CrowdStrike vs McAfee | Cybersecurity Comparisons

3 Reasons WhyCustomers Choose CrowdStrike Over McAfee ENS

Comprehensive Security Protection

CrowdStrike secures the most critical areas of enterprise risk – endpoints and cloud workloads and identity – to keep you ahead of today’s threats and stop breaches. Powered by the CrowdStrike Security Cloud, the CrowdStrike Falcon® Platform was purpose-built in the cloud with a single lightweight agent architecture that enables you to consolidate security solutions and eliminate on-premise infrastructure. CrowdStrike leverages real-time indicators of attack, threat intelligence, evolving adversary tradecraft and enriched telemetry from across the enterprise to protect against all threat vectors - even when computers and servers aren’t connected to the internet.

Fully Operational in Seconds

The CrowdStrike Falcon® Platform, powered by the CrowdStrike Security Cloud, enables customers to deploy tens of thousands of agents at once—with no reboots necessary to install or change security settings. CrowdStrike provides full, automated protection in real time across the enterprise without impacting endpoint performance and end-user productivity. The CrowdStrike Falcon® Platform leverages enriched telemetry from across the enterprise with other sources of threat intelligence to deliver hyper-accurate detections, automated protection and remediation, elite threat hunting and prioritized observability of vulnerabilities.

Enhanced Risk Management

The CrowdStrike Security Cloud is the world’s largest unified, threat-centric data fabric, powering the next generation of protection and elite threat hunting to stop breaches. CrowdStrike correlates trillions of security events per day with indicators of attack, the industry’s leading threat intelligence and enterprise telemetry from across customer endpoints, workloads, identities, DevOps, IT assets and configurations.

Using world-class AI, the CrowdStrike Security Cloud identifies shifts in adversarial tactics, maps their tradecraft and creates actionable data in the patented Threat Graph to automatically prevent threats in real time across CrowdStrike’s global customer base. Powered by the CrowdStrike Security Cloud, your team is in full control with the CrowdStrike Falcon Platform. See what your current anti-virus solution is missing, with ZERO false positives.

Today’s sophisticated attacks require a mix of world-class automation and human expertise in the form of human-based threat-hunting, reviewing content and adding context to detections. CrowdStrike’s teams of elite threat hunters are working 24/7, proactively searching for stealthy threats that technology alone cannot detect.

Compare CrowdStrike to McAfee Endpoint Security (ENS)

CrowdStrike Falcon® combines all the security capabilities required to protect against both legacy and modern attacks into a single lightweight agent - offering better protection, performance, and value.

Feature

McAfee

DETECTION

MACHINE LEARNING BASED Protects against known & unknown threats.

Signature BasedFocused on known threats.

DELIVERY

CLOUD Cloud Architecture. Ease of setup, maintenance, and scalability.

LOCAL Uses local machine and on-premise infrastructure. Additional hardware costs and maintenance burden.

INSTALLATION TIME

MINUTES Silent deployment. No restart required.

MULTI-DAY Requires endpoint downtime, and restart for installation and updates.

NUMBER OF SENSORS

ONE SENSORSingle lightweight agent for all functions. ~3% local CPU usage.

MULTIPLE SENSORS Multiple sensors required for prevention, detection, response, etc. >30% CPU usage when scanning.

BEHAVIOR-BASED PROTECTION

EVENT BASED DETECTIONIndicators of attack (IOAs) prevent sophisticated fileless and malware-free attacks.

SIGNATURE RELIANT DETECTIONLimited behavioral based detection is possible with an additional module.

ENDPOINT DETECTION RESPONSE (EDR)

ADVANCED EDR Automated, prioritized alerts. Unparalleled visibility enables proactive threat hunting. Powerful response.

BASIC EDR Basic recording and response functionality. Supports limited threat hunting use cases.

Feature

Symantec

FLEXIBLE ARCHITECTURE FOR THE DIGITAL WORLD

It’s in our DNA:Designed for the cloud-native, work from anywhere world.

They’re still learning:On-premises, legacy architecture design that is deployed to a cloud, with inadequate scaling for enterprise use.

We’re nimble:Lightweight agent that avoids the performance overhead historically associated with endpoint protection agents.

They’re overweight:Endpoint agent that has high memory consumption and high disk utilization to the tune of GBs on disk.

We’re agile:We enable customers to deploy tens of thousands of agents at once, with no reboots necessary to install or change security settings.

They’re clunky:Their technology requires a reboot to install, needs subsequent reboots when changes are made, and needs custom builds to reduce their false positive problems.

We’re inclusive:Offers the full range of protection on all supported platforms on the day of release – most recently MacOS Big Sur – with full-featured support for the whole enterprise.

They’re narrow:Offers severely limited capabilities on non-Windows platforms, with up to a 2-plus month wait for protections on new operating system releases.

AUTOMATION & RECOVERY THAT ENTERPRISES CAN TRUST

We’re proactive:We provide truly autonomous, surgical remediation without requiring customer intervention or downtime to “rollback,” restore or reimage.

