Microsoft Defender XDR vs Wazuh comparison

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Microsoft Defender XDR

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 8, 2024

Microsoft Defender XDR and Wazuh compete in the cybersecurity solution category. Wazuh seems to have the upper hand due to its robust features and cost-effective nature, despite Microsoft Defender XDR's strong user support.

Features: Microsoft Defender XDR offers integration capabilities with a focus on threat intelligence, providing enhanced protection. It leverages its defensive machine learning to address potential threats effectively. Wazuh, being open-source, allows for customizable security configurations which cater to specific needs. It provides comprehensive log data analysis and a significant degree of adaptability, enhancing its functionality for personalized setups.

Room for Improvement: Microsoft Defender XDR needs enhancements in the initial setup process, which can be complex. Its system resource usage is perceived as high, impacting performance. Users also desire more customization options for specific industry requirements. Wazuh users call for better documentation to aid in troubleshooting and improvements in support response times. They also wish for a more streamlined integration process for various systems.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Microsoft Defender XDR offers seamless integration with Microsoft products, facilitating an easier deployment process. Its customer service is acknowledged for substantial assistance. Wazuh’s adaptability across platforms is well-regarded, although users find the need for enhanced support services to match their deployment capabilities.

Pricing and ROI: Microsoft Defender XDR faces criticism for higher setup costs, though its comprehensive protection offers a promising return on investment. Wazuh provides a cost-effective setup due to its open-source nature, yielding satisfactory ROI through detailed security insights and reduced initial expenditure.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Defender XDR vs. Wazuh Report (Updated: December 2024).

Microsoft Defender XDR vs. Wazuh

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Helped 831,020 peers since 2012

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

Microsoft Defender XDR

Ranking in Extended Detection and Response (XDR)

5th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (5th), Microsoft Security Suite (2nd)

Wazuh

Ranking in Extended Detection and Response (XDR)

3rd

Average Rating

7.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Log Management (2nd), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Extended Detection and Response (XDR) category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender XDR is 9.6%, up from 7.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Wazuh is 11.8%, up from 4.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Extended Detection and Response (XDR)

Featured Reviews

Gabor Nyerd

Enterprise mobility and security evangelist at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.

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Sandip_Patel

Student at Dakota State University

Evaluating robust file monitoring with insights for community support improvements

Wazuh's most valuable features include file monitoring and compliance reporting, which do not require excessive costs. These aspects are vital as they provide alerts for changes and facilitate the monitoring of compliance. The platform is also relatively easy to set up and operate. Reports are straightforward to extract and prove useful for compliance requirements.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The Email Explorer feature has proven invaluable, offering a broader perspective than automated alerts and incidents alone."

"There is also one dashboard that shows us the status of many controls at once and the details I can get... It gives a great overview of many areas, such as files, emails, chats, and links. Even with the apps, it gives you a great overview. In one place you can see where you should look into things more deeply..."

"Defender XDR can stop advanced attacks, like ransomware or business email compromise."

"I like Defender XDR's reports and alerts. They give you updates about the latest hotfixes and zero-day vulnerabilities, which gives me all the information I need to maintain my servers."

"The portal is quite user-friendly. There is integration with Office, Intune, and other products from the same portal. From there, we can see which policies are installed on a particular machine. We also can manage devices, groups, and tagging."

"I like that Defender is easy to use and the alerts are all in one central location."

"From the perspective of Microsoft 365 XDR, the main benefit is a single, centralized dashboard offering the holistic visibility organizations crave."

"A crucial aspect for our team is the inclusion of identity and access management tools from the vendor."

More Microsoft Defender XDR pros

"One of the most beneficial features of Wazuh, particularly in the context of security needs, is the machine learning data handling capability."

"The log monitoring and analysis tools are great in addition to SIEM file activity monitoring."

"If they support a solution, it is easy to do an integration."

"My company implemented Wazuh because it was relatively inexpensive. They could quickly get their hands on it to check a box for some audit and compliance."

"Wazuh's logging features integrate seamlessly with AWS cloud-native services. There are also Wazuh agent configurations for different use cases, like vulnerability scanning, host-based intrusion detection, and file integrity monitoring."

