Cisco Duo vs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cisco Duo
Score 9.4 out of 10
N/A
Cisco Duo is a two-factor authentication system (2FA), acquired by Cisco in October 2018. It provides single sign-on (SSO) and endpoint visibility, as well as access controls and policy controlled adaptive authentication.
$3
per month per user
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (formerly Microsoft Defender ATP) is a holistic, cloud delivered endpoint security solution that includes risk-based vulnerability management and assessment, attack surface reduction, behavioral based and cloud-powered next generation protection, endpoint detection and response (EDR), automatic investigation and remediation, managed hunting services, rich APIs, and unified security management.
$2.50
per user/per month
Pricing
Cisco DuoMicrosoft Defender for Endpoint
Editions & Modules
Duo Essentials
$3
per month per user
Duo Advantage
$6
per month per user
Duo Premier
$9
per month per user
Academic
$2.50
per user/per month
Standalone
$5.20
per user/per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco DuoMicrosoft Defender for Endpoint
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Cisco DuoMicrosoft Defender for Endpoint
Features
Cisco DuoMicrosoft Defender for Endpoint
Endpoint Security
Comparison of Endpoint Security features of Product A and Product B
Cisco Duo
-
Ratings
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
8.7
78 Ratings
2% above category average
Anti-Exploit Technology00 Ratings8.975 Ratings
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)00 Ratings9.177 Ratings
Centralized Management00 Ratings8.777 Ratings
Hybrid Deployment Support00 Ratings7.210 Ratings
Infection Remediation00 Ratings9.075 Ratings
Vulnerability Management00 Ratings8.672 Ratings
Malware Detection00 Ratings9.276 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Cisco DuoMicrosoft Defender for Endpoint
Small Businesses
WatchGuard AuthPoint
WatchGuard AuthPoint
Score 9.1 out of 10
ThreatLocker
ThreatLocker
Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
WatchGuard AuthPoint
WatchGuard AuthPoint
Score 9.1 out of 10
CrowdStrike Falcon
CrowdStrike Falcon
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
Microsoft Entra ID
Microsoft Entra ID
Score 8.9 out of 10
BeyondTrust Endpoint Privilege Management
BeyondTrust Endpoint Privilege Management
Score 10.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Cisco DuoMicrosoft Defender for Endpoint
Likelihood to Recommend
9.5
(158 ratings)
9.0
(133 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.9
(9 ratings)
8.4
(10 ratings)
Usability
9.9
(75 ratings)
8.6
(10 ratings)
Availability
9.9
(8 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Performance
9.8
(3 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
9.9
(89 ratings)
9.0
(7 ratings)
Online Training
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.9
(9 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
Configurability
10.0
(2 ratings)
8.2
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.9
(8 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.8
(3 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
10.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
10.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Cisco DuoMicrosoft Defender for Endpoint
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco
For secure access to apps and business data, I recommend Cisco Duo. It offers SSO, MFA, and Passwordless access, ensuring teams can securely access business data. It is easy to customize and comes with top-tier security features. It protects business data, apps, and users.
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Microsoft
I can definitely tell you where it’s more suited, because we haven’t come across any less appropriate scenarios. But definitely in regard to how we centrally manage our user space and our endpoints, it’s been beneficial from an API perspective and is really transferable, with strong collaboration with our Azure stack. It works very well.
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Pros
Cisco
  • We use Cisco Duo with different type of device and application, but we never face any difficulties to integrate Cisco Duo with any of them.
  • We integrated Cisco Duo with some of our active directory and some of the OS are quite old but Cisco Duo works totally fine with them.
  • The end user application is very easy to use. We never had any complain from non tech team members of having trouble of using Cisco Duo.
  • There are several authentication methods available rather than passcode. I personally like the push notification which is always on time and quite fast.
Read full review
Microsoft
  • Definitely on the threat action and response. We didn't have a stress-response option before, but the dependent brand point provided it instantly. Also, it's doing UVA and machine learning, which we didn't have before. So it's definitely providing more sophisticated threat-detection capabilities than we had before.
Read full review
Cons
Cisco
  • Should have device to device connection ability whereas internet is not met.
  • Changes of device can be sorted and easily made using a second email address or any other identification method.
  • Troubleshooting should be easy to sort out. One time, a Duo admin deleted the authentication group, and some employees were not getting push notifications. It was very hard to find out the cause. Duo should have some troubleshooting finder.
  • Sometimes push notifications are delayed, and the code does not work. At that time, we need to enroll the device again. Not sure why it happens. Duo should give reasons for the error.
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Microsoft
  • The only thing is sometimes, because Microsoft has so many platforms, it gets a little confusing, like am I in the security platform? Am I in Purview? Where am I at right now? Because there's so many sites that are kind of doing a lot of the same thing, and so that does get a little confusing from time to time, but outside of that, it's a pretty good product.
