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Deep Instinct Prevention Platform vs Microsoft Defender for Business comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

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

Deep Instinct Prevention Pl...
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
41st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Anti-Malware Tools (16th)
Microsoft Defender for Busi...
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
25th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Microsoft Security Suite (15th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) category, the mindshare of Deep Instinct Prevention Platform is 0.7%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Business is 1.9%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
 

Featured Reviews

Elena Yau - PeerSpot reviewer
Prevention, in advance, saves us remediation time
We have a PHI (protected health information) committee, and some of the things that we review on a weekly basis are incidents. For example, if there was malware or adware or some kind of phishing attempt, or even ransomware, we would have to investigate and see if there was any PHI impact. We've seen small things because some kind of adware made its way through the browser from some malicious link, and it's really hard to prevent those. We're putting more levels of filtering around that. There are some product development ideas that we have been working on alongside the DI team, and they've been super helpful. There are definitely a lot more little areas of improvement for the interface. Also, we have talked with the DI team about adding the forensic piece, which is what we do a lot. That would be added value and they've just recently provided more individuals to think about the roadmap. That's part of their strategy and one of the good features that they want to bring on. Hopefully, they can bring that to fruition and that will ease our workflow a little bit more. The additional predictive and prevention capabilities in the 3.0 version, that don't require special rules and configuration, help our organization. The only caveat is that when things get done automatically, I would appreciate more logging of what's happening in the background, if it is doing some kind of intervention. If we need to do some forensics, we should be able to backtrack from the log that gets uploaded to our cloud instance and see, forensically, what the root cause was. We should be able to see what instigated that trigger by DI and what exactly was done. That's a missing piece. It does a good job of preventing, but then we don't know what were the symptoms of the prevention. Let's say that there was like a PowerShell block. We'll see an indicator on the dashboard and we'll look at the logs and investigate. Sometimes we find that the logs that are captured locally on the endpoint itself are not very thorough. We were coached through our training with DI that, when troubleshooting, the DI team would always ask for the logs from the endpoint. We know what we need to do to look at something. But the logging for DI doesn't capture everything. There are some things that are missing. When it comes to root-cause analysis, or kill-chain analysis, and figuring out exactly what happened, it's very hard to do that right now on the product. I have used Carbon Black before and they're pretty good with the forensic analysis. That does save some efforts of my one engineer and myself when we have to go through the PHI committee. Right now, with Di, that feels like a blind spot. Another area for development is making the license clean-up a little bit easier. We always have to manually uninstall agents. If there were some way to remove the licensing and do better license management on the platform, that would help my team as well.
Syed Abid  - PeerSpot reviewer
Advanced threat protection secures diverse workloads with cost-effective deployment
If I need logs and don't have local storage bundled with Defender, I need to add workspace and log analytics, which is costly for storing logs of 2 GB, 5 GB, 10 GB. A default storage of 5 GB for logs should be included with Defender. There are limitations in whitelisting folders and files, and the whitelisting feature for Defender threat protection was deprecated. A straightforward feature for this should be added.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Its false positives are very low, because the behavior analysis engine double checks them."
"Deep Instinct’s prevention-first approach to stopping unknown ransomware and malware is the reason why we purchased the product. The pre-execution versus post-execution is a big piece for us where it is able to stop something before it even hits the box or desktop. That was one of the big reasons why we went with Deep Instinct."
"The detection rate is very high. In all the testing with around 20 partners in different environments, quite a lot of them had installed with other anti-malware applications, like Sophos. This software can co-exist with those applications in the same machine. This is impressive."
"The CPU consumption is low compared to what I have been using in my current environment, which is Sophos. The footprint is a lot smaller, about a quarter of Sophos. It is very small."
"The most valuable features are the static/dynamic analyses. Deep Instinct's predictive model has very high accuracy and provides threat information for unknown malware, such as malware classification, static analysis information, and sandbox information."
"When we were looking at Carbon Black and Sophos, the prevention pieces weren't as strong when compared to DI, which is why we decided to go with DI... I would rather have a product that does the prevention up front and saves me the effort of having to wipe someone's workstation."
"Deep Instinct was a strategic complement to our Open XDR platform."
"Good detections for PowerShell. and good user interface."
"Everything is stable. There have been no technical errors or stability issues."
"The security features are valuable because they come with more capabilities that other licenses do not have, including the enterprise license like E3."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its central console."
"It is scalable."
"Defender's main strength is its integration with Microsoft Sentinel, offering valuable insights."
"The solution provides good scalability."
"Microsoft Defender for Business stands out due to its ease of use, particularly due to the fact that many of my customers already use Microsoft and Azure."
"The solution includes attack-savvy service and risk protection, part of data center management, and offers an effective single-dashboard view with Microsoft 365."
 

