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Intercept X Endpoint vs VMware Carbon Black App Control comparison

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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...
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)
Intercept X Endpoint
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
110
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (15th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (13th), ZTNA (13th), Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (11th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (15th), Ransomware Protection (3rd)
VMware Carbon Black App Con...
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Application Control (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Intercept X Endpoint1.8%
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint6.5%
CrowdStrike Falcon5.7%
Other86.0%
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
Application Control Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Carbon Black App Control9.7%
ThreatLocker Zero Trust Platform15.7%
Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform13.1%
Other61.5%
Application Control
 

Q&A Highlights

TT
IT Manager at a wellness & fitness company with 51-200 employees
Dec 03, 2020
 

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.
AM
IT Head at Dee Development
Has struggled to detect major threats but has offered basic protection over time
Intercept X Endpoint could learn from CrowdStrike in terms of overall performance and filtering because performance is most important, especially these days as Windows is getting buggier and buggier, which puts a huge load on the PC, and even with the most advanced CPUs and everything in place, it still lags in performance in so many places, thanks to Windows' clumsy design of these collaboration suites that make it extremely heavy on PC's resources. The interface of Intercept X Endpoint is quite old-fashioned. The Sophos interfaces, including for Intercept X Endpoint, are quite bad actually; to be very honest, even in UTM boxes, they are not great at all. You can hardly see a very small portion of windows while it's creating the firewall rules, and we have been complaining about this for quite some time, but there hasn't been any improvement on those grounds. Intercept X Endpoint's anti-ransomware capabilities failed us during a bad attack, and just because of our own backup policies, we could restore our normal operations; otherwise, if we had to depend on this solution, we would have been long dead because the infection was so bad, it couldn't even detect the infection. Intercept X Endpoint cannot handle zero-day attacks; in my experience, last year, we had this major issue with a malware attack, and it happened just because of our backup policies that we were able to recover without any support from Sophos, which just told us they would charge us some 1 Crore in rupees. Intercept X Endpoint should improve their implementation; things will never be perfect for the new world. This new world is always facing new kinds of attacks and new ways to compromise the system. They need to learn fast, implement fast, and sometimes redesigning the solution is the solution—not just patchwork. There was a time we used to love Sophos because of its fresh design and innovative thought. In my experience, when technical companies are led by MBA professionals, they lose their shine on the technical part and become more dependent on target sales; it turns into a marketing-centric operation that loses the technical focus completely.
AS
Security Administrator at EJADA
We can isolate problem machines and limit their access
We use App Control to scan the network for virtual machines that have unauthorized applications. We can isolate the problem VMs and control application access.  More than two years. I rate Carbon Black App Control 10 out of 10 for stability. I rate App Control six out of 10 for scalability.…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cortex XDR is stable, offering high quality and reliable performance."
"The most valuable features are the fact that it was running in the background and it would intercept any weird stuff, and the fact that it would send things directly to the cloud for sandboxing. It's quite practical."
"I like that the product has behavior-based detection which offers many benefits over signature-based detection."
"The user interface of the solution is sophisticated and straightforward."
"It is a simple platform to use."
"Cortex is a very good total solution on the endpoints."
"Has great threat detection capabilities."
"The product has an intuitive dashboard."
"We use Sophos Intercept X for Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) in our organization."
"This is the best solution that we use and need."
"It is easy to interact with, and its cost is also good."
"Sophos Intercept X has a lot of excellent features."
"I like the way it goes beyond the office space, and being a cloud-based solution makes it very easy to manage your endpoints within the office, and in this time of COVID, you can also very effectively manage people who are working from home."
"Intercept X's smart prevention it's very good as so are its machine learning capabilities for troubleshooting channels and files."
"It is one of the best in terms of technicality."
"It provides a feature for scanning and analyzing endpoints, which is a value-add for our infrastructure. With the advancements in the Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), Sophos Intercept X analyzes an APT and the behavior of the endpoints. It then gives us a detailed dashboard with more information about the endpoints and their security and risk level. While deploying Sophos Intercept X, we identified a lot of vulnerability and risky endpoints that our previous solution didn't cover, which proved that this solution is the best."
"We have been dealing with VMware Carbon Black App Control for one year, and during this time we have already made sure that this is the best solution to protect our user machines and servers."
"We use App Control to scan the network for virtual machines that have unauthorized applications. We can isolate the problem VMs and control application access."
"The API integration is good."
"I use the console to check for threats and I find it to be very user-friendly."
"Carbon Black offers a total lockdown solution; it shows us the attacks that are being attempted against our infrastructure and how we are being protected."
"The visibility, reporting, and the ability to stop or prevent malicious or undesired applications from being installed are the most valuable features."
"Overall, this is a good product and one that I recommend."
"The visibility is valuable."
 

