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BlackBerry Cylance Cybersecurity vs Microsoft Defender for Endpoint comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 2026

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
6.8
Number of Reviews
115
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (5th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (4th), Ransomware Protection (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (1st)
BlackBerry Cylance Cybersec...
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
32nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.6
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
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) (5th), Anti-Malware Tools (1st), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (3rd), Microsoft Security Suite (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) category, the mindshare of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is 3.9%, up from 3.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of BlackBerry Cylance Cybersecurity is 1.6%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is 6.7%, down from 10.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint6.7%
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks3.9%
BlackBerry Cylance Cybersecurity1.6%
Other87.8%
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.
Sooraj Makkancherrry - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Operations Manager at Philips
Doesn't have daily updates, which is important for healthcare IT
I face challenges with the exclusion policy - it still scans folders we told it not to, causing issues. When we contact support, they tell us to update the latest agent, but we can't do that immediately due to medical device protocols and validation testing. I wish support would try to understand our issues better instead of giving this standard response. The machine learning feature they use often tells us to upgrade the agent or add things to the exclusion list, which isn't unacceptable. It's a very good and new technology as a tool and antivirus. But sometimes, it doesn't work properly with our medical devices and products, quarantining files it shouldn't even after we add them to exclusions. This is tricky for us.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We have found in our test Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks to be a very good tool."
"The tool's use cases are relevant to security."
"Technical support is the best in class, in my opinion, because they have invested heavily in research and development."
"In one single alert, we are getting the network telemetry, endpoint telemetry, email security telemetry, and proxy telemetry all in one single ticket, making it very easy."
"Cortex is a very good total solution on the endpoints."
"Previously, we had to install endpoint protection per machine and then scan and update, but Cortex XDR basically does that centrally and predictably, so we have more time to do day-to-day work rather than spend time chasing those endpoints."
"The multi-layered approach to the product gives you confidence that it will stop exploits, ransomware, worms, or viruses from compromising endpoints, essentially providing peace of mind."
"The product is very good, it has caught a lot of exploits that most products would not."
"The initial endpoint cost may seem a little high (~$55/device/year), but when you look at the total peace of mind that the solution of Cylance endpoint protection provides, with no reboots for updates, and negligible performance impact, it is well worth it."
"The most functional item that we use is the process to turn off the false flags that it causes."
"My advice to someone considering this solution is that it's a popular product and you should really go for it."
"I find the actual overall endpoint malware protection the most valuable feature of CylancePROTECT."
"CylancePROTECT works really well with the way we work."
"CylancePROTECT works on AI technology, is always up to date, and uses very few resources on your devices."
"The stability is perfect, and it is leaps and bounds beyond our previous solution by McAfee."
"Has good RAM capacity for the power I need"
"The best thing I like about it is its interaction with the other Defender products. It provides the ability to push telemetry up. It gives me endpoint visibility and allows me to take automated actions."
"The initial setup is not difficult or complex; it's very simple and straightforward."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is useful for the protection of your business information and threat prevention."
"I would highly recommend Microsoft Defender Antivirus for an individual looking to protect their endpoints."
"One of the valuable features of the solution is the small updates that keep my machine relatively clean from any infections."
"What the Defender platform does is that it reduces the size of the haystack, and it'll say that the needle is over here."
"Its real-time security is the most valuable."
"The investigation aspect is the most useful. It's user friendly and has a good user interface."
 

