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Outsourcing Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business43
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise44
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

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Cortex XDR by Palo Alto vs. CrowdStrike Falcon Both Cortex XDR and Crowd Strike Falcon offer cloud-based solutions that are very scalable, secure, and user-friendly. Cortex XDR by Palo Alto offers ...
How is Cortex XDR compared with Microsoft Defender?
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a cloud-delivered endpoint security solution. The tool reduces the attack surface, applies behavioral-based endpoint protection and response, and includes risk-ba...
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Also Known As

Cyvera, Cortex XDR, Palo Alto Networks Traps
Morphisec, Morphisec Moving Target Defense
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
Lenovo/Motorola, TruGreen, Covenant Health, Citizens Medical Center
Find out what your peers are saying about Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs. Morphisec and other solutions. Updated: January 2026.
880,844 professionals have used our research since 2012.