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CrowdStrike Falcon vs Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 11, 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
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
118
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (4th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (5th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (4th), Ransomware Protection (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (1st)
CrowdStrike Falcon
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
173
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (3rd), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (2nd)
Microsoft Defender External...
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Attack Surface Management (ASM) (13th), Microsoft Security Suite (33rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
CrowdStrike Falcon5.7%
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint6.5%
SentinelOne Singularity Endpoint4.5%
Other83.3%
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
Attack Surface Management (ASM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management3.0%
HackerOne3.9%
Bitsight3.5%
Other89.6%
Attack Surface Management (ASM)
 

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.
JW
Senior Security Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Centralized endpoint protection has strengthened compliance and accelerated incident response
There are a number of areas that I only touch a handful of times, but when I get in there, I realize why I don't do that. The main area would be within the support area. The support bot is not really as smart as you would expect it, especially in this day and age of LLM and other capabilities that I know CrowdStrike Falcon is already capable of doing. Additionally, I would appreciate a little bit more easy to read insights of some of the dashboards or maybe manipulation of the dashboards. It is still a little cumbersome to build custom dashboards and it's not as intuitive as you would think. Documentation is abysmal and needs to be improved dramatically. I know that there's a big effort to do this, however, even the new effort is honestly worse than it was before. Those are definitely major areas of improvement, just more in the usability of the features.
AndyChan3 - PeerSpot reviewer
General manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Enhanced visibility and exposes vulnerabilities but needs more integration
I am currently in the pilot stage of implementing Microsoft External Attack Surface Management (EASM). My organization is transitioning to a comprehensive track of Microsoft solutions, and we will move to full-scale production in another year, maybe Microsoft External Attack Surface Management…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"From the Palo Alto side, whatever they buy, they integrate that really well into their integration suite, and that makes a massive difference."
"The ability to kind of stitch everything together and see the actual complete picture is very useful. I guess you'd call it a playbook. Some people call it the forensics analysis of what was happening on particular endpoints when they detected some malicious behavior, and what transpired before that to cause that. It is also very user friendly. The way they have done everything and integrated all the solutions that they've purchased over the years to make it a very seamless, effective product is very good. One thing about Palo Alto is that they take the products or services that they purchase and make them seamless for the end user as compared to some companies that purchase other companies and then just kind of have their products off to the side or keep different interfaces. Palo Alto doesn't do that."
"The dashboard is customizable."
"It is a simple platform to use."
"From a single pane of glass, you can easily manage all of your endpoints."
"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."
"It'll not slow down your system when compared to others."
"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 solution can scale easily."
"Without CrowdStrike, our environment is risky for the developers. As it is now, we have not had any security issues for two years."
"We have signed up for Falcon Complete, which is their completely managed service, and this has done nothing but paid dividends since we have rolled it out."
"CrowdStrike Falcon has done an excellent job at detecting breaches; it has allowed us to stay in business and kept our systems up while multiple partners and service providers have been taken down by ransomware and other cyberattacks."
"The most valuable feature is the activity dashboard because it gives you a holistic view of your environment from a security standpoint."
"Using CrowdStrike Falcon has changed the way my security team detects, investigates, and responds to threats because it is much easier to use than any tool I have used before."
"The most valuable feature is its threat analysis."
"Cyberattack detection is very good, we use it for detecting different vulnerabilities, such as ransomware, virus, and malware, and it is a good product today when compared to Symantec that we used previously."
"It seems to be better at protecting from cyberattacks."
"Microsoft External Attack Surface Management helps improve the visibility of my exposed vulnerabilities and provides an overview of my security posture across the globe."
 