Cons

"Additionally, I think the price is very high, and if it can be adjusted, I believe it will be a very good solution."
"We had a problem with getting our older endpoints up to date, but their newest updates have been really good. I've been pleased with it in terms of what our needs are. It's doing what we want it to do."
"There are some default policies which sometimes affect our applications and cause them to run around. In the hotel industry, we use a different type of data versus Oracle and SQL. By default, there are some policies which stop us from running properly. Because of this, the support level is also not that strong. We have to wait to get a results."
"There are some third-party solutions that are difficult to integrate with, which is something that can be improved."
"It would be good to have a better way to search for a file within the UI."
"Every 30 or 40 days, there's a new version and we need to go and make sure our customer's laptops are upgraded."
"If he is using a smaller company, he can depend on some other tools because Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is a bit expensive."
"Fine-tuning the detection policy requires experience because the policy is very complex in Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks, and we get high false positive alerts."
"It was not effective. There were a lot of false positives, even when we use Adobe, and everybody uses Adobe, which is not a threat."
"The security scripting needs improvement. It needs deeper security for scripting."
"An area for improvement in CylancePROTECT is its pricing, as it's a bit costly."
"I would not rate this solution in the top five for things like presenting information, or ease of use."
"The product must make the interface a little more user-friendly."
"​Work on the math model. We are catching a lot of false positives, which gets to be a pain at the start of a deployment."
"We would like to see secure integration and multi-factor authentication to be able to access the administration dashboard."
"The problem is, for me, sometimes it creeps into the computers and into the servers that we want to get running."
"The solution has minimal customization options, especially compared to Mandiant, so we want to see more scope for customization. A single portal for customization would also be a welcome addition."
"Microsoft Defender could be improved with features more like the McAfee ePO. It would be better if I had a console to get all the information for my endpoints. Maybe this is too much for it, but it would be better if it could handle those non-signature-based malicious codes or viruses."
"The time it takes to restore the application could be improved. It has a lot of dependencies. It's not like the Microsoft security that comes with the OS. Updating through the command prompt, most of the time, it takes some time to download some of these dependencies."
"The initial support process can be lacking as first-line support is sometimes not well-versed technically, resulting in repeated exchanges to finally engage a knowledgeable support person."
"I'm not too sure of its current capabilities, but I'm pretty sure they are doing a good job on Windows and Mac. However, I'm not sure whether they covered Linux. If I remember correctly, Microsoft Defender didn't have anything proper on Linux back then, but if they have improved it from that aspect, it would already be ticking all the boxes."
"I would like to have additional features such as DNS lookup, which would help for detecting malicious sites."
"The product should reduce updates since it is hard to keep up."
"Defender's cloud integration could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is "expensive" and flexible."
"Cortex XDR’s pricing is very reasonable."
"I feel it is fairly priced."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is an expensive solution."
"We pay about $50,000 USD per year for a bundle that includes Cortex XDR."
"The return on investment is from the user side because we have seen the performance of it increase the delivery time of the product if we are using too many web-based and on-premise applications. In indirect ways, we saw the return of investment in terms of performance and user satisfaction increase."
"The pricing seems fair, and I do like the licensing model. You use wherever they are, and it is elastic."
"The price of the product is not very economical."
"The tool is not that expensive."
"The price is reasonable for us at the moment. I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten."
"We would just add more if there are new users, but right now you just need one license for per user."
"Review closely how many endpoints you actually need before buying into a pricing level. Deal and deal with the VAR of your choice."
"CylancePROTECT's pricing is reasonable, at about €18 per user, per year."
"The product cost is about $5, per user, per month."
"CylancePROTECT is worth the money, but I'm not sure of its exact price. I can't remember off the top of my head."
"The license for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is included in the license for the Microsoft Windows operating system."
"The solution is free with Windows."
"As we operate in the educational sector, we are eligible for an educational discount."
"The E5 license is the one that I recommend because it comes with Cloud App Security, which is a good thing to have on top of Microsoft Defender."
"The solution is free and comes with Windows."
"I recently switched from education to private business, and all I can say is that private business licensing from Microsoft is not cheap until you hit certain quantities or scale. That does not mean that it is not comparable to other industries. It is similar pricing, but it is still crazy to me how much you pay for a client. I feel it is high, but it is in line with other vendors."
"You just pay Windows 10 prices, then you have antivirus software. As a price comparison, Defender's costs are very low."
"Even if you are not registered as a not-for-profit, the offering that they have is definitely worth consideration. This is in the sense that the E5 stack just gives you so many benefits. You get your entire productivity suite through Microsoft 365 apps. You get all your security and identity protection. You get the Defender for Endpoint and Defender for Identity. You get the cloud access security broker as well. You get Azure Active Directory Premium P2, which gives you so many good things that you can configure and deploy. You don't have to configure them on day one, but you have access to so many different tools that will protect your data, security, endpoints, and identities that you could build out a security strategy 18 months long, and slowly work your way through it, based on what you have available to you through your license."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise54
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise14
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business82
Midsize Enterprise45
Large Enterprise96
 

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,...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Blackberry Protect?
The price is reasonable for us at the moment. I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.
What needs improvement with Blackberry Protect?
I face challenges with the exclusion policy - it still scans folders we told it not to, causing issues. When we conta...
What is your primary use case for Blackberry Protect?
I am using CylancePROTECT as an active learning algorithm. We installed it on almost 20,000 servers and virtual machi...
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...
 

Also Known As

Cyvera, Cortex XDR, Palo Alto Networks Traps
Blackberry Protect
Microsoft Defender ATP, Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection, MS Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender Antivirus
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
Panasonic, Noble Energy, Apria Healthcare Group Inc., Charles River Laboratories, Rovi Corporation, Toyota, Kiewit
Petrofrac, Metro CSG, Christus Health
Find out what your peers are saying about BlackBerry Cylance Cybersecurity vs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.