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Microsoft Defender for Endpoint vs VIPRE Endpoint Security comparison

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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 Protection Platform (EPP)
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
118
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (5th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (4th), Ransomware Protection (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (1st)
Microsoft Defender for Endp...
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
212
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (4th), Anti-Malware Tools (1st), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (3rd), Microsoft Security Suite (3rd)
VIPRE Endpoint Security
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
52nd
Average Rating
7.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) category, the mindshare of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is 3.8%, up from 3.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is 6.5%, down from 10.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VIPRE Endpoint Security is 0.7%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint6.5%
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks3.8%
VIPRE Endpoint Security0.7%
Other89.0%
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
 

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.
SS
IT Security Analyst at a healthcare company with 11-50 employees
Easy to upgrade and manage but needs better reporting
There just was a lot about it that I didn't like. For blocking certain items, such as USBs, we felt like it was slowing down the network too much. Therefore we utilized a GPO for blocking things like that instead. Our environment was big and I didn't feel like the console did a good enough job. We outgrew the product. I've been asking for a change for a couple of years now, and it finally got approved. In terms of the console, I had over 2000 endpoints in there and there wasn't even a search feature for me to look through them. If I had to find where a policy was I had to sort in alphabetical order to find an endpoint that I wanted. They need to offer a search function within the console - maybe something that shows a "last connected" notice. That way, it's easier to manage obsolete machines that you don't need anymore. They had a very vague setting, like after so many days, when do you want us to remove these, you'd see them. I just wish the console was a little more responsive when I would do commands. The reports could have been better. The product would show a lot of endpoints as not communicating. That was another pain point. We constantly had to run an SQL query to clean up the database as I would know immediately when I was in the console, that it just wasn't being responsive. I could tell I was being given bad data and that we had to clean up the database. As soon as I would clean up that database, it was like a purging of the SQL database and it would become a lot more responsive. The problem was that our environment was too big. We're going through a growth spurt right now. In the end, the solution is small and much better suited for a small business. We would get a lot of false positives and instead of them fixing the false positive, they would just want us to put in an exception, which I didn't care for. The product is based on an older model of signature files. It doesn't use any artificial intelligence or anything. It was slow to refresh the policies and computer scans. The larger we got, the more it became an issue. If a company stayed small, I'm not sure if they would have noticed.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The normal protection was really effective, and we detected situations that if we didn't have Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks, it's highly likely that we would have been affected, but it protected the infrastructure."
"The solution helps find bugs, and it is safe to use to prevent attacks by hackers."
"It is an easy-to-use tool."
"Cortex XDR is stable, offering high quality and reliable performance."
"I have found the solution to be very easy in respect of the integration and configurable."
"The one feature of Palo Alto Networks Traps that our organization finds most valuable is the App ID service."
"The stability of the solution is very good. We have about 100 users on it right now, and we use it twice a week."
"It blocks malicious files, prevents attacks, and doesn't require many updates because it is a very light application."
"The features of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint that I prefer most are the detections. It just works."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is beneficial because we are using Microsoft Windows and all the core solutions are made by Microsoft, such as the authentic platform, operating system, and antivirus protection. It is a heterogeneous environment. We had to use third-party solutions before and update everything separately. For example, the policy for antivirus. With Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, when Microsoft Windows receives updates it will update with it. This is one main advantage of this solution."
"It's stable."
"It's great for investigating what's happening on a machine. They show a whole bunch of machine timeline events that are related to a security incident. They have quite good details on the things related to threat and vulnerability management, such as any weakness that has been disclosed publicly, assets that are exposed, and if there is an exploit active in the wild for that vulnerability. It can provide you with all such information, which is cool."
"In Windows 11, Defender is very, very strong."
"We can react to threats faster and stop them from spreading from one machine to another. It protects from suspicious email attachment downloads. It will lock down the SOC and the workstations."
"There are several features that have helped to improve our security posture at the prevention level, such as the attack surface reduction controls and the exploit prevention control."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has significantly impacted our security posture."
"It has improved the way our organization functions, made things run faster in our company, and has done a fantastic job of keeping our networks free of virus."
"In general, it was pretty easy to manage."
"Technical support was always very helpful and responsive."
"It has low overhead as far as machine resources are concerned. Everything runs faster with VIPRE installed versus some of the competitors. It has also been pretty easy to use. It just runs and gives us reports. It also sends us alerts when there is something that we need to look at. It does its job, and you just look at the reports. In other ways, you just forget that it is there."
 