Cons

"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 server sometimes stops continuously to check things so it would be helpful to receive access updates or technical reasons."
"It's very time-consuming to log support issues and the people that answer the tickets aren't very knowledgeable."
"The solution should force customers to integrate with network traffic to see the full benefits of XDR."
"It's not an ideal choice for smaller businesses, as you need a minimum of 200 endpoints to even use the solution at all."
"Impact on system performance is horrible, adding a lot of delays for users."
"The configuration could be simplified. I would like to see better protection, specifically to protect email applications."
"Cortex XDR should have a lightweight agent, and the agent size should not be heavy."
"The support on offer isn't ideal. In terms of the support on offer, for example, if there was a zero-day kind of attack or something, the turnaround time that Sophos offers is not acceptable."
"I would like to have a built-in firewall, rather than having to integrate one."
"The pricing could be a bit lower to match the normal retail pricing."
"When we load Intercept X, it puts a load on the device. When it is scanning, it slows down the device. A system with basic specifications completely slows down till the scan is complete. They should improve this part."
"There is some issue with the reporting and refreshing information on resources that have been eliminated."
"I'm not clear on what features need improvement. Everything is mostly fine."
"Sophos Intercept X could improve on its setup process. They could make it easier to have a baseline set up for the system, or at least provide more understanding of what the baseline is when you first install it. This could be a matter of lack of training on my part, but it's difficult to receive training on solutions that are not Cisco. Cisco is the only vendor with classes or courses."
"The choices offered for the on-premises and cloud-based platforms are the reverse of each other, such as the one responsible for allowing or denying access."
"The reporting is not good and needs to be improved."
"I would like to see the addition of some more features that are in other, similar solutions."
"The initial setup is somewhat complex."
"Another issue is that even sometimes if you approve, for example, Adobe as a publisher, you say any product or anything that's from Adobe has to run. It generally runs, but especially in a large environment and with a lot of users, sometimes, due to some certification validation issues or some other issue, it might stop the process from running. Genuine processes like Adobe and Chrome can get blocked. so that needs to be improved."
"Carbon Black does not use the database for identifying the file, the fields, or malware."
"Its initial setup is very complex. We got help from their implementation team because if it is not set up properly, you can really hinder the operation of your environment and things won't execute or run."
"Its setup is very complex, and it requires guidance from the support team, but it is well worth the effort."
"I rate App Control six out of 10 for scalability."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It has a higher cost than other solutions, like CrowdStrike or Microsoft’s EDR tools, but it reduces the cost of our operations because it’s a new generation antivirus tool."
"Very costly product."
"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."
"It is cost-effective compared to similar solutions. It fits for the small businesses through to the big businesses."
"The pricing is a little high. It is per user per year."
"Cortex XDR’s pricing is very reasonable."
"I don't have any issues with the pricing. We are satisfied with the price."
"I don't like that they have different types of licenses."
"We were able to eliminate the ransomware using the one-month, full-featured trial license."
"You can pay monthly, but most of our customers choose annual subscriptions because they are less expensive."
"The pricing is average for software like this, but you can purchase additional services if you wish."
"The price of the solution is average compared to the market."
"One can pay for the license annually, or at two and five year intervals."
"I find the pricing to be a little bit expensive, although it is acceptable, for now."
"It is not very expensive but I don't have specific pricing details. The licensing is usually done on yearly basis."
"The price of this solution is a little high compared to competitors because they do not have a proper pricing structure."
"The pricing for this product is competitive and our customers who told us that often, Carbon Back is the cheaper solution."
"We pay a fee for support, which is renewed annually."
"Its price is reasonable and what is expected for these types of products."
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Answers from the Community

TT
IT Manager at a wellness & fitness company with 51-200 employees
Dec 3, 2020
Dec 3, 2020
Officially the answer is Intercept X and anti-virus from other mfgs. can co-exist on an endpoint. Carbon Black is a bit more than just AV, so I would get a free 30-day trial of Int X and try it on one endpoint.
2 out of 3 answers
BA
Sales and Mktg Manager at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
Dec 12, 2019
Officially the answer is Intercept X and anti-virus from other mfgs. can co-exist on an endpoint. Carbon Black is a bit more than just AV, so I would get a free 30-day trial of Int X and try it on one endpoint.
AL
President/Owner at LibreTech
Dec 13, 2019
I’m not sure but if you are using Sophos Intercept X I would suggest just adding the Sophos EDR component.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Construction Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Construction Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Outsourcing Company
16%
Computer Software Company
9%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

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 Business76
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise22
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Large Enterprise4
 

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 Crodwstrike Falcon compare with Sophos Intercept X?
I like that Crowdstrike Falcon allows me to easily correlate data between my firewalls. Its detection and machine lea...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Sophos Intercept X?
Intercept X Endpoint has some impact on the budget. It is quite costly when measuring Intercept X Endpoint's protecti...
What needs improvement with Sophos Intercept X?
Intercept X Endpoint can be improved in several ways. Currently, it is only available on the cloud, and having it ava...
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Also Known As

Cyvera, Cortex XDR, Palo Alto Networks Traps
Sophos Intercept X
CB Protection, Carbon Black CB Protection
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
Flexible Systems
Kaas Tailored, Core-Mark, Indeed, Hologic, Landmark Credit Union, Project Worldwide
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