We performed a comparison between Check Point Harmony Endpoint 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: Check Point Harmony has a slight edge in this comparison. According to its reviewers, its interface is friendlier than that of Defender for Endpoint.
"It is a scalable solution...The initial setup of Fortinet FortiEDR was straightforward."
"Forensics is a valuable feature of Fortinet FortiEDR."
"Having all monitoring, response, tracking, and mitigation tools in one dashboard provides our analysts and SOC team with a comprehensive view at a glance."
"The price is low and quite competitive with others."
"We have FortiEDR installed on all our systems. This protects them from any threats."
"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."
"The solution was relatively easy to deploy."
"he solution is an anti-malware product that integrates well with other vendor products such as firewalls, SIEM, etc. It captures threat intelligence and gives you better visibility. The product also has sandboxing features."
"Its ability to rollback anti-ransomware once an attack has started is the most valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature is forensics."
"The most valuable feature is the Zero-day protection, which covers our on-premises users, and well as those users who are outside of our network."
"It is quite easy to use and deploy the agent on endpoints to protect them from bad actors."
"The forensics allows us to search retrospectively for an URL or file opened by users, for example, when you need to quickly check who else has clicked on a phishing link."
"Forensic Analysis provides a complete analysis of threats via detailed reports."
"It is very powerful tooling that can be tuned a lot."
"The most useful feature so far has been having a functioning and up-to-date anti-malware scanner."
"We are a Microsoft shop, and Defender is a Microsoft solution that provides some security at a reasonable cost."
"The intelligence mechanisms are good."
"The investigation aspect is the most useful. It's user friendly and has a good user interface."
"The endpoint detection of threats is valuable. The initial detection of things like ransomware and viruses and being able to shut down machines immediately and stop a threat is valuable. We can stop a threat at a source versus allow it to propagate it across the network."
"The solution's threat protection is mostly AI and machine-learning based. That is the most important feature of the product. It also offers centralized management so I can remotely manage devices."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is that it is embedded into the Windows system. Additionally, the performance is good and simple to maintain."
"The virus scanning capability is excellent, and it feeds all the logs into the Microsoft 365 Defender portal, making them easy to search for."
"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."
"The solution is not stable."
"FortiEDR can be improved by providing more detailed reporting."
"Once, we had an event that was locked and blocked, but information about it came to us two or three days later."
"I haven't seen the use of AI in the solution."
"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 dashboard isn't easy to access and manage."
"We've encountered challenges during API deployment, occasionally resulting in unstable environments."
"Making the portal mobile friendly would be helpful when I am out of office."
"Support's service and the response times can be improved. The triaging of the tickets takes a long time and the tickets are only resolved with escalations."
"If the IT department is used to "cloning" endpoints (making images) you are going to have a hard time trying to install the product and you are going to end up reading a lot of Check Point documents."
"The next release should consider a strong threat detection mechanism that can categorize various levels of attacks for faster analysis."
"From an improvement perspective, the major challenge we've faced with Harmony is the support."
"It needs more documentation and better ease of deployment. For documentation, it needs more information about integrating the endpoints on SandBlast Agent mobile as well as on desktop platforms."
"Technical support needs to be improved, along with the response time."
"The management in Check Point Harmony Endpoint could be improved."
"We would also like the application control module to be further developed in future versions to include applications commonly used or maintained by Check Point in order to be able to configure blocking policies more quickly."
"Defender is free for one year. Once that year is over, we will switch to Kaspersky."
"The product development team makes frequent changes that affect the stability of the solution."
"Something that is unique to Microsoft is its licensing model. When you go out and you buy McAfee or Symantec, you know what you're getting out of the box, but with Microsoft, often, when you're looking to achieve a certain set of capabilities, those capabilities are spread across different products. You might try to do something you could do with CrowdStrike, but then find out that you also need to purchase Microsoft Defender for Identity or Microsoft Defender for Azure. You realize that when they talk about what they can offer within the Microsoft platform, it's really the suite of investments. So, sometimes, you may find yourself buying Defender for Endpoint thinking that it matches CrowdStrike, but then you find that Microsoft really needs to sell you something else. One plus one will equal three, but when you have a very concise platform, such as CrowdStrike, you know what you're going to get."
"Integrating this with third-party systems has some complexity involved."
"The solution has minimal customization options, especially compared to Mandiant, so we want to see more scope for customization. A single portal for customization would also be a welcome addition."
"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."
"It can be more secure."
"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."
More Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Pricing and Cost Advice →
Check Point Harmony Endpoint is ranked 8th in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 103 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is ranked 1st in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 182 reviews. Check Point Harmony Endpoint is rated 8.8, while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Check Point Harmony Endpoint writes "Excellent anti-ransomware protection, zero-day phishing protection, and web browsing filtering". 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". Check Point Harmony Endpoint is most compared with CrowdStrike Falcon, Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business, SentinelOne Singularity Complete and Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks, whereas Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is most compared with Symantec Endpoint Security, Intercept X Endpoint, SentinelOne Singularity Complete, CrowdStrike Falcon and Tanium. See our Check Point Harmony Endpoint vs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint report.
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