"I like Wazuh because it is a lot like ELK, which I was already comfortable with, so I didn't have to learn from scratch."

"We use it to find any aberration in our endpoint devices. For example, if someone installs a game on their company laptop, Wazuh will detect it and inform us of the unauthorized software or unintended use of the devices provided by the company."

"I like the cloud-native infrastructure and that it's free. We didn't have to pay anything, and it has the capabilities of many premium solutions in the market. We could integrate all of our services and infrastructure in the cloud with Wazuh. From an integration point of view, Wazuh is pretty good. I had a good experience with this platform."

More Wazuh pros

Cons

"The console is missing some features that would be helpful for a managed services provider, like device and user management."

"While the XDR platform offers valuable functionalities, it falls short of other solutions in its ability to deliver a cohesive identity experience."

"I'd like to see a wider solution that includes not only desktop devices but also other devices, such as servers, storage cabinets, switching equipment, et cetera."

"There is no common area where we can manage all the policies for the EDR, third-party solutions, devices, servers, Windows, Mac, etc., but it's on the road map, and we ware waiting for that feature."

"Some of our older hardware experienced a slight bump in CPU and memory usage. Although I don't have empirical data to back that up, I would suggest possibly more streamlining in the software."

"The advanced threat-hunting capabilities are phenomenal, and the security copilot enhances that, but some data elements could be better or have more context inside of the advanced tables themselves. The schemas feel a little limited to what they're building into the product. It's probably just a maturity thing. I imagine we'll see the features I want in the next year."

"When we do investigations, it would be better if Microsoft could populate the host dashboard more. When we open any host for investigation, we want the entire timeline of what is happening on the host, including all the users logging in, their hardware, Windows version, etc."

"At times, when we have an incident email and we click on the link for that incident, it opens a pop-up, but there is nothing. It has happened a couple of times."

More Microsoft Defender XDR cons

"Wazuh has a drawback with regard to Unix systems. The solution does not allow us to do real-time monitoring for Unix systems. If usage increases, it would be a heavy fall on the other SIEM solutions or event monitoring solutions."

"While it is scalable, it can suffer from reduced latencies."

"Wazuh is missing many things that a typical SIEM should have."

"So far, the recent updates have addressed most challenges we previously faced."

"A lack of certain features creates limitations."

"There's not much I like about Wazuh. Other products I've used were a lot more functional and user friendly. They came with reports and use cases out of the box. We need to configure Wazuh's alerts and monitoring capabilities manually. It'd be nice if we could select from templates and presets for use cases already built and coded."

"Log data analysis could be improved. My IT team has been looking for an alternative because they want better log data for malware detection. We are also doing more container implementation also, so we need better container security, log data analysis, auditing and compliance, malware detection, etc."

"Wazuh currently fails to provide its users with AI and ML."

More Wazuh cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the solution is high compared to others and we have lost some customers because of it."

"We've managed to navigate it effectively through our enterprise agreement, and Microsoft's academic discounts have proven to be quite generous."

"Microsoft is not competitive with the pricing of the solution. The competitors are able to offer lower discounts. The price of the solution is higher."

"Microsoft Defender XDR is expensive."

"The bundling of software makes it easier to manage our setup, but Microsoft purposefully obfuscates this through marketing ploys to hide costs."

"On average, we pay around 55 euros per user for the services and features we receive."

"While the standalone price of Defender XDR might seem high, its value becomes clear when considering the ease of implementation and smooth integration with our existing Microsoft infrastructure, especially when bundled with other Microsoft products."

"Microsoft Defender XDR is priced high."

More Microsoft Defender XDR pricing and cost advice

"Wazuh is not an expensive solution."

"It is a cost-effective solution."

"The current pricing is open source."

"Wazuh is totally free and open source. There are no licensing costs, only support costs if you need them."

"Wazuh is an open-source tool, which means it is freely available for use."

"Wazuh is a good tool, but the open-source version has scalability limitations."

"The product is cheaper compared to other tools."

"It is a free-of-cost solution."

More Wazuh pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Extended Detection and Response (XDR) solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

16%

Comms Service Provider

University

Government

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 Wazuh?

