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Microsoft Defender for Endpoint vs Rapid7 InsightIDR comparison

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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
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
120
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (4th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (3rd), 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) (2nd), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (4th), Anti-Malware Tools (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (3rd), Agentic Endpoint Security (1st)
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) (23rd), User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) (11th), Threat Deception Platforms (4th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (18th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) category, the mindshare of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is 3.7%, down from 3.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is 5.4%, down from 9.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Rapid7 InsightIDR is 1.3%, up from 1.2% 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 Endpoint5.4%
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks3.7%
Rapid7 InsightIDR1.3%
Other89.6%
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
SOC L2 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 interface is easy to use and it is more up to date than our previous solution."
"Based on my experience, I would recommend Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks to other people."
"Traps has drastically reduced our endpoint attack surface via advanced detection capabilities, sandboxing of never before seen programs, and by drastically limiting where executables can launch in the first place."
"We've had a significant increase in blocking with a decrease in false positives, because it's looking at how the files work, not just a list of files that it's been told to look for."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks has accelerated the response time for my security team, so we have been able to resolve issues faster than usual."
"The stability is pretty good except for one or two cases, and based on the performance, it's been okay with pretty high performance, no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze."
"One major outcome our organization achieved with Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is that it is a good tool for analysis, remediation, and incident response, with no negative points in terms of budget and overall effectiveness."
"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 like the fact that it has the ransomware solution in there. I'm glad that the ransomware solution is built into it. That's probably the biggest thing that I see in Microsoft Defender."
"It's great for investigating what's happening on a machine. They show a whole bunch of machine timeline events that are related to a security incident. They have quite good details on the things related to threat and vulnerability management, such as any weakness that has been disclosed publicly, assets that are exposed, and if there is an exploit active in the wild for that vulnerability. It can provide you with all such information, which is cool."
"We apply the DLP policies across a range of endpoints and it is very accurate when reporting vulnerabilities, including those in email attachments."
"I would recommend this solution to others if they don't have many third-party tools."
"The protection that it provides is quite good."
"What I like best is that it is part of the operating system, as opposed to a third-party application."
"It depends on the licensing. Most of the customers have got at least a 365 E3 license, and they can use most of the features of Windows 10 Defender. So, anyone who has got an enterprise license can start using those features. Some of the customers have got E5 licenses, and they can use all advanced features. Customers with E5 licenses use the advanced site protection (ATP) features and web content filtering without going via a proxy, which gives the benefit of replacing the proxy. They can get the benefit of MCAS and integration with Intune and the endpoint manager. It is a kind of single platform for all 365 technologies. It helps customers in managing everything through a unified portal."
"I like the process visibility. This ability to visualize how something was executed is valuable, and the fact that Defender ATP is also linked to the threat intelligence that they have is also valuable. So, even if you have something that doesn't have a conventional signature, the fact that you get this strange execution means that you can detect things that are normally not visible."
"This is a great product and the team is very willing to work with companies."
"InsightIDR’s ability to process millions of transactions per day, and to notify me of the most critical ones, is priceless. InsightIDR has the alerts tuned, and has the ability to quickly drill down to determine the threat level."
"The most valuable features have to do with ease-of-use, as it is easy to check the events, investigate suspicious activities, and do forensic analysis, and the web interface is great — very useful and user-friendly."
"I definitely recommend Rapid7 InsightIDR."
"The incident case management is the most valuable feature. Even though there's always something I find I would like to add to that feature, the ability to quickly sort through all the logs, network and endpoint data, etc., and add it to an incident case as part of the investigation, is nice. Having it automatically timeline that additional data into the original incident timeline, and correlate it to other notable events and activities on the network, results in a huge improvement in our overall confidence that we've quickly traced down the right source of an issue."
"Rapid7 InsightIDR is budget-friendly and has a good market position because not everybody can afford to go for LogRhythm or Splunk or QRadar."
"I am able to run automated actions based on the output of reports, leaving me extra time to focus on more pressing matters."
"It gives all the advantages of a SIEM, however, using clever AI, it looks for patterns of behavior rather than just flooding me with all the alerts."
 