They’re reactive:Can only remediate a threat if they detect it and their “rollback” doesn’t work in all scenarios. Organizations shouldn’t rely on a local and partial backup to resolve a breach.

We’re confident:When we have high confidence in a prevention verdict, we’re able to stop the breach without overwhelming operators with false positives.

They’re alarmists: Allows a high rate of false positives, inflating autonomous and machine-learning-based prevention, and they now charge extra to address the overwhelming false positives from that outdated approach.

CLOUD WORKLOAD PROTECTIONFOR THE ENTIRE ENTERPRISE

We’re end-to-end:Providing end-to-end security with image scanning and runtime protection, misconfiguration detection, step-by-step remediation and full threat hunting across workloads, devices and infrastructure.

They’re config-fragile:Difficult to operationalize with hard limits on the number of workloads and no auto-updates. And if the agent is out of date, then the “Ransomware Warranty” doesn’t apply either.

We’re secure NOW:Full force protection deployed right out of the box, on Day One, to tens of thousands of endpoints, with no professional services required.

They’re a “process”:False positives during deployment and lengthy onboarding services is what you can expect.

We cover it all:Vulnerability management can be built into CI/CD, with full Daemonset architecture support across Kubernetes with EKS, AKS, GKE, including support for AWS Fargate serverless compute container.

They don’t:Basic malware scanning for instant images only. No support for AWS FarGate, AWS Secrets, nor for securing images against stands-based assessments such as CIS benchmarks.

DATA RETENTION & STREAMING365/24/7

We provide insight:P365/24/7 we deliver malicious incident details for all customers by default. And at 90 days we provide full detection and Threat Graph data for all customers by default.

They provide basic alerts:All you get are basic alerts. And every 14 days you get EDR data.

We’re effortless:Crowdsource, using AI technology, automatically determines when multiple alerts are related, consolidates them into one incident, and then prioritizes based on criticality.

They’re difficult:Massive levels of false positives making it a daunting task to access event telemetry for validating a detection, understanding what has occurred or to reconstruct the triggering activity.

We search it all:Threat hunters can search through all collected events at scale, with no UI limitations that would delay investigation. And the response is not limited to the amount of the results it returns.

They search much less than we do:Threat hunting doesn’t scale. Searches can’t return all the results because the record counts are capped. The unique endpoint event types captured are less than half of CrowdStrike.

HUNTING, SECURING, GUARANTEEINGAND NO FINE PRINT

We’re high efficacy:OverWatch can focus on hunting and detecting new threats because Falcon protects with such high efficacy and confidence.

They’re triage:Their approach delivers so many false positives that a person is required to triage alerts, and then feed true positives into their existing detections.

We’re hunters:Falcon OverWatch hunts across all endpoint telemetry, compares and contrasts across customer environments helping to make even better informed decisions.

They’re gatherers:SentinelOne Vigilance can only hunt across existing detection data.

We’re complete:Falcon Complete is the only fully managed endpoint protection that includes surgical remediation backed by a “no fine print” warranty of up to $1 million.

They’re partial:Ransomware warranty is strictly limited to ransomware attacks. Lots of strict requirements, and only Windows machines running the latest agent version are eligible.

AUTOMATED INSIGHT AND CONTROLSO YOU DON’T HAVE TO

We’re next gen:CrowdStrike’s Security Cloud delivers enterprise security for what is most critical for the next digital wave – Endpoint Security, Cloud Security, Zero Trust.

They’re last gen:Can’t adequately perform basic current-gen endpoint capabilities because of legacy constraints.

We manage:Delivers vulnerability management, not just vulnerability reporting. Falcon far surpasses any competitor’s endpoint product in the event types it collects, and provides all the insight and interactive controls needed to prioritize and resolve at scale.

They report:Vulnerability assessments don’t include OS level details, any remediation guidance; doesn’t even correlate with report alerts.

We’re low risk:Detects unmanaged devices with no network impact, nor any additional risk introduced into the environment.

They’re high risk:Ranger triggers IDS/IPS systems – requiring remote workers to be cautious with 3rd party networks and infrastructures.

We’re automated:Our unrivaled adversary threat intel data predicts how your organization may be targeted, by automatically prioritizing the environment, and then using asset configuration and vulnerability data to determine what is at the highest risk of being exploited.

They’re manual:Users are left to prioritize alerts and events themselves in order to understand their most important tasks – wasting time on activities that could be automated.

CONSISTENT TESTING MATTERS RIGHT OUT OF THE BOX

We test:We consistently participate in AV Comparatives, SE Labs, and MITRE ATT& evaluations as well as SE Labs Breach Response Detection Test.

They don’t test:No regular participation in standards-based AV testing, nor detection tests beyond basic e-crime adversary emulation.

We’re thorough:In a recent ATT& Evaluation, Falcon had ZERO configuration changes and made 69 proactive detections. For the same test, SentinelOne made three.

They miss the mark:Still underperformed versus CrowdStrike in most recent ATT& Evaluation after making dozens of configuration changes during the tests, unlike a solution that works right out of the box like CrowdStrike.