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

BlackBerry Cylance Cybersecurity vs Microsoft Defender for Endpoint comparison

Why PeerSpot?
Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 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
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
120
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (5th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (3rd), Ransomware Protection (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (1st)
BlackBerry Cylance Cybersec...
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
36th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.6
Number of Reviews
44
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
212
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (4th), Anti-Malware Tools (1st), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (3rd), Microsoft Security Suite (3rd), Agentic Endpoint Security (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) category, the mindshare of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is 3.8%, up from 3.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of BlackBerry Cylance Cybersecurity is 1.7%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is 6.5%, down from 9.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint6.5%
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks3.8%
BlackBerry Cylance Cybersecurity1.7%
Other88.0%
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.
Sooraj Makkancherrry - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Operations Manager at Philips
Doesn't have daily updates, which is important for healthcare IT
I face challenges with the exclusion policy - it still scans folders we told it not to, causing issues. When we contact support, they tell us to update the latest agent, but we can't do that immediately due to medical device protocols and validation testing. I wish support would try to understand our issues better instead of giving this standard response. The machine learning feature they use often tells us to upgrade the agent or add things to the exclusion list, which isn't unacceptable. It's a very good and new technology as a tool and antivirus. But sometimes, it doesn't work properly with our medical devices and products, quarantining files it shouldn't even after we add them to exclusions. This is tricky for us.
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

"We switched because there were a lot of added features with Palo Alto that Check Point didn't have, and it was an upgrade for us."
"The most valuable features of this product are the management capabilities, which allow an IT organization to get quite a good picture of attempted cyber attacks, and its out-of-the-box investigation 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."
"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."
"Cortex XDR can integrate the firewalls and determine the tendencies of the attacks. It's a new generation antivirus, with protection endpoints and detection response. It is very easy to use and everybody can operate the solution."
"I generally believe that Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is probably the best in the market right now."
"It has absolutely improved the way our organization functions, we are more secure, it is giving us more peace of mind, and it has found malicious activity happening on our endpoints that probably would not have been detected if we didn't have it."
"I've found the solution to be highly scalable for enterprises."
"The stability is perfect, and it is leaps and bounds beyond our previous solution by McAfee."
"The solution is stable; it was no problem and all went quite well, with no bugs or freezes."
"The non-daily requirement to update signatures is the most valuable feature. From a functional point of view, it is pretty spot on. For instance, we compared an algorithm from five years ago to today's algorithm, and it was 98% accurate. It has the ability to detect and mitigate. In the industrial environment that we work in, there's what we call OT versus IT. You are IT Central, but this is OT. Generally, we don't have the same level of skillset as IT individuals or IT professionals have. This particular product doesn't require you to be a computer scientist to be able to understand its proprietary algorithm and to be able to deploy, use, and work within it. It integrates well with a robust SIEM or SOAR solution, and it plays nice with others. We use other detection solutions like CyberX or site provision with Cisco, and it plays nice. That's one of the things we really liked about it."
"CylancePROTECT is going to tell you if there are any issues and you are going to be able to see everything from one single dashboard."
"CylancePROTECT is a fairly decent antivirus."
"The initial endpoint cost may seem a little high (~$55/device/year), but when you look at the total peace of mind that the solution of Cylance endpoint protection provides, with no reboots for updates, and negligible performance impact, it is well worth it."
"The CylancePROTECT agent is very low on CPU usage, so it has virtually no adverse impact on my servers, desktops, or workstations."
"The solution is pretty easy to scale."
"You get what you pay for, it's an integrated solution, and there isn't a better one on the market."
"Microsoft Defender has helped me reduce mean time to remediation."
"My advice for anybody who is looking into using this product is that it's a good and easy way to secure your PC."
"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."
"It shows us the risky sign-ins, and if a user's password has been compromised."
"The fact that it's from Microsoft, you don't have many false positives, unlike products from other vendors might have."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is quite good. We haven't really experienced any issues with it."
"This product offers cost-effective threat protection, which integrates with Office 365 and has unified endpoint management features."
 

