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Malwarebytes Teams vs Microsoft Defender for Endpoint comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

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)
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
110
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (6th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (5th), Ransomware Protection (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (1st)
Malwarebytes Teams
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
28th
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
7.0
Number of Reviews
213
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (4th), Anti-Malware Tools (1st), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (3rd), Microsoft Security Suite (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) category, the mindshare of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is 3.6%, down from 3.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Malwarebytes Teams is 1.8%, down from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is 7.0%, down from 10.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint7.0%
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks3.6%
Malwarebytes Teams1.8%
Other87.6%
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

"Stability is a primary factor, and then there's the ease of distribution and policy management."
"Traps has drastically reduced our endpoint attack surface via advanced detection capabilities, sandboxing of never before seen programs, and by drastically limiting where executables can launch in the first place."
"If you are looking to deploy a security solution as a whole, this is a good option."
"I have found the solution to be very easy in respect of the integration and configurable."
"Cortex is a very good total solution on the endpoints."
"The most valuable for us is the correlation feature."
"One of the main benefits of the solution is its intelligence to correlate the events into an incident."
"The initial setup is pretty easy."
"The dashboard actually is good and it is simple."
"It is a stable solution."
"The product keeps our company safe."
"The technical support services are good."
"The most valuable features of the solution are malware scanning and malware removal."
"We have a small IT team, and being able to manage even a small fleet of devices that are out in the field and being able to respond and remediate really quickly from the cloud-based console has been really helpful for us."
"We don't have to spend any time remediating bad things happening: Not viruses nor ransomware."
"The protection is really good with Malwarebytes. It's also user friendly and quite easy to set up."
"The solution's latest features for threat analysis are updated to provide us with future protection against the latest threats worldwide."
"This is a really good product, it's user-friendly and offers us safety and security."
"I would recommend this solution to others if they don't have many third-party tools."
"A few years ago, when I was using a different product, I was affected by a virus that destroyed everything. Since using Microsoft Defender, I have not had this kind of problem."
"The integration of Defender, Security Center, and the Microsoft compliance score, is the feature we use most to share the results with our clients and to create a roadmap together."
"The solution is highly scalable."
"We found that because the endpoint devices are based on Microsoft Windows devices and Windows Defender is integrated with the foundation and the core layer, it makes it more integrated and more agile in terms of responding to any security threats or changes or development."
"One of the valuable features of the solution is the small updates that keep my machine relatively clean from any infections."
 

Cons

"The downside to the solution is that there are a large number of false positives."
"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."
"We have found that there are times Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks does not detect some of the viruses, we have to use another protection solution called Kaspersky."
"The installation should be easier and the Palo Alto pre-sales and sales teams should have more information on the product because they don't know what they are selling."
"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."
"Dashboards do not allow everyone to see what's happening."
"If Palo Alto reduces the pricing slightly for their products, it would make them more scalable in markets such as India and globally for cybersecurity."
"The solution needs better reports. I think they should let the customer go in and customize the reports."
"This solution reports far too many false positives!"
"The EPP solution lacks the sophisticated artificial intelligence required for automating reports and letting you know about things in real-time. It stops a suspicious activity in real-time, but it doesn't let you know in real-time. You have to look at a report, and then you find out that something is wrong. You have to manually kick off a scan. With the Advanced EDR solutions, Malwarebytes has the ability to alert you in real-time, but they still don't do automatic remediation or quarantining of devices. That is something that you still have to do manually. So, the endpoint protection piece, which is just like their basic endpoint protection, lacks AI. For the advanced detection and response piece, there is an add-on that comes with it, but it still doesn't go far enough in terms of automatic remediation of viruses. It won't separate that virus from your network if something happens. You have to manually go there and do it."
"Every once in a while, the product gets clobbered. It's not just one thing. So, it could be a Microsoft update or a Kaspersky update."
"The product has major problems in almost every facet of setup and use including setup, configuration, lack of functionality, lack of stability, false positives, questionable reporting, inability to protect from randsomeware and poor technical support and development."
"They could come up with better reporting capabilities."
"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."
"I would like to see integration with other vendors going forward."
"I really hate the automatic rebuilding without even asking. It's just an annoyance that they should at least ask me, like a month before they bill me."
"Microsoft Windows Defender doesn't have a game mode."
"Integration with third-party vendors could be better. It would be better if it integrates with other protection solutions or other products outside of Microsoft."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint can have more options and more AI capabilities in the future, because everything keeps changing."
"We encountered some issues when we were trying to enable automatic updates from our group policy."
"They're in the process of pulling more things together. They can continue with the integrations and provide a better way of seeing the impact of security changes, especially on the endpoint side. Before we actually flip the switch, we should be able to see the impact of security changes on the business or business applications. It would prevent breaking any business applications."
"Monitoring can always be better, onboarding can be a little bit faster, log collection could be easier, they could streamline the dashboard. They could maybe split it up into different workspaces and have the ability to segment groups a little bit more."
"It is inexpensive but could be cheaper like anything else."
"Sometimes it is a little lacking, but for the most part, they are able to provide exactly what I need."
 

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."
"It has reasonable pricing for the use cases it provides to the company."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is an expensive solution."
"When we first bought it, it was a bit expensive, but it was worth it. The licensing was straightforward."
"It's about $55 per license on a yearly basis."
"Every customer has to pay for a license because it doesn't work with what you get from a managed services provider."
"This is an expensive solution."
"The pricing seems fair, and I do like the licensing model. You use wherever they are, and it is elastic."
"The platform pricing is competitive with other antivirus products."
"I rate the tool's pricing a five out of ten."
"I believe the retail price is between $40 and $50 per copy."
"Its cost is around $60 a machine. The cost of the total solution for 250 people is about $8,500 a year. If we add EDR to it, it will bring that cost up to about $15,000. The cost for Carbon Black is about $25,000, which is $10,000 more, but you get all AI functions with it."
"We expect to pay $1,000 USD a month, depending on the number of users."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price and ten is a high price, I rate the product's pricing a seven."
"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."
"Its licensing is annual. There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fee."
"The price of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as ClowdStrike."
"AV solutions are pretty expensive because they are necessary, not just for protection, but many businesses need them to comply with regulatory bodies and receive accreditation. We recently purchased an E5 license, which gives us access to the entire Microsoft suite. I would say the pricing is competitive; most tools of this kind are similarly priced. There are minor differences between the competitors, but they aren't spectacularly different. Defender for Endpoint makes sense because all our solutions are in the same place, paid for with a single license. The subscription price is around £50 per user per month, though it may have increased slightly."
"Most people don't realize M365/E5 licenses are an amazing deal. They think "Oh, it's expensive," and I'll ask, "Compared to what?" If you don't have it you will have to buy licenses for multiple products to fill the same security space that you would have gotten with the Microsoft product. Go figure out how much it costs you per product, per user, and then come back and tell me how things add up financially."
"It is within the same range as other products. It is not too expensive, and it is also not cheap. Its price can be better, but, well, it is Microsoft."
"Microsoft has different plans for buying this product. The price depends on the configuration of the full set of products that you buy and on the licensing program in your contract."
"If you don't purchase the advanced threat protection then there is no additional charge."
"It is an expensive solution. It would be nice if it could be included with the Microsoft Office package."
"There are different licenses, such as E3 and E5."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
11%
University
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business45
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise48
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business82
Midsize Enterprise43
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?
We have been discussing pricing, setup cost, and licensing, and we are currently on an E3. We are discussing going to...
 

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: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.