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Microsoft Defender for Endpoint vs SanerNow CyberHygiene Platform 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)
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
110
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (4th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (5th), 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
214
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (2nd), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (4th), Anti-Malware Tools (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (3rd)
SanerNow CyberHygiene Platform
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
43rd
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (47th), Patch Management (19th), Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (18th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) category, the mindshare of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is 3.4%, down from 4.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is 6.0%, down from 10.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SanerNow CyberHygiene Platform is 0.6%, up from 0.1% 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 Endpoint6.0%
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks3.4%
SanerNow CyberHygiene Platform0.6%
Other90.0%
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.
JU
Information Technology Supervisor at DMCI Homes, Inc.
Can automate updates and manage software licenses more effectively
Our team uses the SanerNow CyberHygiene Platform for threat detection, focusing on features like vulnerabilities and asset exposure. The asset exposure feature is packaged with software licenses and machines. We get the latest updates and patches for Windows workstations and applications for remediation. We can automate these updates, which greatly improves our previous manual and scripting-based tools. Before, we struggled with setting policies and making changes to workstations. Now, we can automate updates and manage software licenses more effectively. We monitor who's using various licenses like Office, CAD, Visio, and Lumion.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Best solution for avoiding security breaches, malware attacks, and other kinds of security issues."
"One thing that I like about Cortex XDR is its ability to detect all the suspicious or malicious binaries, and it can integrate with Palo Alto Firewall."
"The solution allows us to make investigations. Other XDR solutions also provide similar capabilities but for investigation, Cortex XDR is better."
"Cortex XDR lets us manage several clients from the same console, and its endpoint defense is more advanced than traditional antivirus."
"The anti-exploit is impenetrable. We chose Traps because it is the only product that we were not able to get anything past."
"Has great threat detection capabilities."
"What I like about Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is that it is a comprehensive solution that contains everything the organization may need when using endpoints."
"We can visualize and control the activities in the environment from anywhere."
"I find the layer protection and real-time protection very useful because when I launch a program, I always have a notification and an alarm."
"One feature I like the most is vulnerability management, which shows any vulnerable software or OS present in my environment. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint provides a complete overview and also recommends the steps to mitigate the vulnerabilities or threats. Most of the other antivirus or EDR solutions generally don't provide vulnerability management. It is an add-on that Microsoft Defender for Endpoint provides."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has been secure and there is zero maintenance required because it updates with Microsoft Windows."
"Stable endpoint manager, antivirus, and antimalware, with fast technical support and a straightforward setup."
"It is a very advanced system based on AI. It has a very large database of places or sites on the internet where you should not go. It is continuously online."
"The solution's main antivirus capabilities are okay. So far, they have kept us safe."
"The scalability is good."
"It's not really visible for the user - which is a benefit."
"Our team uses the SanerNow CyberHygiene Platform for threat detection, focusing on features like vulnerabilities and asset exposure. The asset exposure feature is packaged with software licenses and machines. We get the latest updates and patches for Windows workstations and applications for remediation. We can automate these updates, which greatly improves our previous manual and scripting-based tools."
"Although it is, in fact, a complete vulnerability management solution, the most valuable feature is the patch management functionality. Most of our customers give preference to this tool over other tools when it comes to patch management."
 

Cons

"When it comes to core analysis and security analysis, Cortex needs to provide more information."
"The solution needs better reports. I think they should let the customer go in and customize the reports."
"It should support more mobile operating systems. That is one of the cons of their infrastructure right now."
"Initially, we got to have a lot of false positives when we onboarded, but nowadays it's quite smooth."
"However, if you do not have Palo Alto in your environment, you are paying these additional services just for Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks, so it is not a cost-effective solution."
"I would like to see improvement in the tool's user interface, particularly in the area of managing alerts and providing more reporting capabilities."
"I have run into some detection issues with Cortex XDR. It needs to be better at detection of internal attacks."
"Based on our experience so far, its implementation is quite complex."
"The system can always be simplified and have a better integration check."
"Some executive reporting is inefficient, and we're looking into ways to improve it."
"We'd like the stability to be better."
"The technical from Microsoft could be better. It is not as good as other solutions."
"We would like to see more tools for managing on-premises security... Sometimes, we have the tools, like Defender, to manage security in the cloud, but because we are so focused on the cloud, we forget the fact that we need to be sure about the security of the on-premises environment, specifically Active Directory."
"I would appreciate agentic protection as an additional feature in the next release to protect the agents that the business creates."
"Defender is free for one year. Once that year is over, we will switch to Kaspersky."
"The dashboard customization could be improved. It's not as good as Azure."
"SanerNow CyberHygiene Platform needs to incorporate more documentation."
"SanerNow has good integration with the more well known ITSM tools, but at the same time there are many other ITSM (IT Service Management) tools available in the market, including local tools here in India, and I'm not sure how SanerNow plans to integrate with them all out of the box."
 

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 was fine."
"If one wishes to work with another team or large number of users at a future point, he must purchase a license for them."
"This is an expensive solution."
"We didn't have to pay any additional fee for the cloud instance. It just came with the renewal, which was nice."
"It's the most expensive solution, but features-wise, it's quite strong. It's very good for protection, so the results are very good in the case of protection. I would rate it a two out of ten in terms of pricing."
"It's way too expensive, but security is expensive. You pay for your licensing, and then you pay for someone to monitor the stuff."
"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."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is more affordable compared to some other endpoint solutions."
"As we operate in the educational sector, we are eligible for an educational discount."
"I don't know the standalone costs. It is my understanding that the M365 E5 is $56 a month or something close to that pricing. That would be for the full suite. Just Defender might be $8 a month. I can't say for sure."
"The solution is free with Windows."
"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."
"It's all pretty easy. For some clients, it's an easier sell because it's just an add-on to their existing Microsoft licensing and Office 365 licensing."
"Microsoft Defender ATP is expensive."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is cost-effective because there's one unified license, and with this unified license, you get the capabilities for your cloud applications, servers, and endpoints as well. Therefore, it saves us a lot of money because the cost with other solutions is for just one piece of OS or maybe an urban environment. The licensing process is not complex as well."
"As with several other solutions such as Microsoft MECM and SCCM, the licensing for SanerNow involves per-device pricing for each kind of product or service on offer."
"The pricing is reasonable - we paid about 2.5 million for 3,500 nodes."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Outsourcing Company
14%
Construction Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise49
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business82
Midsize Enterprise44
Large Enterprise95
No data available
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SanerNow?
The pricing is reasonable - we paid about 2.5 million for 3,500 nodes.
What needs improvement with SanerNow?
SanerNow CyberHygiene Platform needs to incorporate more documentation.
What is your primary use case for SanerNow?
We use the tool for patch, application, and vulnerability management.
 

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
SecPod SanerNow, SanerNow RP
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
Petrofrac, Metro CSG, Christus Health
Siemens, Aruba, SironLabs, POS Aviation, Kotak, Kaizen Automotive, Amagi, McNeilus Steel, Claremont, Glassbeam, Marlabs, Amazon Web Services
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Defender for Endpoint vs. SanerNow CyberHygiene Platform and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.