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Microsoft Defender for Endpoint vs Sangfor Endpoint Secure comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 9, 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...
Sponsored
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
115
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (4th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (4th), Ransomware Protection (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (1st)
Microsoft Defender for Endp...
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
212
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (1st), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (5th), Anti-Malware Tools (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (3rd)
Sangfor Endpoint Secure
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
32nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) category, the mindshare of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is 3.7%, down from 3.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is 5.6%, down from 10.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Sangfor Endpoint Secure is 0.7%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint5.6%
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks3.7%
Sangfor Endpoint Secure0.7%
Other90.0%
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.
Robert Arbuckle - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Analyst III at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Automatically isolates threats and integrates with logging to reduce response time
Overall, I would evaluate the Microsoft support level that I receive at probably about a seven, but that depends on the day. It has been spotty. We have had issues where the urgency level of the Microsoft support is not as high as ours, especially during a data breach or potential data breach situation. We have had issues with some of the offshore support being lackluster. One specific thing that comes to mind is we were on a support call with our CISO on the call, and the Microsoft agent, who did not actually work for Microsoft, is one of the vendors that Microsoft uses for support, said, "Just to set expectations, my lunch break is in an hour and I am going to go away then." For us, it was already ten o'clock at night and we had been working on this for a couple of hours, trying to get a security engineer on with us. For him to tell us that he was going to go away and have lunch, it was, "Okay, but go find somebody else if you need to." It was just the lackluster approach, and it seemed like he did not really care. We seem to get a lot of this when we get non-Microsoft support. I can identify areas for improvement with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, as it is kind of a convoluted mess to try to take care of false positives. Especially when they have been identified as false positives but they keep going off over and over again. It is great for my pocketbook because it generates a lot of on-call action, but I would really prefer more sleep at two o'clock in the morning than dealing with false positives. I would say that the unified portal for managing Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is suitable for both teams as they are all in there. It would be great if they would stop moving things around and renaming things, which makes sense. The new XDR portal is pretty nice. Being able to have it central again inside of the regular Security Center without having to open up two windows is helpful. Overall, I think it is pretty good. There is always going to be something that could be improved, such as alerting and the ability to modify alerts would be a little bit helpful to have. Being able to add more data into the alerts and turn off alerts that are not as useful would be beneficial. It is hard to say what the quantitative impact the security exposure management feature has had on our company's security, because a lot of it is kind of subjective. I think we are sitting at around a fifty percent score still, and a lot of it is just kind of unusual circumstances that we cannot really implement without breaking the organization.
OA
Coordinator Associate at National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases
Quick threat response and behavior analysis while enhancing network security
The main use case is usually related to security. It deals with attacks that come day-to-day such as zero-day attacks and APT attacks. Our main task is to secure the network infrastructure in the hospital where I work It facilitates the departments of IT and other departments to procure and…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks a nine."
"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."
"Stability-wise, it is good; I did not hear about any issues in terms of stability, and Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks can be trusted completely."
"Once you become familiar with it, Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is a more powerful tool and I would say that I prefer it over MDE because it is a stronger tool for me."
"If the user leaves our premises or network, Palo Alto Traps will still be on that endpoint and will still apply our policies."
"Cortex XDR is a simple platform that's easy for administrators and users. You have a lot of flexibility to change or customize the features."
"The solution helps find bugs, and it is safe to use to prevent attacks by hackers."
"Cortex is the best tool for endpoint detection, and I have used it to verify hashes or domains to identify malicious activity, trigger playbooks that automate and gather endpoint logs, block malicious processes, and update incident tickets, showcasing end-to-end processes with automation in investigation and reducing the analysis workflow."
"Windows is a great tool that I have used; it has helped my organisation in achieving what it does daily and protected our data in a great way."
"The most important and the most relevant features of Defender for Endpoint are the malware and ransomware protection."
"It's a stable solution."
"We can run the virus scan across our entire environment."
"Defender is stable enough and is competitive with the other products in the market."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has helped free up my SOC team to work on other projects and tasks, and the automated reporting and dashboarding has saved them a lot of time, amounting to several man-hours."
"The scalability is amazing; using Azure, the sky is the limit."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is free and part of the licensing stack of other Microsoft products."
"Sangfor Endpoint Secure has some good policy certificates."
"The user-friendliness of Sangfor Endpoint Secure is particularly impressive. Even with basic technical knowledge, users can easily navigate the system, make changes, and implement updates."
"The real-time monitoring feature of Sangfor Endpoint Secure is truly real-time, with no delay compared to other solutions."
"The most valuable feature I have found in the system is its comprehensive end-to-end protection."
"What stands out to me is the dual-end user interface they provide."
"The tool's most valuable features are control access, endpoint security, and load balancing of ISPs."
"The product's initial setup phase was straightforward."
"I like the tool's honeypot feature. Some features include having a honeypot to detect attacks in a certain area. Additionally, there is RDP protection, which means that when we remote into our server or any endpoint, we must enter a password as a second layer of security. It can also integrate with next-generation firewalls."
 

