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Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs Qualys Multi-Vector EDR 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

Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Net...
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
8th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
103
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (5th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (7th), Ransomware Protection (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (2nd)
Qualys Multi-Vector EDR
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
70th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Network Detection and Response (NDR) (28th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) category, the mindshare of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is 3.4%, down from 4.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Qualys Multi-Vector EDR is 0.3%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks3.4%
Qualys Multi-Vector EDR0.3%
Other96.3%
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
 

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.
reviewer1668453 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, Security Innovation at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
Provides contextual alerts and risk ratings on findings
It's kind of difficult to quantify areas for improvement. In the larger picture, one challenge is that the NDR space is very crowded today. I can mention half a dozen names just off the top of my head. There are at least 12 to 20 different players. All of them are well-known brand names, and it's difficult to compare them. They all claim to be giving you the same network difference capability: catching malware, dealing with all the minor taxonomy of attack, all that. Still, it's very difficult to compare them side by side because they all do things a little differently, and they all have different presentations and output. We haven't deployed it, so I can't give you what we felt about it exactly. But in the larger perspective, the critical feature is really giving a clear separation between a low, high, and medium criticality. You need a rating that is really true to the actual attack. There's one other capability we are evaluating them for, and it's for custom alerts detection. A lot of these products are trying to profile the threats that are already out there in the industry. They're very well known and published. Today, there are targeted acts being played against organizations, so you have to be sensitive to how your firewalls, protocols, and your HTTP are all operating. You might have some fine-tuned threats that are targeting you, and you should be able to build custom defenses. They should have some openness in terms of how you specify your threats. You get a standard library of threats. On top of it, every organization builds its own.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features are incident creation, policy-based protection, IP whitelisting, and device encryption. These are beneficial for endpoint and server security."
"The solution doesn't need a high level of technical training."
"I've found the solution to be highly scalable for enterprises."
"The solution allows us to make investigations. Other XDR solutions also provide similar capabilities but for investigation, Cortex XDR is better."
"When the pandemic started, Palo Alto came up with many solutions, which helped with the quick shift from on-premises to the cloud."
"The anti-exploit is impenetrable. We chose Traps because it is the only product that we were not able to get anything past."
"From a single pane of glass, you can easily manage all of your endpoints."
"The solution's stability is generally good."
"They can provide you very contextual alerts on if something bad is happening—coming into your network or going out of your network. As part of that, they gather a lot of threat intelligence and map your connections against that. The larger benefit is that they give you a risk rating on their findings."
 

Cons

"It is not easy to sell Cortex XDR, not because it isn't a good tool. Its marketing needs to be improved."
"There's an overall lack of features."
"Currently, we are monitoring all USB drives and ports but we would like to improve our device control capabilities."
"The price could be a little lower."
"The encryption is not up to the mark."
"While using Cortex, I noticed some aspects that could be improved, such as increasing the synchronization speed between XDR and Xnor."
"It's not an ideal choice for smaller businesses, as you need a minimum of 200 endpoints to even use the solution at all."
"The solution can never really be an on-premises solution based simply on the way it is set up. It needs metadata to run and improve. Having an on-premises solution would cut it off from making improvements."
"My challenge is actually comparing offerings from different vendors across a threat spectrum that is very large. We are talking about millions of threats. How are you confident that Blue Hexagon is catching all one million of them and Palo Alto is doing the same thing? They all have their strengths. Within that, Blue Hexagon might cover 990,000 of them. Palo Alto might cover another 990,000. It's a bit difficult to compare them and say, "Oh, are they catching the same 990,000?" I don't know."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its pricing is kind of in line with its competitors and everybody else out there."
"I am using the Community edition."
"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 price of the product is not very economical."
"I don't have any issues with the pricing. We are satisfied with the price."
"Cortex XDR is a costly solution."
"The price is on the higher side, but it's okay."
"Every customer has to pay for a license because it doesn't work with what you get from a managed services provider."
"It's difficult to state the setup cost. All the NDRs range anywhere between $500,000, plus or minus, to $2 million. There's a spread of pricing here, depending on who you are talking to. Obviously the major brand names want more money. They typically bundle it with their other offerings. With Cisco, for example, you don't just buy an NDR. So, typically it gets rolled into the cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Retailer
9%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business43
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise44
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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How is Cortex XDR compared with Microsoft Defender?
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Also Known As

Cyvera, Cortex XDR, Palo Alto Networks Traps
Blue Hexagon
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
Pacific Dental Services, Greenhill and Co, Heffernan Insurance Brokers
Find out what your peers are saying about CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Microsoft and others in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR). Updated: December 2025.
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