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Deep Instinct Prevention Platform vs VirusTotal comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 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 Anti-Malware Tools
15th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (40th)
VirusTotal
Ranking in Anti-Malware Tools
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Threat Intelligence Platforms (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Anti-Malware Tools category, the mindshare of Deep Instinct Prevention Platform is 1.6%, down from 2.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VirusTotal is 5.6%, down from 7.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Anti-Malware Tools
 

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.
Chinmay Banerjee - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps businesses collect threat data while keeping privacy in mind and apable of detecting, blocking, and removing viruses and malware
There are two gray areas I still need to explore. I have worked with VirusTotal because it easily integrates with over seventy antivirus scanners and blacklisting services. In addition to those there is much scope to improve and add other services or integrations. The areas for improvement are that VirusTotal is not using much AI or generative AI models, while other competitors are starting to build them. For example, VirusTotal's work is based on the setup done by their engineers. If you want to do scanning or protection activities for a specific site, app, or device, that is the area VirusTotal is currently focused on. But other competitors are building AI models that can do things like left-side scanning and provide auto-generated reports. VirusTotal has predefined reports, but there is a lot of manual effort involved. Secondly, the API is very limited if I want to integrate VirusTotal with other applications. They need to build more connectors and provide support for Webhook connectors for the API. If you can't build your own connector, it's always good to have provisions for Webhook setup connectors across platforms. Thirdly, Kaspersky, a competitor of VirusTotal, is using a methodology called "gatekeeper." A gatekeeper is a security system that protects the inside of a building from outside threats. This is the model Kaspersky is currently using. You have your website set up, but the entire army of VirusTotal or Kaspersky is standing guard, protecting you from the first gate itself. Right now, VirusTotal detects threats from your domain, but it is always better to verify inside the domain and protect it from the first level when people or malware are entering. This first level of protection is lacking in VirusTotal right now. The security bridge and protection gate are missing.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most important thing is that it is for prevention. It prevents attacks of any type of malware. Normally, what we've seen in other products is that they are not for prevention. They isolate a possible threat that they don't understand or know about, and then they check it with our database to see if it needs any correction or elimination. This means that the threat is already inside a customer's base, whereas Deep Instinct prevents a threat from getting in. Prevention is basically done by an agent in each installation, PCU, or product. An agent has its own intelligence to be able to detect if it should stop a threat or not. It has been taught. It is like a brain that has been taught to react according to any possible threat. Deep Instinct is very light. It doesn't take too much CPU attention or memory. It doesn't slow down the performance. You don't really realize any change in the performance, which makes it very different from other solutions. They are usually heavy for the users."
"The support is very good. They reply and respond very quickly."
"Instead of having features like rollback and after-event actionable stuff, the whole premise and the context of the solution is to actually prevent these malicious attacks from happening to begin with.... The ability to prevent threats is the most appealing aspect. It absolutely, 100 percent helps with real-time prevention of unknown malware. That's the strength of the product."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"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."
"Deep Instinct was a strategic complement to our Open XDR platform."
"I really like the behavioral analysis feature, because it looks at all the different things, like arbitrary shellcode and reflective DLL. It looks at a lot of things that threat actors use as threat vectors to get into the environment."
"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."
"VirusTotal provides 95% to 98% accurate information."
"VirusTotal provides 95% to 98% accurate information."
"It provides detailed insights into possible malicious behavior, dropped files, and TCP connections."
"It is quite simple for anyone if they just want to check some suspicious URLs."
"I have never had any problems with stability or bugs while using VirusTotal."
"With VirusTotal, I can check for any hash, malware, file, domain, IP URL, or malicious URL, and Kaspersky stays clean."
"It allows us to see if there have been previous reports on certain indicators of compromise, providing insights from other security professionals."
"It can scan the dark web and find if an email ID has been compromised. This is another area that we have not explored yet."
 

Cons

"The Management Console is not localized."
"They have a manual, but it is not excessive."
"Reporting on incidents needs improvement."
"The Deep Instinct client stops working when you have two servers and you add high availability or Windows Failover Cluster mode. It doesn't work in a clustered mode. I haven't yet had time to go back and talk with their support and get it fixed. It would be good if they can make the installation independent of an actual user. Currently, its installation is dependent on the actual user being logged in. For example, a computer has to be logged in for the installation to happen. If it is not logged in, then on the cloud platform, it is going to show that the client is offline. On the management side of the cloud platform, we would like to have the administrators segregated by logical entities. We have told them that on their cloud management platform, we would like to be able to segregate clients into different logical entities or organizations so that the administrators are able to manage only those entities that are within their designated organization."
"Some features are too resource intensive."
"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."
"Its support for Linux and Unix operating systems can be improved. Currently, they cover macOS and Windows, but they don't cover Linux and some of the Unix products. Pricing is also an issue. Its pricing is not as aggressive as it could be, and its price makes it difficult to sell. Customers feel that they can get an antivirus for a lower price, even though it is not a similar product. It is technically different. Their SLAs can be better. They have to give you 24/7 support, but their SLAs are not very good. They should be better documented, and the offerings should also be a little bit better. What happens is that the SLAs end up in the hands of the intermediary, seller, or the local partner of Deep Instinct in a country. The customers want very fast SLAs in a very short time, but Deep Instinct doesn't give them at the same speed. Having said that, SLAs are important when you have a lot of issues, but this product doesn't have too many issues, so it is not a big concern. However, for a customer who doesn't know the product, it could be a concern."
"I would love to see a really exceptional, outstanding level of reporting. I know that's like asking for a unicorn to leap out of the sky with any of these products... When everything works, clients began to wonder: "Everything's fine. Why do we need you?" That's where the reporting capabilities would allow us to really demonstrate: "Hey, here's what's actually going on, Mr. Customer.""
"There is room for improvement, particularly in making some of the most useful features more accessible in the non-paid version."
"VirusTotal has different versions, and sometimes the parameters of the API are not very clear."
"I would like to see improvements in the score consistency and accuracy."
"The platform could improve in the areas of endpoints and networks."
"VirusTotal is hard to understand because you need to know Google Docs to create queries, and it doesn't have documentation for that."
"I would like to see improved correlation with other threat intelligence sources, not just reliant on its own database, to enhance the database of threat intelligence that VirusTotal offers."
"VirusTotal has predefined reports, but there is a lot of manual effort involved."
"There should be room for improvement, particularly in the API side of things."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"There is a need for customers of the product to pay towards the licensing costs of the tool."
"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."
"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."
"Their pricing is very competitive. It is good, fair, and a lot cheaper than what we were doing with Cylance."
"If I include the false positive rate and the detection rate in the comparison, Deep Instinct is worth its price."
"The pricing is very economical."
"VirusTotal is an expensive solution."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"We are using VirusTotal with free licenses, managing the license limits across three or four accounts, thus incurring no costs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Healthcare Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
10%
University
7%
 

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 VirusTotal?
With VirusTotal, I can check for any hash, malware, file, domain, IP URL, or malicious URL, and Kaspersky stays clean.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VirusTotal?
I do not know about the pricing or licensing as our organization services VirusTotal for our clients.
What needs improvement with VirusTotal?
I would like to see improvements in the score consistency and accuracy. VirusTotal should add more details like those from competitors such as URL Void or Symantec URL Checker, which show the categ...
 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about Deep Instinct Prevention Platform vs. VirusTotal and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.