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Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs Rapid7 InsightIDR comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 8, 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 Detection and Response (EDR)
5th
Ranking in Extended Detection and Response (XDR)
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
117
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (4th), Ransomware Protection (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (1st)
Rapid7 InsightIDR
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
32nd
Ranking in Extended Detection and Response (XDR)
18th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
33
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (23rd), User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) (11th), Threat Deception Platforms (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) category, the mindshare of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is 3.6%, down from 3.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Rapid7 InsightIDR is 1.3%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks3.6%
Rapid7 InsightIDR1.3%
Other95.1%
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
 

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.
Prajwal Chougale - PeerSpot reviewer
SPC L2 Analyst at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Centralized threat hunting has improved alert accuracy and simplifies incident investigations
I would say there are two areas for improvement: the reporting dashboard that provides insights or reports weekly or monthly lacks detailed information about how logs are being ingested. While the details are there, they could be more concise and easier to understand for any level of authority. The second area is alert tuning; compared to Microsoft Sentinel, Rapid7 InsightIDR provides fewer alerts with more static alert functionality and lacks dynamic alerting exposures. There could be improvements to learn from past alert activities for more dynamic alert configurations. These two areas are the main areas for improvement; everything else is good.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution allows us to gain remote access without the user's knowledge and take the necessary actions on the device."
"There has been a significant reduction of approximately 70% to 80% in our internal MTTR and MTTD metrics, now around five to eight minutes whereas previously it was hours, which has helped tremendously."
"Cortex is a very good total solution on the endpoints."
"We can use Cortex XDR to get the entire graph of the incidents from source to destination, and we can take remedial action."
"The most valuable for us is the correlation feature."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks's ability to block sophisticated threats in real time is quite good and is on par with SentinelOne's."
"The tool is designed to scale for large enterprises and handle large volumes of data."
"Based on my experience with Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks, I highly recommend it due to its quick response to zero-day attacks and low utilization from end-user devices."
"InsightIDR’s ability to process millions of transactions per day, and to notify me of the most critical ones, is priceless. InsightIDR has the alerts tuned, and has the ability to quickly drill down to determine the threat level."
"They can subscribe to Rapid7 because it is more valuable and delivers a greater return on investment."
"The UI is very good."
"Very intuitive and easy to set up."
"Another very important part of insightIDR is the ability to collect data from endpoint devices via agent software. With a large remote workforce, this allows visibility into the endpoints that are connected to the internet, but not to the corporate network."
"The solution is very intuitive, it's easy to set up, is absolutely stable, and has a lot of integration with other security products."
"The log aggregation and storage provided by InsightIDR has shown no issues with scalability; aggregating over one hundred millions events daily."
"The platform offers unlimited storage and agent-based solutions."
 

Cons

"The price could be a little lower."
"The onboarding process could be better."
"The deployment is pretty hard."
"Additionally, I think the price is very high, and if it can be adjusted, I believe it will be a very good solution."
"Whenever the tool releases a new version when deploying the product across the organization, I feel like there are some disturbances in the CPU usage after upgrading the tool to the latest version."
"The solution lacks real-time, on-demand antivirus."
"If Palo Alto reduces the pricing slightly for their products, it would make them more scalable in markets such as India and globally for cybersecurity."
"The GUI could be improved."
"The ability to tune the collector for custom logs would greatly help."
"One thing that springs to mind is easier API integration with ITSMs."
"Currently, it lacks the functionalities provided by Rapid7's User Behavior Analytics (UBA)."
"Sometimes, it is hard to get the right queries to use. Currently, the tool lacks a pre-made set of queries."
"It takes time for the product's support team to resolve issues, making it an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The reporting is the weakest aspect. There needs to be multi-level grouping for events (for example, group by user and destination). Right now, we can do a group by user and a separate table or group by destination. But I'd be more interested in where a person was logging into instead of who was logging in or where he was logging in."
"Rapid7 doesn't integrate well with all our security tools from various vendors, so we plan to switch. Many of our solutions work with Rapid7, but some do not. We are already searching for a replacement already."
"The solution needs improvement in threat intelligence. Increasing the depth of intelligence to help users understand more about threats is a possibility. My suggestion is to expand access to other websites or resources."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It has reasonable pricing for the use cases it provides to the company."
"It is cost-effective compared to similar solutions. It fits for the small businesses through to the big businesses."
"The cost depends on your chosen license type, like Pro or other licenses."
"I feel it is fairly priced."
"This is an expensive solution."
"The tool's price is moderate."
"I don't recall what the cost was, but it wasn't really that expensive."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is an expensive solution."
"​I am sure that there are cheaper products out there, but none that meet so many of our needs whilst maintaining stability and usability.​"
"I rate Rapid7 InsightIDR's price a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"The pricing is good, and it is not very expensive."
"Rapid7 InsightIDR is priced very well and is cost-effective."
"It is on a yearly basis. For our own company, for about 250 users, it was 16,000 euros a year."
"The pricing and licensing are competitive."
"Rapid7 InsightIDR is a cheaply priced product. On a scale of one to ten, where one is very expensive, and ten is very cheap, I rate the product's price at seven or eight."
"The solution has a mid-range price point in the market"
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Construction Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business47
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise54
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise6
 

Questions from the Community

Cortex XDR by Palo Alto vs. Sentinel One
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto vs. SentinelOne SentinelOne offers very detailed specifics with regard to risks or attacks. The ability to reverse damage caused by ransomware with minimal interruptions to...
Comparing CrowdStrike Falcon to Cortex XDR (Palo Alto)
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...
What SOC product do you recommend?
For tools I’d recommend: -SIEM- LogRhythm -SOAR- Palo Alto XSOAR Doing commercial w/o both (or at least an XDR) is asking to miss details that are critical, and ending up a statistic. Also, rememb...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Rapid7 InsightIDR?
My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing has been very positive; it is cost-effective and offers great value for the money. We bought the licensing through an agent, and the setup was...
What needs improvement with Rapid7 InsightIDR?
I would say there are two areas for improvement: the reporting dashboard that provides insights or reports weekly or monthly lacks detailed information about how logs are being ingested. While the ...
 

Also Known As

Cyvera, Cortex XDR, Palo Alto Networks Traps
InsightIDR
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
Liberty Wines, Pioneer Telephone, Visier
Find out what your peers are saying about Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs. Rapid7 InsightIDR and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
912,006 professionals have used our research since 2012.