Integrates with various open-source and paid products, allowing for flexibility in customization based on use cases.

What needs improvement with Wazuh?

I am investigating more about the community support for Wazuh. I can't provide a definitive answer yet. An issue I noticed is with tag values in certain rules not functioning properly. It's unclear...

What is your primary use case for Wazuh?

I am currently evaluating and using Wazuh for file monitoring and compliance reporting. We are in the process of conducting a POC to understand how the rules work. I lead this effort to explore and...

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Product Reports

Microsoft Defender XDR

Download Microsoft Defender XDR product report

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Also Known As

Microsoft 365 Defender, Microsoft Threat Protection, MS 365 Defender

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Microsoft

Overview

Microsoft Defender XDR is a comprehensive security solution designed to protect against threats in the Microsoft 365 environment.

It offers robust security measures, comprehensive threat detection capabilities, and an efficient incident response system. With seamless integration with other Microsoft products and a user-friendly interface, it simplifies security management tasks.

Users have found it effective in detecting and preventing various types of attacks, such as phishing attempts, malware infections, and data breaches.

Watch the Microsoft demo video here: Microsoft Defender XDR demo video.

Wazuh is an enterprise-ready platform used for security monitoring. It is a free and open-source platform that is used for threat detection, incident response and compliance, and integrity monitoring. Wazuh is capable of protecting workloads across virtualized, on-premises, containerized, and cloud-based environments.

It consists of an endpoint security agent and a management server. Additionally, Wazuh is fully integrated with the Elastic Stack, allowing users the ability to navigate through security alerts via a data visualization tool.

Wazuh’s agent can run on many different platforms, and is lightweight. It can successfully perform the tasks needed to detect threats in order to trigger responses automatically.
Wazuh manages the agents, can analyze agent data, and can scale horizontally.
Elastic Stack is where alerts are indexed and stored.

Wazuh Capabilities

Some of Wazuh’s most notable capabilities include:

Intrusion detection: Wazuh’s agents can detect hidden files, cloaked processes, or unregistered network listeners, as well as inconsistencies in system call responses. Wazuh’s server component uses a signature-based approach to intrusion detection, using its regular expression engine to analyze collected log data and look for indicators of compromise.
Log data analysis: Wazuh can read operating system and application logs, and securely forward them to a central manager for rule-based analysis and storage.
Integrity monitoring: File integrity monitoring can help identify changes in content, ownership, permissions, and attribute of files. Wazuh’s file integrity monitoring can be used in conjunction with threat intelligence.
Vulnerability detection: Wazuh agents can identify well-known vulnerable software so you can see where your weak spots are and take action before an attack can exploit them.
Configuration assessment: System and application configurations are monitored to make sure they are compliant with security policies. Periodic scans are used to detect applications that are known to be vulnerable, insecurely configured, or unpatched.
Incident response: Wazuh responds actively when active threats need to be addressed. It can perform countermeasures like blocking access to a system when a threat source is identified.
Regulatory compliance: Wazuh includes the security controls required to be compliant with industry regulations and standards.
Cloud security: Wazuh’s light-weight and multi-platform agents are commonly used to monitor cloud environments at the instance level. In addition, Wazuh helps monitor cloud infrastructure at an API level.
Security for containers: With Wazuh, you have increased security visibility into hosts and containers, allowing for easier detection of threats, anomalies, and vulnerabilities.

Wazuh Benefits

Some of the most valued benefits of Wazuh include:

No vendor lock-in
No license costs
Uses lightweight, multi-platform agents
Free community support

Wazuh Offers

Annual support and maintenance
Assistance with deployment and configuration
Training and instructional hands-on courses

Reviews From Real Users

"It's very easy to integrate Wazuh with other environments, cloud applications, and on-prem applications. So, the advantage is that it's easy to implement and integrate with other solutions." - Robert C., IT Security Consultant at Microlan Kenya Limited

“The MITRE ATT&CK correlation is most valuable.” - Chief Information Security Officer at a financial services firm

Sample Customers

Accenture, Deloitte, ExxonMobil, General Electric, IBM, Johnson & Johnson and many others.

Information Not Available

Microsoft Defender XDR vs. Wazuh