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Binary Defense MDR vs Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Binary Defense MDR
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (14th)
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Net...
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
112
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (4th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (6th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (4th), Ransomware Protection (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

Binary Defense MDR and Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Binary Defense MDR is designed for Managed Detection and Response (MDR) and holds a mindshare of 1.3%, up 0.5% compared to last year.
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks, on the other hand, focuses on Extended Detection and Response (XDR), holds 4.6% mindshare, down 5.1% since last year.
Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Binary Defense MDR1.3%
SentinelOne Wayfinder Threat Detection and Response6.8%
CrowdStrike Falcon Complete MDR5.4%
Other86.5%
Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
Extended Detection and Response (XDR) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks4.6%
CrowdStrike Falcon9.2%
SentinelOne Singularity Endpoint6.0%
Other80.2%
Extended Detection and Response (XDR)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2588769 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cybersecurity Architect, Information Technology Division at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Phenomenal response time and good handling of context in our diverse environment
We are going to have a meeting with them the following Monday. It will be our first quarterly business review. Half of it is going to be looking at new products and new functions that they are bringing out. So far, I do not have anything negative or a concern. There were two small mistakes that the technician made, and they were remedied immediately. Once we brought them to their attention, they were remedied. I do not have any complaints. They were just simple mistakes that anybody could make, and their response was a positive response. So far, I have not had anything negative to say. The only area for improvement that I can think of relates to statistical analysis for SLAs. They are in the middle of moving to a new product called D3 which is going to do some backend work for them. I know they are working to improve some of the help desk statistics, such as the time the tickets open and the time they are closed. They are working on that function. It is going to be resolved in the next month or two. We have service level agreements with them, but they can use improved statistics for service level agreements. This is the only point of improvement I can identify.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The best part about Binary Defense MDR is that it runs on everything, and they keep an eye on things 24/7."
"One of the main benefits of Binary Defense MDR is the ability to easily meet with their support team to discuss any issues we encounter."
"In the six months we have been with Binary Defense on this, they run with the ball. They take care of our problems. When we get a ticket, they do not just give us a report."
"The most valuable features are the SIEM and the ticketing function; the latter is very smooth and easy to read and understand. We don't have any issues looking at the ticketing information when we're trying to identify what's going on."
"Our mean time to response has gone down. We're much faster with direct response and have more investigative capabilities than we did before."
"The most valuable part of Binary Defense is its team of cybersecurity analysts. Their analysts filter out the noise and only forward the critical threats that require a response instead of false positives."
"Binary Defense has a human service department that provides live monitoring for our systems."
"Binary Defense's most valuable feature is the 24/7 monitoring and threat hunting. Their team checks the latest breaches and how they're done."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is specifically designed to prevent zero-day attacks and is part of an ecosystem of Palo Alto, providing customers with a long-term vision to modify and redesign how security is applied in their company."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks should be a stable solution."
"It has absolutely improved the way our organization functions, we are more secure, it is giving us more peace of mind, and it has found malicious activity happening on our endpoints that probably would not have been detected if we didn't have it."
"The biggest positive impact I see from Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is a significant reduction in the number of people required to manage it."
"The good thing about the product is that it's always scanning."
"What I like about Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is that it is a comprehensive solution that contains everything the organization may need when using endpoints."
"The most valuable feature of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is its machine-learning capabilities. Additionally, there is full integration with other solutions."
"Since they've done their most recent update, the ease to isolate endpoints is valuable. If we find one where there is a virus on it, we can easily isolate it. We don't even have to contact the user. We don't have to manually take them off the network. We can easily isolate them."
 