Cons

"I would like to see some additional features related to email protection included."
"Based on our experience so far, its implementation is quite complex."
"The product's pricing needs improvement. They could provide more discounts. Additionally, the dashboard and control panel could be enhanced."
"Cortex XDR could improve its sales support team, including better commission structures and referral programs."
"It would be good if they could make an exception for applications. Sometimes, it can be a bit of a challenge to make exceptions for certain applications that have been used as rogue."
"It's not an ideal choice for smaller businesses, as you need a minimum of 200 endpoints to even use the solution at all."
"If you compare it to SentinelOne, which has more functionalities and detection capabilities on an open platform, the pricing on SentinelOne is far more reasonable and cheaper than Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks."
"This product has not improved my organization - in fact, we are in the process of moving back to another product as a result of Cortex's horrible impact on system performance."
"I would like to see equal support across all versions. Aside from that, I would say most of the features are there."
"Basically, they don't cover legacy OS or applications. That's the only issue we're concerned about."
"Too many false positives."
"This solution lacks basic functionality, such as being able to perform on-demand scanning."
"The price is too high. When we are reaching a new renewal, management always asks what's going on in the market."
"The overall cost of CrowdStrike Falcon could be reduced."
"It would be nice if they did have some sort of Active Directory tie-in, whether that be Azure or on-prem. Sometimes, it is difficult for us to determine if we are missing any endpoints or servers in CrowdStrike. We honestly don't have a great inventory, but it would be nice if CrowdStrike had a way to say this is everything in your environment, Active Directory-wise, and this is what doesn't have sensors. They try to do that now with a function that they have built-in, but I have been unsuccessful in having it help us identify what needs a sensor. So, better visibility of what doesn't have a sensor in our environment would be helpful."
"We struggle to get specialized resources from CrowdStrike in a few cases."
"Further integration across different Microsoft products would be an improvement."
"The integration is not as seamless compared to competitors like Palo Alto."
"With Microsoft, support is always crazy, it's not easy to get support."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Very costly product."
"It's the most expensive solution, but features-wise, it's quite strong. It's very good for protection, so the results are very good in the case of protection. I would rate it a two out of ten in terms of pricing."
"I don't like that they have different types of licenses."
"The price is on the higher side, but it's okay."
"It is "expensive" and flexible."
"When we first bought it, it was a bit expensive, but it was worth it. The licensing was straightforward."
"The tool's price is moderate."
"I don't have any issues with the pricing. We are satisfied with the price."
"The tool is a little bit expensive compared to other products, but I think it's okay owing to its quality."
"The other administrator and I can log in to check the exact details of what happened, what was running, and what caused the detection. We know exactly what was happening on the end users PC and we can tell if it's something that we actually need or something that's malicious."
"CrowdStrike Falcon's price is good."
"Purchasing the product through the AWS Marketplace is just a click away. Since we were using the on-premise version of the product, we continued on the cloud by purchasing it through the AWS Marketplace."
"CrowdStrike Falcon can be more expensive than some competitors, and its base price doesn't cover every feature."
"The cost is usually a challenge in the industry. I think we pay around sixty-eight dollars."
"The solution's pricing is great for us."
"There is an annual license required to use this solution."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Construction Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
13%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business47
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise55
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business58
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise83
No data available
 

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,...
How does Crowdstrike Falcon compare with Darktrace?
Both of these products perform similarly and have many outstanding attributes. CrowdStrike Falcon offers an amazing u...
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...
Is Crowdstrike Falcon better than Trend Micro Deep Security?
I like that Crowdstrike allows me to easily correlate data between my firewalls. What’s most useful for my needs is t...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management?
Further integration across different Microsoft products would be an improvement. Introduction of more AI automation i...
What is your primary use case for Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management?
I am currently in the pilot stage of implementing Microsoft External Attack Surface Management (EASM). My organizatio...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Cyvera, Cortex XDR, Palo Alto Networks Traps
CrowdStrike Falcon XDR, CrowdStrike Falcon Threat Intelligence, CrowdStrike Identity Protection, CrowdStrike Falcon Surface, CrowdStrike Falcon Platform
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
Information Not Available
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Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, SentinelOne, CrowdStrike and others in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP). Updated: September 2026.
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