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Microsoft Defender XDR vs Microsoft Purview eDiscovery comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
7.0
Microsoft Defender XDR boosts security efficiency, saves time, reduces breaches, despite high licensing costs, enhancing overall organizational security posture.
Sentiment score
7.7
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery boosts ROI by improving data efficiency, compliance, risk management, and reducing legal and IT workloads.
Ever since we turned on the M5 feature set back in June, we have seen a reduced number of potentially malicious clicks and faster alerting when incidents occur.
We have seen a 100% return on investment.
The ease of accessing necessary information promptly is the biggest return on investment.
It's hard to quantify the ROI in a dollar amount, but we realize value by doing more tasks in less time than we did before.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.4
Microsoft Defender XDR support excels in premium tiers but has mixed reviews for basic service response times and expertise.
Sentiment score
7.6
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is praised for responsive support, despite some mixed experiences with wait times and outcomes.
You get stuck in low-level support for way longer than you should, instead of them escalating the issue up the chain.
It's critical to escalate SEV B issues immediately to a domestic engineer.
The technical support from Microsoft Defender XDR has been disappointingly slow.
I would rate Microsoft Purview eDiscovery's customer service and technical support a ten.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Microsoft Defender XDR is scalable and cloud-based, with positive user feedback, but may face network and licensing challenges.
Sentiment score
7.9
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is scalable and efficient, seamlessly integrating with cloud infrastructures but lacks some search functions.
Microsoft Defender XDR shows tremendous scalability, much more so than on-premises solutions.
It is suitable for enterprise-level deployment but has room for improvement.
It scales with us seamlessly.
With the E3 licensing, I would rate the scalability of Microsoft Purview eDiscovery as a six because it lacks certain critical search functionalities.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Microsoft Defender XDR is highly stable and reliable, with users rating it 8 or 9 out of 10.
Sentiment score
8.6
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is generally stable, with minor slowdowns, but users seek more transparency on performance issues.
The service has remained consistently online, with any issues isolated to specific components, suggesting a well-designed and modular architecture.
The services within our ecosystem have been reliable, meeting their SLAs.
For us, it has been one hundred percent reliable.
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is highly reliable.
 

Room For Improvement

Microsoft Defender XDR needs faster scans, improved integration, intuitive dashboards, cost-effective licensing, better automation, and broader environment support.
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery needs faster, more efficient features, better integration, NLP for queries, and affordable pricing for users.
The licensing process needs improvement and clarification.
Improvements are needed in automated response capabilities.
Some inconsistencies exist between blades, which could be improved for a more seamless user and UI experience.
Adding more features, as Microsoft continues to expand their cloud offerings, would be beneficial.
Defining what constitutes a credit card because that is where I get the most false positives.
We find that many critical functions are available only to E5 license holders.
 

Setup Cost

Microsoft Defender XDR pricing opinions vary, with some appreciating bundled savings and others finding standalone costs high.
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery pricing is complex, with E5 costly yet beneficial, while E3 is cheaper but limited.
I would rate the pricing as eight out of ten, indicating it is a reasonable cost for the product.
Microsoft purposefully obfuscates this through marketing ploys to hide costs.
There are no issues with pricing, but sometimes, the clarity in licensing is a concern.
With CSP or MCE-style agreements with Microsoft, the process is streamlined since we have reps from both Microsoft and CDW working together.
As an M3, I find the Purview pricing of 1250 per user worthwhile.
The pricing and licensing with Microsoft can be complex, and licensing is known to be a challenge because it changes frequently.
 

Valuable Features

Microsoft Defender XDR offers integrated tools, enhancing threat detection, management, and automation, simplifying security tasks for enterprise environments.
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery ensures efficient data retrieval with multi-platform integration, automation, compliance visibility, and adherence to global data privacy laws.
With Microsoft threat intelligence information, it detects various types of threats, including insider attacks, malicious content, and data exfiltration.
This allows us to secure our systems in advance and proactively improve security, rather than waiting for incidents to occur.
It's because endpoint management is my primary focus, and this feature integrates well with my other skills.
The most valuable feature of Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is its ability to search across various platforms, including Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive.
Purview can connect to iOS, Mac, Android, and SaaS apps, which is critical for capturing SMS and MMS text message data.
Purview's inclusion of global regulations is critical because we're heavily regulated by FERC, Sarbanes-Oxley, and the SEC.
 