Cons

"Cortex XDR is trickier to configure than other Palo Alto products. This is one area where we are not so satisfied."
"The product's pricing needs improvement. They could provide more discounts. Additionally, the dashboard and control panel could be enhanced."
"I have faced some issues with Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks; there is room for improvement in the sense that certain options prevent us from seeing and segregating data."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks could improve its user interface, which is more complicated compared to competitors such as SentinelOne."
"The product's pricing could be better."
"The playbooks could be improved to include more functionalities or actions."
"Every 30 or 40 days, there's a new version and we need to go and make sure our customer's laptops are upgraded."
"They have the worst support, as a company, that I have ever worked with, as they are difficult to get a hold of and keep on the phone. They don't know what they are talking about when you get them on the phone. They don't like to respond to messages when you send them to them. They like to "research problems" for weeks on end, then pass you off to somebody else."
"​It needs real analysis of quarantined files. The EDR product isn't showing much right now."
"The high price of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required. The product's price should be more competitive."
"CylancePROTECT could be improved in its technical support and communication."
"It should have better support for Windows and Mac."
"They could improve on the false positives, reporting and whitelisting features."
"The initial deployment was quite complicated."
"The product needs to continue to offer better alerts, in particular around false positives, and it needs to reduce them from happening."
"Having worked with SentinelOne, Cylance is good, however, it probably needs to add a feature similar to SentinelOne's rollback functionality. With this feature, if you get infected, with a click, you can go back to the pre-infection state. If Cylance could add this functionality to their offering as well, that would be ideal."
"Microsoft should improve support for third-party platforms, because not all functionality is available for all of them. It's a good product, but they should just extend the functionality for all platforms."
"Additional security would be beneficial."
"Its price could be better."
"Microsoft Defender in the basic form is not very useful for managing the security environment."
"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."
"There are alternative solutions that offer a greater range of dashboard insights when compared to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint."
"The second major area for improvement involves enhanced capabilities for different operating systems or platforms. That is, even though we have coverage for different operating systems or platforms such as Linux, we don't get all of the controls and enhanced capabilities that are available with Windows devices."
"Lacks some additional integration."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing seems fair, and I do like the licensing model. You use wherever they are, and it is elastic."
"We pay about $50,000 USD per year for a bundle that includes Cortex XDR."
"Compared to CrowdStrike, Cortex XDR is an expensive solution."
"It has a yearly renewal."
"We didn't have to pay any additional fee for the cloud instance. It just came with the renewal, which was nice."
"It is "expensive" and flexible."
"I did PoCs on products called Cylance and CrowdStrike. Although, I consider these products and they were also good, when it come to cost and budgetary factors, Traps has been proven to be better than the other two products. It is quite cost-effective and delivers all the entire solution which we require."
"The cost depends on your chosen license type, like Pro or other licenses."
"Do not get hung up on price. You pay for what you get and expensive will hurt one time, where cheap will hurt forever, especially if you fall victim to a ransom attack, etc.​"
"We would just add more if there are new users, but right now you just need one license for per user."
"The tool is not that expensive."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten."
"The solution provides me with competitive pricing."
"We went through a third party initially to do the renewal, but we won't be renewing, we will move on to something else."
"CylancePROTECT's pricing is reasonable, at about €18 per user, per year."
"The initial end-point cost may seem a little high (~$55/device/year) but when you look at the total peace of mind that the solution provides, with no reboots for updates, and negligible performance impact, it is well worth it."
"I do not have to purchase antivirus solutions anymore because Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is integrated into Windows and comes free."
"Buying individual point products would've cost us a lot more money than one integrated solution that also capitalizes on Teams Voice and things of that nature. Given our size, buying individual products would have easily cost us a million dollars."
"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."
"We have the E5 security license, and the solution comes with that."
"For most people, the price of the license is not something that they have to worry about."
"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."
"They are now doing it on an endpoint basis. It is based on the number of endpoints, which is good."
"I got it with the Microsoft Windows license."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) solutions are best for your needs.
917,433 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
13%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business48
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise56
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise14
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business82
Midsize Enterprise44
Large Enterprise97
 

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,...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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
Blackberry Protect
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
Panasonic, Noble Energy, Apria Healthcare Group Inc., Charles River Laboratories, Rovi Corporation, Toyota, Kiewit
Petrofrac, Metro CSG, Christus Health
Find out what your peers are saying about BlackBerry Cylance Cybersecurity vs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
917,433 professionals have used our research since 2012.