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Microsoft Defender for Endpoint vs Rapid7 InsightIDR 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)
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)
Rapid7 InsightIDR
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
34th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
33
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (24th), User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) (11th), Threat Deception Platforms (4th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (19th)
 

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 Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is 5.6%, down from 10.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Rapid7 InsightIDR is 1.3%, up from 1.1% 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%
Rapid7 InsightIDR1.3%
Other89.4%
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.
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.
Prajwal Chougale - PeerSpot reviewer
System Analyst at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Centralized threat hunting has improved alert accuracy and simplifies incident investigations
I would say there are two areas for improvement: the reporting dashboard that provides insights or reports weekly or monthly lacks detailed information about how logs are being ingested. While the details are there, they could be more concise and easier to understand for any level of authority. The second area is alert tuning; compared to Microsoft Sentinel, Rapid7 InsightIDR provides fewer alerts with more static alert functionality and lacks dynamic alerting exposures. There could be improvements to learn from past alert activities for more dynamic alert configurations. These two areas are the main areas for improvement; everything else is good.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is that you can select remote access of any machine for sandboxing."
"Cortex XDR alerts us on the dashboard when there's a threat, which allows us to restrict that user and helps secure our infrastructure."
"I don't have to do much monitoring with it; I don't have to have anybody manually looking at this, it gives us reports, and it lets us know if something needs to be addressed, and we can easily address it."
"The product's initial setup phase is very easy."
"The most valuable aspect of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks for me is its integration with AI detection, where we get to know the behavioral detection based on users, traffic patterns, and different services that we consume."
"The information the dashboard provides is very clear."
"It is an easy-to-use tool."
"It is easy to use."
"The feature I like the most about Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is that it's built into Microsoft; the ASR rules have really secured our endpoints."
"The stability is great, it just keeps getting more and more stable and as it matures it's going to be very good."
"We can react to threats faster and stop them from spreading from one machine to another. It protects from suspicious email attachment downloads. It will lock down the SOC and the workstations."
"Defender for Endpoint provides good visibility into threats and has favorable threat intelligence."
"It's an enterprise solution that provides a centralized console and it supports all the platforms that we use, including Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, and Android."
"I like that it's easy to deploy because it already comes with Windows 10. Overall, it has all the features that we need. Easy to deploy, comes with updates, and comes with Windows updates. You don't have to really manage or update the signature."
"When it comes to technical support, I have found Microsoft to be outstanding."
"Threat intelligence is one of the most valuable features in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint."
"The platform offers unlimited storage and agent-based solutions."
"It is a very stable solution."
"​​User behavioral analytics allows us to pinpoint abnormal or suspicious behavior among millions of events every day."
"It improved my organization by building a security alerting program."
"I like the tool's user analysis feature."
"The web interface is great — very useful and user-friendly."
"The alerting to drive investigations and remediation has been its most valuable feature, plus the ability to quickly search multiple logs makes investigations easier."
"The technical support is a solid 10 out of 10 as they take the time to answer any questions or problems which may arise in a reasonable time frame."
 