Cons

"I think it's probably the administration, especially the administration platform, which could be improved in the solution. It's clunky and hard to navigate, especially for inexperienced technicians."
"There's an issue in the installation process where you can't install it unless you disable the built-in Windows Bitdefender antivirus. So, you have to manually disable Microsoft Bitdefender in order to install Deep Instinct. So, that makes it impossible to do a network rollout unless you manually visit each computer, which is ridiculous."
"The Management Console is not localized."
"They have a manual, but it is not excessive."
"Some features are too resource intensive."
"If they can bring some additional, complementary solutions, like network scanning and the like, that will help. If they had some sort of a firewall which could help detect DDoS attacks and other things, it would be an improvement"
"It would be nice if there were options where, if I have to do SIEM integration, I could do so from the UI: Just pick and choose what SIEM solutions the customers use and have options to have out-of-the-box connection facility."
"I would like to see improvement in the user interface so that the user has more control. For example, it would be good if a user could change their grouping if they want to be part of another group. Or if I want to right-click and scan a specific file that I just imported, that would be helpful. Sometimes you just want to do an extra scan to make sure you're safe."
"The user interface has a lot of features which can make it complex and hard to adapt to for some users."
"Pricing could be lowered as it is expensive and not suitable for low-budget organizations."
"We face a licensing issue with Windows 11 Enterprise not reflecting in our portal, which affects activation. Microsoft's support did not resolve this issue, even after sharing remote desktop and screen details."
"We faced some issues while running some applications on Mac."
"Additionally, the pricing policy poses a challenge, particularly in multi-year contracts, where other solutions like Trend Micro offer more affordable options."
"Defender's threat protection should be fine-tuned to reduce false positives. It could be more targeted, reflecting a continuous evolution in detecting. Also, it could be easier to integrate into other environments."
"The security could always be improved."
"The solution's AI is notorious for false positives, and the time you have to spend training it is ridiculous."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its pricing is too high, but that is not because of the product. It is expensive because of the cost of the console. You need a console to control the whole thing, but the console is expensive. You have to split this cost among all possible users. Normally, to be able to make it economically attractive, you need at least 1,000 agents, PCs, or users. If you have a customer with 300 to 500 agents, PCs, or users, it becomes too pricey."
"In comparison to the other products out there, it's exceptionally competitively priced. When you consider the lower administrative overhead that it facilitates, it's an absolute value."
"The pricing is a little bit expensive but we are satisfied with DI's performance."
"There are no additional costs on the price, and our company has a support contract, which bundles in those services anyway."
"One thing about their licensing program that I like is that just one covers the server as well as on the endpoint as well as mobile devices. There is no complexity in calculating how many SKUs I need for mobile, for laptop, for desktop, and for servers. It's very simple and that makes it much easier to budget."
"If I include the false positive rate and the detection rate in the comparison, Deep Instinct is worth its price."
"Their pricing is very competitive. It is good, fair, and a lot cheaper than what we were doing with Cylance."
"There is a need for customers of the product to pay towards the licensing costs of the tool."
"The tool's cost has been a little high, but I do not think it was terrible."
"It has to get more competitive because we are starting to see some of the competitors providing better pricing, and some of it, of course, is to gain market share. The Defender product pricing is probably a little higher than the competitors."
"Since we're a nonprofit, we get pretty good discounts on the tool."
"The tool is cheap, while some other solutions are more expensive. I remember the tool cost about five euros for a workstation or for a user on a monthly basis."
"Defender for Business is included by default with an Office 365 premium subscription."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Healthcare Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Computer Software Company
18%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Retailer
7%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Deep Instinct?
The product offers integration capabilities and is also easy to use.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Deep Instinct?
There is a need for customers of the product to pay towards the licensing costs of the tool.
What needs improvement with Deep Instinct?
The solution's stability is good. If the tool was able to provide fine-tuning capabilities from the product's end depending on the environment of its user, then it would be a good improvement in th...
What do you like most about Microsoft Defender for Business?
A few things are valuable. One is the alerting we see when any kind of intrusion is happening, any kind of malware is being deployed across the endpoints, or any kind of suspicious activity is goin...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Defender for Business?
Microsoft Defender for Business offers the best pricing option in the market and is very cost-effective.
What needs improvement with Microsoft Defender for Business?
The areas where Microsoft Defender for Business could improve include the support, installation process, and wiki. I should be able to find solutions to issues quickly without having to delve too d...
 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about Deep Instinct Prevention Platform vs. Microsoft Defender for Business and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
847,772 professionals have used our research since 2012.