CrowdStrike

VS MICROSOFT DEFENDER FOR ENDPOINT

There's no comparison. Discover why businesses choose CrowdStrike over Microsoft Defender for Endpoint.

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3 Reasons WhyCustomer Choose CrowdStrike Over Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

1

Better Protection

CrowdStrike protects across workloads and across different operating systems with a single, cloud native solution. Broad coverage with a cloud-native platform that is automatically kept up-to-date reduces security gaps that can result from inconsistent updates, version control or dependency on signatures.

Broader Prevention Capabilities
2

Reduced Complexity

A single lightweight agent reduces drag on your endpoints and minimizes end-user interruption. Installation and day-to-day operations bear little impact on endpoints—even when analyzing, searching and investigating. An easy-to-use, single console enables simple policy management across operating systems and versions.

Broader Prevention Capabilities
3

Accelerated Security Operations

CrowdStrike minimizes efforts spent handling alerts, empowering you to quickly investigate and respond to attacks with the data you need, when you need it—all in one spot. From the same console, contain and remediate compromised systems—across operating systems—including on-the-fly remote access to take immediate action.

Broader Prevention Capabilities

Compare CrowdStrike to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

Feature
DETECTION
SIGNATURELESS Advanced, signatureless protection from machine learning, behavioral analytics and integrated threat intelligence.
SIGNATURES Includes signature-based AV engine.
MAINTENANCE
FRICTIONLESS UPDATES Lightweight agent. No reboot required.
REBOOT REQUIRED Sensor updates require OS-level updates and device reboots, including critical servers.
Cross-platform support
Consistent One platform for all workloads. Provides comprehensive protection coverage that can be deployed across Windows, Linux and macOS servers and endpoints.
Varied Varied capabilities outside Windows 10. Inconsistency between Windows versions and other operating systems, including macOS support and Linux distro support.
Managed threat hunting
24/7 Expert Hunting Elite team of experts proactively hunt, investigate and advise on threat activity.
Machine Led Hunting Threat Experts service mostly uses “Hunter-trained AI” rather than human analysts. No direct interaction between hunter-customer is offered.
Integrated threat intel
Best in Class Integrated Intel Alerts are automatically enriched with CrowdStrike's industry leading threat intelligence, for maximum analyst efficiency.
Inefficient Intel Defender for Endpoint includes separate dashboards for specific threats, requiring analysts to pivot between screens.
Feature
CrowdStrike
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.

Undecided? See Why Customers Trust CrowdStrike

Don’t just take our word for it – see what our customers have to say:

Scott Stoops, Security Analyst | Ashland University Scott Stoops, Security Analyst | Ashland University Scott Stoops, Security Analyst | Ashland University

We don’t have an antivirus solution that’s waiting on signatures to be developed and pushed out. What we’ve got is that we’re part of a larger collection of organizations that are running CrowdStrike, so any data that we see gets fed back into the system and someone else will benefit from that knowledge. And it’s all because it is cloud-based.

Scott Stoops

Security Analyst Ashland University
Jason Rooks, CIO | Parkway Schools Jason Rooks, CIO | Parkway Schools Jason Rooks, CIO | Parkway Schools

When we engaged CrowdStrike, it was a complete 180. Now we’ve found that partner that will get us back to a stable operating point.

Jason Rooks

CIO Parkway Schools

Protecting Companies of All Sizes

Deloitte

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Still Not Convinced?

Then let our products do the talking for us. Explore the CrowdStrike Falcon® Platform, powered by the CrowdStrike Security Cloud, and see for yourself why CrowdStrike excels over the competition. Click the button below to create your free account.

CrowdStrike: We stop breaches.