Cons

"The only area I see for improvement with Binary Defense is their service portal. It could benefit from some enhancements."
"We found a couple of bugs in the user interface."
"We should be able to isolate devices faster. They should shorten the time between clicking on a device to contain it and carrying out the action. That would be a welcome improvement."
"Binary Defense MDR could be even better with additional features, like automatic scans and file quarantine."
"The most significant area for improvement is in support for non-English speakers; we're a global organization, so many of our users are not English speakers, which can make interacting with them a challenge. There's no Chinese language support, so we must rely on what we can do with the internet. We don't expect Binary Defense to build a language staff, but details can get lost in translation when we assume the whole world speaks English."
"We found that an earlier version of the agent had high memory usage and that was a bit concerning, but we raised the concern with their support team and they immediately replied that they had noticed the same thing and had a candidate fix already available... it totally fixed the issue."
"The current reporting system could benefit from improvement."
"It's sometimes difficult to know when to engage Binary Defense or TrustedSec, their sister company. TrustedSec is more focused on offensive security, as opposed to the defensive security that the MDR solution provides. It would be awesome if there were a better bridge between that relationship for when we need to get more proactive services or when we need to do a penetration test."
"The solution eats memory of the computer, unlike anything I've ever seen."
"One thing that was missing was the integration part. Currently, they don't have out-of-box integration with IBM QRadar, or if they have the integration, the integration doesn't work well."
"The downsides of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks are that in many incidents, when I enter the causality chain, there are numerous logs."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks could improve by adding a sandbox feature to better compete with their competitors which have it."
"It'll help if customization was easier."
"Currently, we are monitoring all USB drives and ports but we would like to improve our device control capabilities."
"The onboarding process could be better."
"The dashboard could use some significant improvement, just making it more useful with more information. It has a limited amount of information right now. It is customizable, but I'd love to see a better out-of-box dashboard."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It has been good. We have saved money, and we have a better product."
"The pricing is on target. Working with their sales team on pricing negotiations was a pleasant process. They were very respectful of the constraints we had and I feel that we're paying a fair price."
"Binary Defense has changed its pricing model from being primarily based on the volume of data to one based on escalations and incidents they handle."
"The pricing is very good. They are definitely competitive and they were lower at the time that we went with them."
"After we acquired this platform, we met with a number of different vendors. Binary Defense came in with a proposal that was surprisingly affordable. In fact, we were able to recoup the cost of their services within a short period of time. This is because Binary Defense is able to provide the same level of security as a team of two or three in-house analysts but at a fraction of the cost. As a result, Binary Defense is saving us an estimated $250,000 to $300,000 per year."
"The solution's price is spot on; if anything, it's slightly below the norm for most services. Compared to building the same team internally, it would cost more to create the same amount of capability than what we get from an external team. Price-wise, Binary Defense is in a great spot."
"From the initial cost that Binary Defense came in with, we pared it down quite a bit over the course of 30 or 60 days. My leadership would say that their cost was high, but realistically, they were in line with the market."
"The pricing isn't that bad, it's very competitive. I don't feel that it's over-priced and I don't feel that it's under-priced."
"Our license will require renewal in August, after which the maintenance will continue as usual."
"It's about $55 per license on a yearly basis."
"Licensing for Palo Alto Networks Cortex XDR can be costly, especially when it comes to a hundred users. A license is required for each user, and the subscription must be renewed on a yearly basis."
"It has a yearly renewal."
"The price is on the higher side, but it's okay."
"The cost depends on your chosen license type, like Pro or other licenses."
"I don't recall what the cost was, but it wasn't really that expensive."
"Its pricing is kind of in line with its competitors and everybody else out there."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Insurance Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Construction Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise52
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Binary Defense MDR?
It has been good. We have saved money, and we have a better product. We are a company that has become an enterprise from a small medium business in two years. Our company passed a certain dollar ma...
What needs improvement with Binary Defense MDR?
We are going to have a meeting with them the following Monday. It will be our first quarterly business review. Half of it is going to be looking at new products and new functions that they are brin...
What is your primary use case for Binary Defense MDR?
They co-manage our Sentinel SIEM instance, and they provide a Security Operations Center (SOC) with 24/7 coverage. They perform research and remediation. They have a separate team for phishing. Tha...
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. The ability to reverse damage caused by ransomware with minimal interruptions to...
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 that are very scalable, secure, and user-friendly. Cortex XDR by Palo Alto offers ...
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, applies behavioral-based endpoint protection and response, and includes risk-ba...
 

Also Known As

Binary Defense Vision, Binary Defense Managed Detection and Response, Binary Defense Managed Detection & Response
Cyvera, Cortex XDR, Palo Alto Networks Traps
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Securitas USA, Black Hills Energy, Lincoln Electric,The J.M. Smuckers Company, New York Community Bank, State of Connecticut, NCR
CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
Find out what your peers are saying about Huntress, CrowdStrike, SentinelOne and others in Managed Detection and Response (MDR). Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.