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Likelihood to Renew
Cisco
There are a lot of competing solutions on the market; however, Duo "just works", and there is little to no learning curve for the new members to be acclimated to it. As long as that continues I see it as the preferred option moving forward
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Microsoft
Cost add-ons for Security features is nickel and diming the process to keep pace with cybercrime. Limited Education budgets require us to be more pro-active in finding cost-effective measures to protect our devices, staff and students. Defender is a strong, well-featured product that is pricing itself out of the education market
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Usability
Cisco
La interfaz es intuitiva y fácil de navegar, lo que permite a los usuarios administrar sus dispositivos y acceder a las políticas sin problemas. La integración con las aplicaciones SSO y SaaS facilita aún más el proceso de acceso, mejorando la experiencia del usuario.
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Microsoft
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a great EDR to have that works quickly and silently in the background and it integrates well with other Microsoft services. As an IT manager, I can appreciate that I do not get bombarded by alerts for every small detail. On the flipside, the management site can use some work in being more clear and should be more streamlined so I'm not clicking through multiple pages to figure out what happened
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Reliability and Availability
Cisco
In the last 5+ years we've been using Duo, there may have been 1 outage that impacted us. We do receive periodic notifications of issues but, for the most part, they impact carriers or functionality that we either don't use, or do not care about.
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Microsoft
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint chugs along just fine no matter what we throw at it and what systems it's running on. It doesn't take up a lot of resources either, so that's welcomed.
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Performance
Cisco
We do not see any degradation of performance of the protected applications. There are occasional lags in receiving the push but no show stooppers.
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Microsoft
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is easy on memory and resources on clients.
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Support Rating
Cisco
I have not needed direct support for Cisco Secure Access by Duo as I have not had a problem with it, but I have full confidence that the support is outstanding. It is now a core component of the corporate technology stack - a problem would mean a serious degradation in the ability of the company to function.
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Microsoft
The first time I tried to onboard my macOS endpoints to MDE I struggled for quite a bit. I had to reach out to Microsoft's MDE support team. The tech was very helpful in walking me through the steps during a screen share session
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In-Person Training
Cisco
There was no in person training but checking the box was the only way I could complete all of the questions.
Read full review
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Online Training
Cisco
This was not organized training but the videos that Duo provides to teach you how to install a particular integration are top notch.
Read full review
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Cisco
Documentation could have been better. I had to piece together different KB/admin guides to make certain things work and I also had to use third-party guides to get bits of information that were missing from Cisco Duo documentation. Support was also engaged multiple times to figure out an issue and after some back and forth it was usually determined that the information I needed was hidden somewhere else and had no direct correlation with the document that was linked from the platform.
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Microsoft
Deployment was handled by our team here and everything went pretty smoothly. We did have a few hiccups in our test group, but that only took a bit to get ironed out.
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Alternatives Considered
Cisco
Ultimately we ended up going with Cisco Duo because we are a Cisco shop. All of our networking infrastructure, our phones, our wireless environment is Cisco based. It made logical sense to stay with a product that we already have a line of support with. With a smaller support / tech group we depend on outside Cisco support. That support is already here for us, so we stayed with a Cisco product.
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Microsoft
Previously, we've used Sophos. We've used, way back when, McAfee, Norton, Symantec, all those. And we finally settled on Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. We're a Microsoft technology stack shop. So obviously it was natural. It's built into Windows, so we're not adding additional agents. Some of the other vendors and their agents, for a while, would compete with CPU usage. And so it actually slowed down the machines. Because Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is built into the Windows product, Microsoft is going to ensure that it does not affect the other productivity tools that a user may use.
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Scalability
Cisco
So far, the only limits we've encountered were tied to our imagination. Duo's strong list of supported integrations is amazing.
Read full review
Microsoft
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is easily scaled from small orgs to giant enterprises.
Read full review
Return on Investment
Cisco
  • It's one of those things that only costs money in the sense of you have to convince a leadership team to spend money to save money, right? Like a compromise is far more expensive than duo paying for duo. So specifically it's really just about trying to prevent problems. And so while it costs money and we don't have a direct return on investment that we can point out immediately, I would still always advocate for it just because it keeps security. Paying for security is cheaper than getting compromised essentially.
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Microsoft
  • Reduced incidents of security breaches lead to lower remediation costs and avoid potential financial losses and reputational damage.
  • Reduces the need for additional third-party security solutions and training, thereby lowering overall security management costs.
  • Increased efficiency and productivity of IT staff lead to better allocation of resources and cost savings.
  • Reduces the risk of fines and sanctions associated with non-compliance, ensuring business continuity and protecting revenue.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Screenshots

Screenshot of blocked activitiesScreenshot of Detects & respondsScreenshot of discovers vulnerabilityScreenshot of Eliminates blind spotsScreenshot of Risk management