

Microsoft Exchange Online Protection and Microsoft Defender for Office 365 compete in the email security category. Defender for Office 365 appears to have the upper hand due to its enhanced security features and real-time threat protection, which justify its higher price for larger organizations.
Features: Microsoft Exchange Online Protection stands out for its ease of administration, seamless integration with Microsoft tools, and effective anti-phishing and anti-malware capabilities. It allows centralized management and scales well within the Microsoft ecosystem. Defender for Office 365 enhances this with advanced threat protection, URL scanning, and data loss prevention features, while also integrating with Sentinel for comprehensive enterprise security.
Room for Improvement: Users suggest Microsoft Exchange Online Protection could improve its configurability and granularity, and address its perceived high cost compared to rivals. It could also offer more than basic email protection, such as mailing list tools. Defender for Office 365 needs to enhance its scalability and simplify its interface, while offering more proactive intelligence alerts without complex licensing.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Both products are deployed in hybrid and public cloud environments; EOP is also on-premises. Microsoft’s technical support receives mixed reviews: helpful for some, but slow or unsatisfactory for others. EOP users find service delays frustrating, while Defender users face occasional interface issues. The overall service is competent but lacks consistency.
Pricing and ROI: EOP is generally reasonably priced, with simple licensing appealing to many users despite some perceiving it as expensive. It delivers positive ROI through security improvements. Defender for Office 365 is seen as costly, especially for small businesses, but larger enterprises find its advanced features justify the price. Its proactive security capabilities bring significant ROI.
It has also decreased our time to detection and response by about 15 to 20 percent.
Overall, cost of owning and operating our system goes down.
It's hard to quantify the return on investment we've seen from Microsoft Defender for Office 365.
Over the past two years, there have been no critical problems.
we opened tickets, and they typically resolve them quickly.
With a subscription for Microsoft Defender for Office 365, it is an eight. Without it, it is a six.
Microsoft offers excellent 24/7 support.
My team is able to get the help they need when necessary.
We have never faced scalability problems, and Microsoft manages it effectively.
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 scales transparently for us, as we grew from 1,000 users to 3,000 users, and we didn't notice much difference.
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 scales with the growing needs of my company well.
I would rate the stability of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 as 10 over 10 because it's highly available, it works, and it does the job it is meant to do.
I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues because of Defender.
The solution is stable, as we have been using it for the past two years.
The main area for improvement is simplifying the implementation and rollout process.
Microsoft could improve by offering recommendations for domain spoofing attacks, especially scenarios where DNS records like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are not properly published.
There is a different console for different things; I just want one consolidated console.
Improving the search process by allowing searches with different types of parameters and facilitating searches within emails would be advantageous.
The user interface of Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP) has room for improvement.
We've likely saved 30% of costs.
Money-wise, it is a part of the Office 365 suite, making it slightly more expensive compared to Trend Micro.
Microsoft is quite affordable with a lot of features available for any size organization.
The pricing is reasonable.
Microsoft Exchange is more expensive compared to other services like Gmail.
I find the price of Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP) to be fairly reasonable, and I have no problems with it.
It ranks the threats and allows us to prioritize those hitting us the hardest, such as email threats.
It provides end-to-end visibility on email threats such as phishing, extending beyond Exchange Online Protection.
The value of the DLP feature is significant to us because we have internal data, sometimes sensitive, and the users may not always be aware of security and privacy, which might lead them to send out information mistakenly to external parties.
We've benefited from the anti-phishing features of Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), as it has been quite accurate and has eliminated most of our phishing emails, making it really impressive.
The security features provided by Microsoft are robust.
It offers more features and better security, making it the best option for corporate environments.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Microsoft Defender for Office 365 | 9.6% |
| Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP) | 4.4% |
| Other | 86.0% |

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 23 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 10 |
| Large Enterprise | 31 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 24 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 7 |
| Large Enterprise | 10 |
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is a comprehensive security solution designed to protect organizations against advanced threats in their email, collaboration, and productivity environments. It combines the power of Microsoft's threat intelligence, machine learning, and behavioral analytics to provide real-time protection against phishing, malware, ransomware, and other malicious attacks.
With Microsoft Defender for Office 365, organizations can safeguard their email communication by detecting and blocking malicious links, attachments, and unsafe email content. It employs advanced anti-phishing capabilities to identify and prevent sophisticated phishing attacks that attempt to steal sensitive information or compromise user credentials.
This solution also offers robust protection against malware and ransomware. It leverages machine learning algorithms to analyze email attachments and URLs in real-time, identifying and blocking malicious content before it reaches users' inboxes. Additionally, it provides advanced threat-hunting capabilities, allowing security teams to proactively investigate and respond to potential threats.
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 goes beyond email protection and extends its security features to other collaboration tools like SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams. It scans files and documents stored in these platforms, ensuring that they are free from malware and other malicious content. It also provides visibility into user activities, helping organizations detect and mitigate insider threats.
Furthermore, this solution offers rich reporting and analytics capabilities, providing organizations with insights into their security posture and threat landscape. It enables security administrators to monitor and manage security incidents, track trends, and take proactive measures to enhance their overall security posture.
Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP) is a comprehensive email filtering and security service designed to protect organizations from spam, malware, and other email-based threats. It provides advanced threat protection, anti-malware and anti-spam filtering, and data loss prevention capabilities.
With EOP, organizations can ensure the security and integrity of their email communications. It uses multiple layers of filtering and scanning to detect and block malicious content, including phishing attempts, viruses, and ransomware. EOP also leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence to continuously improve its threat detection capabilities.
In addition to its robust security features, EOP offers advanced anti-spam filtering to reduce unwanted and unsolicited emails. It uses a combination of reputation-based filtering, content filtering, and sender authentication techniques to identify and block spam messages.
EOP also includes data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities to prevent sensitive information from being leaked or shared inappropriately. It allows organizations to define policies to detect and prevent the transmission of sensitive data, such as credit card numbers or social security numbers, via email.
Furthermore, EOP integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Exchange Online and other Office 365 services, providing a unified and integrated email security solution. It can be easily managed through the Exchange admin center, allowing administrators to configure and monitor security settings, review reports, and manage quarantined emails.
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