Cons

"Impact on system performance is horrible, adding a lot of delays for users."
"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."
"Cortex XDR could be improved with more GUI features."
"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."
"We had a problem with getting our older endpoints up to date, but their newest updates have been really good. I've been pleased with it in terms of what our needs are. It's doing what we want it to do."
"The solution should offer more dashboards and they should be better customized."
"Basically, they don't provide customer support tools just to investigate the logs."
"Palo Alto Networks Cortex XDR does not detect malicious activity like in other anti-virus solutions like Trend Micro and Windows with Cisco."
"There is room to improve the security of the solution."
"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. Nowadays, anti-virus protection doesn't really have to be planned as overall protection for your environment in terms of security. There are really different avenues that bad actors can take to wreak havoc on your machine."
"The time it takes to restore the application could be improved. It has a lot of dependencies. It's not like the Microsoft security that comes with the OS. Updating through the command prompt, most of the time, it takes some time to download some of these dependencies."
"Microsoft Defender in the basic form is not very useful for managing the security environment. The free version is not capable of covering the needs of centralized management, EDR, and behavioral analysis. If you don't have the commercial version, you can't have centralized management and set up the policies and other things. Each client is a standalone installation, which is not useful for security in an enterprise model."
"They should come up with pre-built inner workflows."
"Microsoft support could be more knowledgeable."
"The pricing could be a bit better."
"The deployment of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint on Windows 10 is not quite so straightforward. This could be made easier."
"One thing that springs to mind is easier API integration with ITSMs. We are evaluating a new ITSM and I would like to have InsightIDR create a ticket when an attack is identified, and the ticket would be closed in InsightIDR when the ITSM resolution is completed. This would take out the "single point of failure" we currently have, if the email recipient is somehow absent, in recording the risk appetite for the incident and the actions taken to mitigate or not."
"I'd like to see a mobile application included and some feature related to the generality of segregation for internal users that access the application."
"Inability to get access to compliance reports within the solution."
"Needs a better ability to customize the check within the console."
"The integration capabilities of the solution have certain shortcomings where improvements are required."
"Personally, I feel it would greatly benefit from more supported log sources."
"The solution needs improvement in threat intelligence. Increasing the depth of intelligence to help users understand more about threats is a possibility. My suggestion is to expand access to other websites or resources."
"I would like the ability to adjust the threshold of certain existing alerts. Currently the only option is to change the notifications or create my own alert."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cortex XDR's pricing is ok."
"It has reasonable pricing for the use cases it provides to the company."
"It is cost-effective compared to similar solutions. It fits for the small businesses through to the big businesses."
"It's about $55 per license on a yearly basis."
"Very costly product."
"The cost of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is $55 to $90 USD per endpoint per month."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is an expensive solution."
"Every customer has to pay for a license because it doesn't work with what you get from a managed services provider."
"The solution is free with Windows."
"Microsoft Defender ATP is expensive."
"When customers haven't deployed the solution and don't have licenses, it can be expensive to start from scratch."
"The license cost is around $35 per machine, which is not expensive compared to other products."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is more affordable compared to some other endpoint solutions."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is an expensive solution."
"The price is fair for the features Microsoft delivers. If you want tailor-made features, you have to mix different licenses. It isn't straightforward."
"The solution is included with Microsoft Windows."
"Licensing is straightforward. If, for some reason, you don’t meet the minimum licensing requirements, there is a third-party managed service that can help."
"The solution has a mid-range price point in the market"
"​I am sure that there are cheaper products out there, but none that meet so many of our needs whilst maintaining stability and usability.​"
"​Accurately predict your licensing counts as this is a subscription based product.​"
"It is on a yearly basis. For our own company, for about 250 users, it was 16,000 euros a year."
"Rapid7 InsightIDR is priced very well and is cost-effective."
"The pricing is good, and it is not very expensive."
"Rapid7 InsightIDR's pricing is reasonable but we have challenges with the Minimum Order Quantity. It is not reasonable for customers who have less than one hundred devices. If they can reduce Minimum Order Quantity, it is good. You have to pay around 5000-6000 dollars per year for the product. The pricing includes maintenance and support costs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise54
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business82
Midsize Enterprise45
Large Enterprise96
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise6
 

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,...
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...
What SOC product do you recommend?
For tools I’d recommend: -SIEM- LogRhythm -SOAR- Palo Alto XSOAR Doing commercial w/o both (or at least an XDR) is a...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Rapid7 InsightIDR?
My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing has been very positive; it is cost-effective and offers great ...
What needs improvement with Rapid7 InsightIDR?
I would say there are two areas for improvement: the reporting dashboard that provides insights or reports weekly or ...
 

Also Known As

Cyvera, Cortex XDR, Palo Alto Networks Traps
Microsoft Defender ATP, Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection, MS Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender Antivirus
InsightIDR
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
Petrofrac, Metro CSG, Christus Health
Liberty Wines, Pioneer Telephone, Visier
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Defender for Endpoint vs. Rapid7 InsightIDR and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,858 professionals have used our research since 2012.