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Malwarebytes Teams vs Microsoft Defender for Endpoint comparison

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 15, 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)
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
108
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (7th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (6th), Ransomware Protection (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (2nd)
Malwarebytes Teams
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
20th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Microsoft Defender for Endp...
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
213
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 March 2026, in the Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) category, the mindshare of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is 3.5%, down from 4.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Malwarebytes Teams is 2.1%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is 7.8%, down from 11.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint7.8%
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks3.5%
Malwarebytes Teams2.1%
Other86.6%
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.
reviewer2594097 - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Executive Officer at a wholesaler/distributor with 11-50 employees
Exceptional malware protection with regular updates and behavior-based detection
There are no built-in backups or integrated backup options, which could be an opportunity. The free version is effective, however, the paid version is pricey compared to it. Other customers have mentioned issues with false positives. It lacks enterprise-level management and more enterprise functionality. CrowdStrike and SentinelOne are much more enterprise-grade solutions. Malwarebytes has limited integration with cybersecurity tools and lacks enterprise integrations because it is not an enterprise product.
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

"The main benefit of using Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks while employing Palo Alto Firewall at the internet edge is that it improves security on our endpoint devices, integrating seamlessly with Palo Alto Firewalls to deliver comprehensive network, analyst, and security details all in a single dashboard, which allows us to manage everything from our network devices."
"Automation and playbooks have helped me significantly, as Cortex Xnor's playbooks predefine the workflow of the automation, such as response processes, alert triggering, and enriching the context, efficiently detecting and blocking malicious attacks with firewalls while eliminating workload and speeding responses for next-generation operations."
"They have a new GUI which is just fantastic."
"The normal protection was really effective, and we detected situations that if we didn't have Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks, it's highly likely that we would have been affected, but it protected the infrastructure."
"My advice for others looking into using Cortex is that it is very easy to use and very useful for the customer environment, whether it's a public or private one."
"The solution allows control over the user and his machine through Cortex XDR security policies."
"The initial setup isn't too bad."
"It integrates well into the environment."
"It is a stable solution."
"The behavior-based detection is very nice, and it combats zero-day threats by looking for anomalous behaviors."
"The pricing of the product is very good."
"The most valuable features of the solution are malware scanning and malware removal."
"Ten times a day, improved signatures will be downloaded, so it is very up-to-date in terms of malware experience."
"The central management of devices from different sites is a very good feature; this has made them much easier to manage."
"It is intuitive and easy to use. For the most part, it does a good job of catching things. It is good at stopping stuff. I did a couple of tests with a password cracker. I tried to load that on, and Malwarebytes didn't let me do that, which was pretty good. It has a rollback feature that I haven't seen with any other company. If one of your endpoints are hit with mass ransomware, you could actually roll it back. I watched a demo of them do that, and it was pretty sweet."
"Being able to cloud manage it from just a cloud login is valuable. We can get to it from anywhere, which is really helpful. The fact that we can remediate from the cloud console is one of our favorite features."
"It's really stable. I've used a lot of stuff, a lot of products, like ESET and Kaspersky. None of them are comparable with this one. This one is much better."
"The best part is that it is built into Windows, whether it is a server base or a desktop base, which gives more control over the operating system. Because Defender, the operating system, and the Office solution are by Microsoft, everything is working like hand-in-glove. Its administrative overhead is less because a desktop user has already got some experience of how to handle a Microsoft Defender notification or administer it."
"The fact that it's from Microsoft, you don't have many false positives, unlike products from other vendors might have."
"It's a very solid security system, and the advanced hunting and everything really lets you dive deep into things."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has been secure and there is zero maintenance required because it updates with Microsoft Windows."
"It does not make Windows slow, as compared to all of the third part antiviruses."
"Its simplicity is the most valuable. It also has very good integration. We like it."
"The threat hunting service is very useful for a security professional."
 

