No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint vs Tanium comparison

Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 18, 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
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
110
Ranking in other categories
Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (5th), Ransomware Protection (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (1st)
Microsoft Defender for Endp...
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
2nd
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
214
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (4th), Anti-Malware Tools (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (3rd)
Tanium
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
16th
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
22nd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (4th), Vulnerability Management (25th), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (7th)
 

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 Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is 7.0%, down from 10.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tanium is 2.3%, down from 2.5% 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%
Tanium2.3%
Other87.1%
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
 

Q&A Highlights

 

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.
MA
Division Manager, Information Technology at a legal firm with 51-200 employees
Centralized policies have improved remote endpoint control and have simplified data visibility
The integration is not simple and easy. It requires experienced users or people who have done the implementation. When certain policies are applied, they do not immediately push the policies. For example, we manage endpoint device USB access. We set a policy to block it, but it does not come into effect immediately. Sometimes it takes three or four days for it to reflect. That is a pain point. I have raised this issue with support as well, but they said that I need to limit the number of devices in the policy. In terms of application deployment, for us, it was seamless.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We use it for malicious connections from malicious websites, to identify payloads that might be inside the traffic, to identify malicious processes or bugs that are running on the network, and any activities that tend to lead to data infiltration."
"Cortex XDR features advanced threat detection capabilities."
"One of the main benefits of the solution is its intelligence to correlate the events into an incident."
"The product is mostly automated, and we do not have to make decisions, because all the decisions are made by the product itself and we are not required to create any custom policies since the policies that are created are well defined in the product itself."
"Palo Alto Networks Traps improves our security posture and lowers risk by providing next-gen methods to combat against modern threats on all the major platforms."
"The best feature of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is that it collects logs from different sections such as the endpoint, the network, and the cloud, making it easy to investigate alerts, collect some of the investigation packages related to the infected machines, and provide live response."
"They did what they said, and this solution could apply to any scenario."
"It can automatically correlate events and logs, which is very helpful for an IT administrator. It can correlate different kinds of malware activities over a network, agent, or host system. You do not need to do it manually. It is a good feature. It is also a user-friendly solution. We have deployed it on the cloud because our space does not provide any flexibility for on-premises deployment, but Palo Alto has added some flexibility to install it on-premises. It must be like the same Cortex XDR agent for all the VPN services, web filtering services, and everything else."
"It's pretty easy to scale."
"Offers good protection."
"One of the valuable features of the solution is the small updates that keep my machine relatively clean from any infections."
"The antivirus is the most valuable feature."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a robust platform."
"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."
"The solution provides protections and reports about strange behavior and automatically blocks some of it. I love the way that statuses are represented."
"The most valuable features are the Windows Firewall and the regular virus definition updates. These features are very helpful and have helped to improve our security."
"When I push a quick update, it's done right away, and I can rescan immediately to confirm completion within minutes."
"The solution's technical support is very responsive."
"Tanium is used for endpoint management, specifically patching and configuration management."
"The solution is scalable and helps to understand how infrastructure works. It helps to improve the health of the organization."
"The product is granular and can build complex roles compared to other EDR vendors."
"Tanium's most valuable features are patch management, inventory, and distribution software."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the consolidation of all historical data on device endpoints, security drivers, firmware, and Software version gaps."
"The security features are very valuable."
 

Cons

"Dashboards do not allow everyone to see what's happening."
"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."
"There are some third-party solutions that are difficult to integrate with, which is something that can be improved."
"It would be good if they could make an exception for applications. Sometimes, it can be a bit of a challenge to make exceptions for certain applications that have been used as rogue."
"The solution should offer more dashboards and they should be better customized."
"It is an enterprise-level solution. Its price could be less expensive."
"I have run into some detection issues with Cortex XDR. It needs to be better at detection of internal attacks."
"I would like to see some additional features related to email protection included."
"It is inexpensive but could be cheaper like anything else."
"I would just like them to have more consistency, and that's a comment that's across the board with Microsoft. They change things a lot."
"At times, the other antivirus products are now doing AI, in terms of understanding the behavior of the system and determining when there's an anomaly. This is something that Defender can improve on."
"The solution could be more friendly for end-users, with different type of scans or scheduled scans for it."
"I am not sure if I will be using this product in the future because of the price."
"I would like to see improvement from a management perspective. We have had to depend on Intune for certain tasks."
"This solution needs to move beyond relying on virus definitions alone and protect the system using behavioral analysis of the processes that are running."
"I would like MDE to have the ability to isolate a certain amount of time on the timeline."
"When working with Tanium, there are some older devices that haven't been patched for a long time, and certain patches are not included in Tanium."
"We set a policy to block USB access. The moment a device is being set up on the network, I apply the policy, but it does not come into effect immediately."
"Tanium’s scalability could be improved."
"We had some issues with the solution's OS upgrade."
"The performance could improve in future releases. We have had performance issues in specialized web environments, but overall I think the problems are less than 2% of the computer systems being used."
"Most of the time, agent-relative issues have to be more equipped with self-healing features. At times, the agent is there, but for some reason, it doesn't report a status. It gives certain problems that are obviously agent-based."
"Any movement into a SaaS solution has challenges since the processes and data flows are not well defined. Hence, you need to build it at the same time."
"The most painful thing is the interface. It's a bit unclear sometimes."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is $55 to $90 USD per endpoint per month."
"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."
"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 pricing is a little high. It is per user per year."
"The pricing seems fair, and I do like the licensing model. You use wherever they are, and it is elastic."
"The tool's price is moderate."
"It has reasonable pricing for the use cases it provides to the company."
"Cortex XDR’s pricing is very reasonable."
"The licensing costs for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint are reasonable."
"I recently switched from education to private business, and all I can say is that private business licensing from Microsoft is not cheap until you hit certain quantities or scale. That does not mean that it is not comparable to other industries. It is similar pricing, but it is still crazy to me how much you pay for a client. I feel it is high, but it is in line with other vendors."
"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 so expensive. It isn't cheaper than McAfee or other solutions."
"I pay for it through the Windows Professional or Standard license. It is a one-time cost for me, and I use the same license."
"Microsoft Defender ATP is expensive."
"Pricing can always be lower."
"It's included with the Windows Operating System, I don't pay for any licensing fees."
"It's an expensive solution. It would be nice if the cost were lower."
"The solution is expensive but it's a good investment."
"Tanium is a more expensive solution in Latin America than some of the competitors, such as BigFix."
"The solution offers value for money."
"There is an annual license required to use this solution."
"It is higher than some competitors in the market."
"The product's pricing differs from region to region depending on negotiations and the number of endpoints."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) solutions are best for your needs.
894,668 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare 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 Enterprise45
Large Enterprise96
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise12
 

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 needs improvement with Tanium?
While there is always room for improvement, I am pleased with Tanium.
What is your primary use case for Tanium?
The primary use case for Tanium ( /products/tanium-reviews ) is compliance, patching, and inventory as part of the co...
What advice do you have for others considering Tanium?
For smaller companies, Tanium is quite a big investment, and one needs to have a considerable setup to make it econom...
 

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
Tanium Inc Cloud, Tanium XEM
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
Petrofrac, Metro CSG, Christus Health
JPMorgan Chase, eBay, Amazon, US Bank, MetLife, pwc, Cerner, Delphi, MGM Grand, New York Life
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Defender for Endpoint vs. Tanium and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
894,668 professionals have used our research since 2012.