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Datto Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) vs Microsoft Defender for Endpoint comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 9, 2024

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 Detection and Response (EDR)
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
115
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (4th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (4th), Ransomware Protection (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (1st)
Datto Endpoint Detection an...
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
47th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Microsoft Defender for Endp...
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
212
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (1st), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (5th), Anti-Malware Tools (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) category, the mindshare of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is 3.7%, down from 3.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datto Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) is 1.1%, down from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is 5.6%, down from 10.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint5.6%
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks3.7%
Datto Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)1.1%
Other89.6%
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.
reviewer2406663 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at a computer software company with 11-50 employees
Effective risk response, easy deployment, and enhanced security
They use Datto EDR as part of the solutions that we supply Datto EDR has helped reduce overall security incident costs by fifteen percent. The ease of deployment has been good, and the responsiveness of the application to risks has been quite effective. The inclusion of web filtering would be…
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

"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 is a simple platform to use."
"Palo Alto is one of the tech vendors that always provides top-of-the-line products."
"It's a nice product that's stable and scalable."
"I recognize that Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is one of the best products in its category regarding capabilities."
"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."
"They have a new GUI which is just fantastic."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is easy to use and does not consume a lot of hardware resources."
"The most valuable feature of Datto EDR is the visibility of the endpoints."
"The insight that the solution provides is the most valuable aspect. The security scanning they do is excellent."
"Datto Endpoint Detection and Response is a perfect product for endpoint security."
"The ease of deployment has been good."
"It automatically detects intrusion and malware."
"It has Kusto Query Language (KQL), so we can use our own queries to find anything."
"This solution absolutely eliminated the need to look at multiple dashboards because we have one XDR."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is quite good. We haven't really experienced any issues with it."
"Because it has been integrated with the OS, we get the entire software inventories, and we even get access to the registries. Those are the primary features."
"This solution definitely increases our security posture."
"Microsoft Defender has been around for many years, and since Windows 10, they've really ramped it up, and it has gotten a lot better."
"The most valuable aspect is information, specifically the automatic investigation of packages."
 

Cons

"Traps doesn't work with McAfee. You need to remove McAfee to install Traps. This is very common, and its nothing that should be an issue. Some antivirus engines recognize Traps as an threat component, so maybe they need to shake hands somewhere."
"Data privacy is a matter of concern. You have to be careful with data privacy, it can be sensitive and Cortex can have most of your access."
"Technology evolves every day, so it would be nice if it gets more secure. It can also have more integration with other platforms."
"I think sometimes Cortex XDR agent automatically stops event capturing from the device, and then even the dashboard does not get any notifications from the agent."
"It'll help if customization was easier."
"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."
"It's more focused on network communication. If a customer wants to increase the level of protection and start working with documents, it's impossible to integrate these features into the system. It's more of a communication-oriented system than a content security-oriented system."
"Enhancing UI simplicity and playbook flexibility are areas that could benefit from more low-code automation options for smoother integrations."
"The inclusion of web filtering would be good."
"The solution should allow the automation of playbooks."
"The solution could improve by having more deployment methods."
"The deployment of the solution right now is terrible. We find it to be very bad. It could be improved enormously."
"ATP is a work in progress. To me, it is not a complete product."
"We would like more customization, actually."
"Defender's cloud integration could be improved."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is effective for validating work, but not ideal for investigations."
"We encountered some issues when we were trying to enable automatic updates from our group policy."
"Features like device inventory continue to lack essential workstation drill-downs showing the entire device information with the least effort."
"My main issue with the tool is that there are too many menus. This causes a steep learning curve for those without training or unfamiliar with Defender for Endpoint. From an end-user perspective, the solution is there on the machine and does its job; it works seamlessly. However, as a security professional dealing with it behind the scenes, the learning curve can be steep, but not too steep. Still, it has taken some of my analysts up to a month to get familiar with the product."
"It makes your Surface devices hot. It is resource-intensive. It strains your CPU, not more than other file scanners around, but it also does a lot more. When you are transmitting files or data, it is continuously scanning the traffic and analyzing it bit by bit to see what's going on, and that, of course, is costly in terms of CPU. It is CPU intensive, and if you are on battery, it drains your battery fast. That's the only drawback that it has."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing seems fair, and I do like the licensing model. You use wherever they are, and it is elastic."
"The price is on the higher side, but it's okay."
"Its pricing is kind of in line with its competitors and everybody else out there."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is quite an expensive solution."
"It is "expensive" and flexible."
"This is an expensive solution."
"The price of the solution could be reduced. I have customers that have voiced that the solution is good for the value but if I want to sell more of the solution the price reduction would help."
"When we first bought it, it was a bit expensive, but it was worth it. The licensing was straightforward."
"There is an annual license to use this solution. The price of the solution can be expensive depending on the company."
"Datto Endpoint Detection and Response is not an expensive solution."
"You do not need to pay any additional costs for antivirus and anti-malware solutions for endpoint protection."
"It is affordable and comes in the Office 365 bundle."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is more affordable compared to some other endpoint solutions."
"Defender doesn't cost that much. When you use Microsoft technology, you can start with the free version and see how much the technology helps your organization solve security problems before you use the subscription. They also do this pay-as-you-go model, so you only pay when you use it."
"The license for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is included in the license for the Microsoft Windows operating system."
"The subscription is part of Windows, so we don't have to pay anything extra for this product."
"There is no licensing fee."
"The pricing is competitive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Retailer
6%
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
No data available
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 Infocyte HUNT?
The price is quite low. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate it a four, meaning it is quite cheap.
What needs improvement with Infocyte HUNT?
The inclusion of web filtering would be good.
What is your primary use case for Infocyte HUNT?
They use Datto EDR as part of the solutions that we supply.
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Cyvera, Cortex XDR, Palo Alto Networks Traps
Infocyte HUNT
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
Check Point Software, PwC, Grant Thornton, AT&T, DHL, U.S. Department of Defense
Petrofrac, Metro CSG, Christus Health
Find out what your peers are saying about Datto Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) vs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.