Cons

"There are some default policies which sometimes affect our applications and cause them to run around. In the hotel industry, we use a different type of data versus Oracle and SQL. By default, there are some policies which stop us from running properly. Because of this, the support level is also not that strong. We have to wait to get a results."
"The installation should be easier and the Palo Alto pre-sales and sales teams should have more information on the product because they don't know what they are selling."
"It is not a suitable solution if you are looking for a single product with multiple features such as DLP, encryption, rollback, etc."
"I feel that it should not be a licensed activity because a feature should allow us to see applications running on end devices."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks could improve by adding a sandbox feature to better compete with their competitors which have it."
"The solution lacks real-time, on-demand antivirus."
"A little bit more automation would be nice."
"To jump from the partner to Palo Alto directly was challenging."
"Microsoft has some creative accounting when they promise an SLA of 99.99%. But it is generally good."
"I would like to see improvements made to how it secures activities on web pages."
"Notifications are always popping up — I hate that."
"There's a lot of manual effort involved to configure what we need."
"The central console needs improvement."
"Monitoring can always be better, onboarding can be a little bit faster, log collection could be easier, they could streamline the dashboard. They could maybe split it up into different workspaces and have the ability to segment groups a little bit more."
"It is currently more suitable for end-users rather than enterprises with lots of other processes and third-party tools. It needs improvement on that front. We had many issues while integrating it with our enterprise solutions, such as Splunk, and third-party tools. It provides everything via APIs. Other vendors provide integration with third-party tools, but Microsoft doesn't do that. It is also logging too much and is not serialized from the process aspect. It has all the data, but it is not in a proper format or not properly indexed, which doesn't make it easier for enterprises to use this data. Other vendors provide troubleshooting information that can be used to troubleshoot issues, but Microsoft doesn't provide anything like that."
"In India at least, it seems to be a bit more expensive than other options."
"I face issues while migrating from Kaspersky to Sangfor Endpoint Secure."
"Sangfor Endpoint Secure performs poorly."
"I believe Sangfor Endpoint Secure could improve in terms of its user interface and management capabilities."
"Sangfor Endpoint Secure should include healing capabilities."
"It is complicated to establish a tunnel due to technical issues in the VPN system."
"It would be much more convenient if the migration tool could be installed directly on the customer's VMs, enabling a smoother migration process to the new infrastructure, with potential restrictions addressed accordingly."
"The interface has too many buttons, making it cluttered."
"Currently, the tool lacks reporting functionalities."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's price is moderate."
"It's about $55 per license on a yearly basis."
"I don't have any issues with the pricing. We are satisfied with the price."
"Cortex XDR's pricing is ok."
"The pricing is a little bit on the expensive side."
"It has a yearly renewal."
"It is "expensive" and flexible."
"It is present, but when compared to other competitive products, I would say it is not less expensive; however, when all of the other added values are considered, the price is reasonable."
"The licensing costs for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint are reasonable."
"Its price at the moment is very good because you get a lot of value for your money, especially with the subscriptions. If you have the E1, E3, or E5 enterprise subscription, you pay per month per user, and you get almost an infinite number of solutions. If you compare the price to the number of solutions that you get, it is a very good deal."
"The E5 license is the one that I recommend because it comes with Cloud App Security, which is a good thing to have on top of Microsoft Defender."
"The solution is included with Microsoft Windows."
"It is built into Windows 10. If our clients are using Microsoft Defender, the cost goes away for them."
"The solution is free and comes with Windows."
"I recently switched from education to private business, and all I can say is that private business licensing from Microsoft is not cheap until you hit certain quantities or scale. That does not mean that it is not comparable to other industries. It is similar pricing, but it is still crazy to me how much you pay for a client. I feel it is high, but it is in line with other vendors."
"It is within the same range as other products. It is not too expensive, and it is also not cheap. Its price can be better, but, well, it is Microsoft."
"We were using Hyper-V. So, we switched to Sangfor because of the pricing."
"The product is expensive compared to other vendors."
"Sangfor Endpoint Secure is not a cheap solution."
"The solution is cheap. It is cheaper than other products by 15-20 percent."
"Price-wise, Sangfor Endpoint Secure can be considered a competitively priced product in the market as it offers quite low prices compared to other solutions."
"Sangfor Endpoint Secure's pricing is cheap. I rate it seven out of ten."
"Its "pay as you grow" model offers cost-effectiveness compared to major cloud providers."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Media Company
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise54
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business82
Midsize Enterprise45
Large Enterprise96
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise3
 

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. ...
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 th...
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,...
Which offers better endpoint security - Symantec or Microsoft Defender?
We use Symantec because we do not use MS Enterprise products, but in my opinion, Microsoft Defender is a superior sol...
How does Microsoft Defender for Endpoint compare with Crowdstrike Falcon?
The CrowdStrike solution delivers a lot of information about incidents. It has a very light sensor that will never pu...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint?
We have been discussing pricing, setup cost, and licensing, and we are currently on an E3. We are discussing going to...
What needs improvement with Sangfor Endpoint Secure?
The interface has too many buttons, making it cluttered. It would be better if it were a simplified version with fewe...
What is your primary use case for Sangfor Endpoint Secure?
Sangfor Endpoint Secure is easy to handle with its user-friendly interface. The four engines it utilizes for endpoint...
What advice do you have for others considering Sangfor Endpoint Secure?
At first, people might not understand the interface, which is why it should be simplified. However, once they underst...
 

Also Known As

Cyvera, Cortex XDR, Palo Alto Networks Traps
Microsoft Defender ATP, Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection, MS Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender Antivirus
No data available
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
Petrofrac, Metro CSG, Christus Health
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Defender for Endpoint vs. Sangfor Endpoint Secure and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
909,563 professionals have used our research since 2012.