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Defender XDR
Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
97
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (5th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (4th)
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery
Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite
24th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
eDiscovery (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Microsoft Security Suite category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender XDR is 5.6%, down from 8.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is 0.7%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Microsoft Security Suite
 

Featured Reviews

Gabor Nyerd - PeerSpot reviewer
Includes four services and four products, which can help organizations a lot
We found that sometimes integrations work, but testing them can take some time. Sometimes, configurations take much longer than expected. We have a configuration in place that needs to be synchronized with another server. However, the servers are four hours apart, so this can cause delays. In general, I believe that the time it takes to configure and test a service should be shorter. Sometimes, it can take a couple of hours to test a single configuration setting. Other times, it is only ten or fifteen minutes, which is normal. However, sometimes, even immediate actions can be triggered by configuration changes, and some settings can take up to eight hours to complete. I believe that this time can be improved. Microsoft is making a lot of improvements to its services in a short period of time. This is a good thing, as it means that the services are constantly being updated and improved. However, it can be challenging for customers to keep up with the changes. For example, a customer may read about an update, understand it, and share it with their colleagues and boss. However, it may take days or weeks to test the update and get the necessary approvals. This can be especially challenging for large customers with many users or machines. In some cases, Microsoft may change a service before the customer has had a chance to implement the previous update. This can be frustrating for customers, as it means that they have to constantly learn new things and adjust their workflows. On the one hand, it is important for Microsoft to keep updating and improving its services. This helps to ensure that the services are meeting the customers' needs and that they are staying ahead of the competition. Microsoft should also be mindful of the challenges that these changes can create for customers. One way to address this challenge is to provide customers with more time to implement changes. Microsoft could also provide more information about upcoming changes so that customers can plan ahead. Ultimately, Microsoft needs to strike a balance between keeping its services up-to-date and providing customers with a smooth transition to new features.
Frank Radeck - PeerSpot reviewer
Tasks that took an entire day before we implemented the solution now take just 30 minutes.
The most valuable feature of Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is its ability to search across various platforms, including Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive. It enables a streamlined, unified process for searching across these platforms. It is critical for Purview to be able to connect to iOS, Mac, and Android devices and data in other SaaS apps. From a support perspective, I can do things while I'm eating lunch or something else. It's more dynamic and responsive. I think everybody appreciates it. We're not tied to one device. Purview's multi-cloud capabilities are also essential for the same reasons. Keeping everything under one umbrella further increases the time savings. Purview accounts for critical regulations from around the world. This is crucial because we hold ourselves accountable to standards and need to align with them. Working at a law firm, we have clients who dictate to us what standards they expect. The visibility is excellent. As we move more things into the cloud, more opportunities exist to put everything under one umbrella.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Government
13%
Computer Software Company
11%
University
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Microsoft 365 Defender?
Microsoft Defender XDR provides strong identity protection with comprehensive insights into risky user behavior and potential indicators of compromise.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft 365 Defender?
Licensing is somewhat confusing, particularly when presenting our pitch decks to stakeholders and leveraging key features in premium SKUs, but we managed with some assistance from Microsoft.
What needs improvement with Microsoft 365 Defender?
It would be beneficial to reduce the number of clicks required to navigate between blades, as the current navigation and breadcrumb system can be a bit confusing. Some inconsistencies exist between...
What do you like most about Microsoft Purview eDiscovery?
The tool has been beneficial. Some of our previous users left the organization without sharing the information they had at a personal level. This information was related to the organization, and th...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Purview eDiscovery?
The setup process was very straightforward. We acquired pricing through our reseller in NASDAQ, eliminating the need to search for prices ourselves.
What needs improvement with Microsoft Purview eDiscovery?
The query language can be time-consuming to figure out if you don't know it initially. While there are options with dropdowns to select criteria, having a natural language feature would be benefici...
 

Also Known As

Microsoft 365 Defender, Microsoft Threat Protection, MS 365 Defender
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Accenture, Deloitte, ExxonMobil, General Electric, IBM, Johnson & Johnson and many others.
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Defender XDR vs. Microsoft Purview eDiscovery and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
847,625 professionals have used our research since 2012.