Cons

"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."
"This is a very costly product."
"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."
"It automatically detects security issues. It should be able to protect our network devices while operating autonomously."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is a very good product, but financially, it is very expensive, so the company should look into that area."
"Every 30 or 40 days, there's a new version and we need to go and make sure our customer's laptops are upgraded."
"There are some default policies which sometimes affect our applications and cause them to run around. In the hotel industry, we use a different type of data versus Oracle and SQL. By default, there are some policies which stop us from running properly. Because of this, the support level is also not that strong. We have to wait to get a results."
"I have seen lagging with Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks. There was one time when we faced a threat actor trying to gain access to our system. When our team utilized the tool, we were all on the same dashboard and we faced a lag issue at that time of around five minutes, which was quite significant."
"I want Microsoft Defender to have the ability to deal with some issues automatically, so I don't need to address that issue manually."
"I would like the solution to be able to prevent unauthorized programs from installing and to block unauthorised URLs which is similar to web filtering product."
"Because Microsoft Defender comes as an add-on, it can be a bit expensive if you're trying to buy it separately."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is not as robust, and you cannot customize it much, so that's a challenge."
"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."
"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint could improve by making the reporting better."
"In active mode, it's great that it gives you so much information, but it does record every keystroke so you have a lot of logs... that amount of data logging started to add up in the cost."
"Windows Firewall is integrated with Windows Defender. Over the last few days, I have had a problem with defining a wildcard on Windows Firewall. For example, I wanted to pull out the connection of my program and install a software package with a lot of executable files. I wanted to prevent it from accessing the internet. I could not select executables by using a wildcard. I had to select a single executable with its full name."
"If we pitch Rapid7 InsightIDR against solutions such as SIEMs from Splunk or LogRhythm, it is not as customizable as a SIEM solution is."
"There is a future in AI with Rapid7, however, it is not fully operated. There are certain limitations with Rapid7 that I am working on."
"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."
"Currently, it lacks the functionalities provided by Rapid7's User Behavior Analytics (UBA)."
"Cloud risk assessment is one area where I think they need a lot of improvement."
"It takes time for the product's support team to resolve issues, making it an area of concern where improvements are required."
"I chose eight out of ten because of the analytical rules; they lack dynamic rules, and also due to the dashboard and reporting part."
"The searching feature in Rapid7 InsightIDR needs to evolve"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Cortex XDR’s pricing is very reasonable."
"The price is on the higher side, but it's okay."
"It has reasonable pricing for the use cases it provides to the company."
"Every customer has to pay for a license because it doesn't work with what you get from a managed services provider."
"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 solution has one subscription for endpoint protection and one subscription for detection and response. The two licenses combined give you the BRO version."
"We pay about $50,000 USD per year for a bundle that includes Cortex XDR."
"It is an expensive solution. It would be nice if it could be included with the Microsoft Office package."
"The price for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is about three euros, which is considered reasonably priced."
"It came with Windows."
"The solution is included with Microsoft Windows."
"The pricing is competitive."
"There is no license needed, the solution comes with Microsoft Windows."
"There is no licensing fee."
"Microsoft has different plans for buying this product. The price depends on the configuration of the full set of products that you buy and on the licensing program in your contract."
"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."
"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."
"It is a reasonably priced solution."
"Licensing is by endpoint and amount of retention time (at least ours is). Default retention was one year, but we are able to push the retention further if needed. There's also a provide-your-own-S3 option for longer retention if you don't want to pay for the additional retention years in your Rapid7 agreement."
"Rapid7 InsightIDR is a cheaply priced product. On a scale of one to ten, where one is very expensive, and ten is very cheap, I rate the product's price at seven or eight."
"The pricing of the solution depends on the user. But there is a yearly licensing cost."
"The pricing and licensing are competitive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
13%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Outsourcing Company
6%
 

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 Business82
Midsize Enterprise44
Large Enterprise97
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: September 2026.
917,433 professionals have used our research since 2012.