Cons

"The dashboard could use some significant improvement, just making it more useful with more information. It has a limited amount of information right now. It is customizable, but I'd love to see a better out-of-box dashboard."
"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."
"There are some false positives. What our guys would have liked is that it would have been easier to manipulate as soon as they found a false positive that they knew was a false positive. How to do so was not obvious. Some people complained about it. The interface, the ESM, is not user-friendly."
"Cortex XDR could be improved with more GUI features."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks could improve by offering remote management. It would be useful to look at the client's issue to fix it."
"It's not an ideal choice for smaller businesses, as you need a minimum of 200 endpoints to even use the solution at all."
"I would like to see improvement in the tool's user interface, particularly in the area of managing alerts and providing more reporting capabilities."
"The dashboard is the area that needs to improve so that we can have the ability to drill down without having to go elsewhere to verify results."
"I would like to see a little more detail in the log. So, when an event occurs, I'd like to know not just when it happened and on what device, but what activity was taking place on the machine at the time so that we can drill down. If we get a false positive, we have to do a lot of research and go back and forth with our end-users to know why it was a false positive. So, having a little more detail around detections and events would probably be my most asked feature."
"Every once in a while, it gets clobbered by updates from other places. I don't think this should happen."
"They can include advanced scanning and improve reporting. I scan malware on the pen drive. Some more reports need to be added for that. It should also provide better protection because we have a new version of the malware."
"They could come up with better reporting capabilities."
"My clients have frequently encountered some tech support scams where when you go to a particular website, it throws up a fake warning to you and states that you need to call this number."
"Overall, I haven't found any ways the solution lacks in features or usability."
"It would be better if updates could be downloaded, and deployed, on-premises to avoid low bandwidth causing issues."
"The interface could be improved. Currently, you need to really dig around to find the elements you need."
"Additional security would be beneficial."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is secure but when it comes to security all solutions could improve security."
"With regards to the interface, a challenge I found was that there was not enough documentation on how to tune it. I had to read multiple sources on the internet to learn how to configure the tool appropriately."
"The product itself does not necessarily need improvement, but the support and implementation of the product are the disaster cases."
"We would like more customization."
"In India at least, it seems to be a bit more expensive than other options."
"The UI for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint needs to be better. Integration with client dashboards is also lacking in this product, e.g. client dashboards shouldn't just be viewable from the cloud, because when the client's computer is offline, you won't be able to see the client dashboard."
"On the Mac OS platform, there is no parity between Windows and Mac OS. The solution is very feature-rich and very well-integrated into Windows, and I guess baked into Windows 10 and Windows 11. Whereas, on the Mac OS platform, there is still some work there to give it a more feature-reach platform."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Traps pays for itself within the first 16 months of a three-year subscription. This is attributed to OPEX savings, as security teams spent less time trying to identify and isolate malware for analysis as a result of a reduction in malware incidents, false positives, and breach avoidance."
"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 was fine."
"We pay about $50,000 USD per year for a bundle that includes Cortex XDR."
"Its pricing is kind of in line with its competitors and everybody else out there."
"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."
"Every customer has to pay for a license because it doesn't work with what you get from a managed services provider."
"Cortex XDR's pricing is ok."
"Malwarebytes is a cost-effective product."
"It is expensive."
"The platform pricing is competitive with other antivirus products."
"I believe the retail price is between $40 and $50 per copy."
"I rate the tool's pricing a five out of ten."
"The licensing is per seat, with clients being a little less expensive than servers. If we need more licenses, we can accomplish that within a day. As Malwarebytes adds new features to their product, such as DNS filtering and a patching module, they want to charge us more even though we're a premium user, which isn't ideal."
"The cost may be something in the ballpark of $20-25 a year per computer."
"It is really expensive. We've got between 30 and 40 licenses every year, and for the number of licenses that we have, we're finding that Malwarebytes on average costs between $900 and $1,000 more per year than comparable options. We're paying about $3,300 per year for these licenses. There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fee."
"There is no license needed, the solution comes with Microsoft Windows."
"The base price for an E5 license, which includes Enterprise Mobility + Security E5, is $57 per user per month."
"The licensing fee is a function of your Office 365 license. The feature set you get is a function of the license as well. There is probably an E2 version, an E3 version, and an E5 version. There are several versions, and not all features are the same. So, you might want to check what features you're expecting because you might get shocked. If you only have an E3 license, the capability isn't the same."
"You just pay Windows 10 prices, then you have antivirus software. As a price comparison, Defender's costs are very low."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint comes with Windows 10, and it's free. But for you to be able to manage it in the cloud and use the console, you need to have either an Office 365 E5 subscription or a Microsoft M365 subscription. You need to buy an extra license."
"The price is higher than others because it is doing more than what the others are doing."
"The licensing costs for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint are reasonable."
"Given our extensive Microsoft licensing, transitioning to Defender for Endpoint did not affect licensing costs."
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Top Industries

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

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business44
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise47
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business81
Midsize Enterprise40
Large Enterprise95
 

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 do you like most about Malwarebytes?
Ten times a day, improved signatures will be downloaded, so it is very up-to-date in terms of malware experience.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Malwarebytes?
I really hate the automatic rebilling without officially confirming it with me. It's an annoyance and they should at ...
What needs improvement with Malwarebytes?
It takes up too much space when it's trying to run in the background.
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?
I'm not too familiar with the pricing, setup costs, and licensing for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint; it wasn't some...
 

Also Known As

Cyvera, Cortex XDR, Palo Alto Networks Traps
No data available
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
Knutson Construction
Petrofrac, Metro CSG, Christus Health
Find out what your peers are saying about Malwarebytes Teams vs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.