Cons

"There are some default policies which sometimes affect our applications and cause them to run around."
"The deployment is pretty hard."
"There's room for improvement with Mac device installations, which can be challenging."
"I have faced some issues with Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks; there is room for improvement in the sense that certain options prevent us from seeing and segregating data."
"The solution needs better reports. I think they should let the customer go in and customize the reports."
"I feel that it should not be a licensed activity because a feature should allow us to see applications running on end devices."
"Impact on system performance is horrible, adding a lot of delays for users."
"The solution eats memory of the computer, unlike anything I've ever seen."
"Some executive reporting is inefficient, and we're looking into ways to improve it."
"With regards to the interface, a challenge I found was that there was not enough documentation on how to tune it. I had to read multiple sources on the internet to learn how to configure the tool appropriately."
"Defender’s GUI can be optimized. The console needs to be more refined."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is secure but when it comes to security all solutions could improve security."
"Sometimes it's complicated. It's not intuitive in terms of installation and deployment."
"Microsoft Defender in the basic form is not very useful for managing the security environment. The free version is not capable of covering the needs of centralized management, EDR, and behavioral analysis. If you don't have the commercial version, you can't have centralized management and set up the policies and other things. Each client is a standalone installation, which is not useful for security in an enterprise model."
"A challenge is that it is not a multi-tenant solution. Microsoft's tenant is a licensed tenant. I'm an MSSP. So, I have multiple customers. In Microsoft's world, that means that I can't just buy an E5 license and give that out to all my customers. That won't work because all of the customer data resides within a single tenant in Microsoft's world. Other products—such as SentinelOne, Palo Alto Cortex, CrowdStrike, et cetera—are multi-tenant. So, I can have it at the top of the pyramid for my analyst to look into it and see all the customers, but each customer's data is separate. If the customer wants to look at what we see, they would only see their data, whereas in the Microsoft world, if I've got multiple customers connected to the same Microsoft tenant, they would see everybody else's data, which is a privacy problem in Europe. It is not possible to share the data, and it is a breach of privacy."
"The GUI is very complex and could be more user friendly."
"Their management interface is a little buggy. It requires a few system resources on the management interface. Its reporting can also be better. Overall, the reports are pretty good. They patch some third-party software, but if they can expand what they do for reporting and patch enterprise software, it would be handy."
"We would get a lot of false positives and instead of them fixing the false positive, they would just want us to put in an exception, which I didn't care for."
"Their management interface is a little buggy as it will hang up and crash from time to time."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's the most expensive solution, but features-wise, it's quite strong. It's very good for protection, so the results are very good in the case of protection. I would rate it a two out of ten in terms of pricing."
"The price of the solution could be reduced. I have customers that have voiced that the solution is good for the value but if I want to sell more of the solution the price reduction would help."
"The price of the solution is high for the license and in general."
"The cost depends on your chosen license type, like Pro or other licenses."
"This is an expensive solution."
"It has reasonable pricing for the use cases it provides to the company."
"The solution has one subscription for endpoint protection and one subscription for detection and response. The two licenses combined give you the BRO version."
"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 fee is a function of your Office 365 license. The feature set you get is a function of the license as well. There is probably an E2 version, an E3 version, and an E5 version. There are several versions, and not all features are the same. So, you might want to check what features you're expecting because you might get shocked. If you only have an E3 license, the capability isn't the same."
"We went for Microsoft Defender once we were informed that it would be part of our Office 365 package. So, we combined the licensing for the OS with Office 365. Yeah. We thought it was a good bargain."
"The solution comes as part of Microsoft Windows."
"Compared to ESET, the pricing for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is on the higher side."
"We pay a yearly license for Microsoft Defender. We also have a support contract with them."
"Microsoft has different plans for buying this product. The price depends on the configuration of the full set of products that you buy and on the licensing program in your contract."
"They are now doing it on an endpoint basis. It is based on the number of endpoints, which is good."
"The solution comes as a part of Windows 10 and it is covered under its license."
"Its price point has been phenomenal. Our previous solution from Trend Micro was triple the cost of it."
"Its price point has been phenomenal. Our previous solution from Trend Micro was triple the cost of it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Construction Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
19%
University
8%
Wholesaler/Distributor
5%
Financial Services Firm
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business47
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise55
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business82
Midsize Enterprise44
Large Enterprise97
No data available
 

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...
Ask a question
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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
VIPRE Cloud, VIPRE Endpoint Security Cloud Edition, VIPRE Endpoint Security Server Edition
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
Petrofrac, Metro CSG, Christus Health
College Station ISD, Mid-West Companies, Guardian Network Solutions
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Defender for Endpoint vs. VIPRE Endpoint Security and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
914,351 professionals have used our research since 2012.