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CrowdStrike Falcon vs Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 11, 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
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
120
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (4th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (5th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (3rd), Ransomware Protection (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (1st)
CrowdStrike Falcon
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
174
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (1st), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (1st)
Microsoft Defender External...
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Attack Surface Management (ASM) (16th), Microsoft Security Suite (33rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
CrowdStrike Falcon5.6%
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint6.5%
SentinelOne Singularity Endpoint4.5%
Other83.4%
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
Attack Surface Management (ASM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management2.9%
HackerOne4.1%
Darktrace3.6%
Other89.4%
Attack Surface Management (ASM)
 

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.
JW
Senior Security Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Centralized endpoint protection has strengthened compliance and accelerated incident response
There are a number of areas that I only touch a handful of times, but when I get in there, I realize why I don't do that. The main area would be within the support area. The support bot is not really as smart as you would expect it, especially in this day and age of LLM and other capabilities that I know CrowdStrike Falcon is already capable of doing. Additionally, I would appreciate a little bit more easy to read insights of some of the dashboards or maybe manipulation of the dashboards. It is still a little cumbersome to build custom dashboards and it's not as intuitive as you would think. Documentation is abysmal and needs to be improved dramatically. I know that there's a big effort to do this, however, even the new effort is honestly worse than it was before. Those are definitely major areas of improvement, just more in the usability of the features.
AndyChan3 - PeerSpot reviewer
General manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Enhanced visibility and exposes vulnerabilities but needs more integration
I am currently in the pilot stage of implementing Microsoft External Attack Surface Management (EASM). My organization is transitioning to a comprehensive track of Microsoft solutions, and we will move to full-scale production in another year, maybe Microsoft External Attack Surface Management…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We have a complete overview of all our PCs and it's very easy to handle and to use the interface. It has a lot of benefits for us."
"The product has an intuitive dashboard."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks's ability to block sophisticated threats in real time is quite good and is on par with SentinelOne's."
"The tool is easy to use."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its ability to rapidly detect certain hardware files."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is specifically designed to prevent zero-day attacks and is part of an ecosystem of Palo Alto, providing customers with a long-term vision to modify and redesign how security is applied in their company."
"Implementing Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks has had a significant impact on my security analyst workload because it becomes much easier."
"The most valuable features are the fact that it was running in the background and it would intercept any weird stuff, and the fact that it would send things directly to the cloud for sandboxing. It's quite practical."
"The threat intelligence is the most valuable feature."
"We don't need to maintain onsite servers and deep end user updates with the new vulnerabilities."
"I value the overall behavior analysis of CrowdStrike. The engine of this product is what drew us to this solution."
"We have seen a reduction to the performance hit to our operating systems."
"Scalability hasn't been an issue for us."
"Enables us to understand what processes are running on the system, what registry keys have been enabled."
"So far, in the past three years, they've been absolutely great."
"The product's deployment phase is easy."
"Microsoft External Attack Surface Management helps improve the visibility of my exposed vulnerabilities and provides an overview of my security posture across the globe."
"It seems to be better at protecting from cyberattacks."
 

Cons

"It's not an ideal choice for smaller businesses, as you need a minimum of 200 endpoints to even use the solution at all."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks can improve mobile integration to allow access to the console."
"The server sometimes stops continuously to check things so it would be helpful to receive access updates or technical reasons."
"Cortex XDR should have a lightweight agent, and the agent size should not be heavy."
"I am facing issues with customer support for Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks, so I am not satisfied with customer support."
"The tool needs to be improved in terms of integration and interface."
"In terms of areas of improvement, we have not completed our review of the product. We're also looking at other products. So, it's a little bit hard to tell what could be different because we have not completed the review of this product, but based on our experience so far, its implementation is quite complex."
"The solution eats memory of the computer, unlike anything I've ever seen."
"The solution could improve by providing more types of reports because it's in the detection span you cannot re-export anything. If it could be exported to a CSV file directly there it would help a lot. I currently need to do this by API to get what I need."
"For CrowdStrike to work, all the machines need to have an internet connection. This makes it challenging to assist customers without an internet connection. We would like to have a mechanism or relay to make this possible."
"The price is too high."
"So far, the benefits I have seen from having multiple security capabilities on a single platform have been limited, but based on the testing, we see that it is identifying threats and it has shown us proactive capabilities to shut down the threats."
"We have had to go back to CrowdStrike, and say, "Our search are taking far too long for even one host.""
"I would assess the stability and reliability of CrowdStrike Falcon as being awesome, other than the great CrowdStriking. I have experienced downtime, crashes, or performance issues."
"I would like a centralized deployment where I could roll out or push it to all endpoints."
"Any kind of integration that you want to do, such as using the API to connect to a SIEM, is complex and it will be expensive to do."
"Further integration across different Microsoft products would be an improvement."
"With Microsoft, support is always crazy, it's not easy to get support."
"The integration is not as seamless compared to competitors like Palo Alto."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"In terms of the cost Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is very expensive because we are a Mexican company and when you translate dollars to pesos the cost is very high. The solution is very expensive for Mexican companies. I understand that they have international prices, but I do not think it offsets the price enough for many companies in countries, such as Mexico. The amount it is reduced is not a massive percentage."
"I am using the Community edition."
"Its pricing is kind of in line with its competitors and everybody else out there."
"When we first bought it, it was a bit expensive, but it was worth it. The licensing was straightforward."
"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."
"Licensing for Palo Alto Networks Cortex XDR can be costly, especially when it comes to a hundred users. A license is required for each user, and the subscription must be renewed on a yearly basis."
"Cortex XDR’s pricing is very reasonable."
"The price of CrowdStrike Falcon is reasonable."
"The pricing on CrowdStrike is per license. It was about $42 per seat yearly."
"We are at about $60,000 per year."
"We are on an annual subscription for the solution. There are not any additional costs."
"Our company pays approximately US$ 65,000 annually for 900 machines."
"Purchasing the product through the AWS Marketplace is just a click away. Since we were using the on-premise version of the product, we continued on the cloud by purchasing it through the AWS Marketplace."
"I do not have experience with the cost or licensing of the product."
"The pricing could be reduced. If it was more reasonable that would be great."
Information not available
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Top Industries

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

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 Business58
Midsize Enterprise47
Large Enterprise84
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,...
How does Crowdstrike Falcon compare with Darktrace?
Both of these products perform similarly and have many outstanding attributes. CrowdStrike Falcon offers an amazing u...
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...
Is Crowdstrike Falcon better than Trend Micro Deep Security?
I like that Crowdstrike allows me to easily correlate data between my firewalls. What’s most useful for my needs is t...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management?
Further integration across different Microsoft products would be an improvement. Introduction of more AI automation i...
What is your primary use case for Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management?
I am currently in the pilot stage of implementing Microsoft External Attack Surface Management (EASM). My organizatio...
 

Also Known As

Cyvera, Cortex XDR, Palo Alto Networks Traps
CrowdStrike Falcon XDR, CrowdStrike Falcon Threat Intelligence, CrowdStrike Identity Protection, CrowdStrike Falcon Surface, CrowdStrike Falcon Platform
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
Information Not Available
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