We performed a comparison between ESET Endpoint Security 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: ESET Endpoint Security ultimately won out in this comparison. Our reviewers agree that ESET Endpoint Security is easy to install and easy to use. In addition, it has excellent customer support.
"The main thing is that I feel safe. Because the processes that have been used to get a handle on the attackers are much better than other competitors"
"The setup is pretty simple."
"NGAV and EDR features are outstanding."
"Fortinet FortiEDR's scalability is quite good, and you can add licenses to the solution."
"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."
"Fortinet FortiEDR made our clients feel secure and more at ease, knowing that they had an EDR solution that would close the gap in their security posture."
"I like FortiClient EMS. FortiEDR has a lot of great features like lockdown mode, remote wipes, and encryption. I can set malware outbreak policies and controls for detecting abnormalities. You can also simulate phishing attacks."
"The product's initial setup phase is very easy."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the protection itself, which works well for us."
"The solution has a very good endpoint feature."
"It's easy to set up and quick to deploy."
"I have found ESET Endpoint Antivirus is light on system resources compared with other antivirus solutions that tend to be very heavy on the computers system resources. Additionally, the solution is very secure."
"This is a product at the top of its game. That is the reason we choose to support and sell it."
"The protection and device control features are the most valuable. I found its user interface and integration pretty good. It is very user friendly as compared to other products."
"The product offers great reporting tools"
"The solution's features and pricing are pretty good."
"I like that Defender is integrated and doesn't have a third-party payload trying to advertise subscription renewal."
"Defender provides useful alerts and groups them. It sends an alert to your portal if it detects any malicious activity, and you can group multiple alerts to form an incident."
"The intelligence mechanisms are good."
"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."
"Defender is integrated into the operating system. It's integrated with everything. You don't have to spend time analyzing what you have to do to be sure that the integration is okay between the security tool and all the other apps. This, from my point of view, is the main advantage."
"I am using it for very simple purposes. It is perfect and quite effective. I have been using it for a while, and I have never had any virus infection, data leak, or other security breaches. It works fine for standalone purposes. If you log on to OneDrive, it has ransomware protection."
"It captures data through machine learning, which is built-in on the back-end. It also provides built-in analytics and a threat intelligence feature. It is a one-stop solution that doesn't require an antivirus because it comes prebuilt into Windows 10."
"It's great for investigating what's happening on a machine. They show a whole bunch of machine timeline events that are related to a security incident. They have quite good details on the things related to threat and vulnerability management, such as any weakness that has been disclosed publicly, assets that are exposed, and if there is an exploit active in the wild for that vulnerability. It can provide you with all such information, which is cool."
"Detections could be improved."
"I haven't seen the use of AI in the solution."
"The EDR console should have more extensive reporting. You shouldn't need to purchase FortiAnalyzer. It should be included in the EDR part. The security adviser cloud platform could be improved with more options for exclusive or intensive rules for devices."
"The SIEM could be improved."
"To improve Fortinet, we need to see more features and technology areas at the endpoint level introduced."
"The solution's installation from a central installation server could be improved because the engineers had a little bit of trouble getting it installed from a central location."
"It takes about two business days for initial support, which is too slow in urgent situations."
"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."
"The migration between on-prem and cloud has room for improvement."
"The update process can be improved, and there could be an automatic update process when a new version comes out. For system updates or program updates, there could be more automation."
"The new versions only support no operative systems in Mac and do not support operative systems."
"They need to improve licensing for VMs. When ESET is uninstalled from a VM, the seat stays on the license management server. We have to manually delete the seat from that server because it doesn't know how to handle it. I contacted exclusive ESET support here in Croatia and they told me there is no solution for this yet."
"The tool needs to explore security possibilities to secure iOS and Mac devices."
"It's not a huge thing, because it doesn't happen very often, but I'll notice sometimes, when there's a startup scan, the computer does bog down a little bit. However, this happens rarely."
"I'm unsure as to if they could actually support a large enterprise."
"The solution could improve by having higher-level security and reporting."
"It would be nice to have a paid upgrade that would provide additional screening of the day-to-day activities."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint does not offer default templates for alerts, requiring us to configure everything ourselves to avoid numerous false positives."
"The application control feature requires improvement."
"Integrating this with third-party systems has some complexity involved."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint can improve by providing more and different types of reports."
"I would like to have additional features such as DNS lookup, which would help for detecting malicious sites."
"We'd like the stability to be better."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is not as robust, and you cannot customize it much, so that's a challenge."
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ESET Endpoint Protection Platform is ranked 11th in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 97 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is ranked 1st in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 182 reviews. ESET Endpoint Protection Platform is rated 8.2, while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of ESET Endpoint Protection Platform writes "Easy to set up with good security and rapidly improving capabilities". 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". ESET Endpoint Protection Platform is most compared with Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business, CrowdStrike Falcon, SentinelOne Singularity Complete, Check Point Harmony Endpoint and Fortinet FortiClient, whereas Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is most compared with Symantec Endpoint Security, Intercept X Endpoint, SentinelOne Singularity Complete, CrowdStrike Falcon and Fortinet FortiClient. See our ESET Endpoint Protection Platform vs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint report.
See our list of best Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) vendors, best Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) vendors, and best Anti-Malware Tools 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.