Microsoft Defender for Business vs. SentinelOne Singularity

Microsoft Defender for Business is well suited for small and medium businesses that are running on a smaller budget, with little to no IT department and require a quick and effective setup to manage and protect their endpoints. It can be deployed and managed very quickly, and the person doing it can have little to no experience as long as they follow directions.

Incentivized

It works extremely well for investigating the root cause analysis of events because you can see so much detail into what was happening before, after, and around the detective incident. A weak point would be when the AI gets a little over-aggressive or doesn’t quite understand the use case for specific tools. Our RMM tool was detected as a pup.

• Already integrated with Windows
• Allows for folder and executable-specific exceptions when combined with Intune.
• Incident response and analytics are fantastic.

Incentivized

• Installs on all of our Windows machines and only requires 1 reboot for the install to finish.
• It allows you to customize the UI and filters based on your use case.
• Gives a very high level of visibility into any concerns you have or should have in your network.

Incentivized

• Confusion between the different Defender products
• Ease of setup and configuration
• Reporting and Alerts

Incentivized

• Possibly for compatibility with legacy Windows OS's and non Windows OS's.
• Some settings are greyed out and unable to change but I believe this is to protect you from making a bad configuration change.
• Could do better with reporting at the base level subscription.

Incentivized

So far we have found no alternative that would overall offer us more than we are getting from Microsoft Defender for Business!

Incentivized

Reliable for simple installation and above all efficient

Incentivized

Microsoft Defender for Business is a solid tool for smaller businesses looking to manage their endpoints and devices, while staying on budget. The setup is minimal compared to the full-blown InTune and EMS suite, and the product can be included in some Small Business SKUs that they may already have.

Incentivized

There are some minor issues with the platform that can be mildly frustrating, but the overall performance, peace of mind, and ROI make it worth using. The management console is intuitive and easy to learn, the endpoint clients are simple but give IT professionals enough data to make management easy and simple

Incentivized

Their support is good and quick to respond. The one issue we faced was when a non-protection issue arose there was a lot of dancing around trying to figure things out. This was frustrating as it took significantly longer to figure out issues. Lots of repetitive log gathers, screen caps, uninstalls that never seemed to resolve issues. Eventually, the product would be updated and the issue seemed to be resolved, but seemed to be the only solution.

Incentivized

Microsoft Defender for Business has better reporting and incident response. There is limited client rollout due to being integrated with Windows. Microsoft Defender for Business is much better at identifying asset risks and giving a broad security overview. Because we moved to Microsoft 365 to access the Office applications and Exchange online, Microsoft Defender for Business was essentially cost free to us. Where Microsoft Defender for Business falls short in comparison to Sophos is that it requires integration with Intune to enforce many of the physical controls that Sophos offers in their client.

Incentivized

SentinelOne had all of the major features that we were looking for. The other products either required too much administrative attention or were lacking key features. For example, one could be uninstalled by the end user. We required that the installation be password protected to protect against end user disabling or uninstalling. One product required manual intervention for all remediation which put to high a burden on limited staff. All products are always being revised so these may no longer be issues but they had a significant impact on our decision.

Incentivized

• Improved cybersecurity
• Learning curve
• Resource consumption

Incentivized

• SentinelOne has already proved its value by stopping attacks that would have gone otherwise unnoticed until much later in their infection process.
• The Vigilance team has provided quick response to threats that were not easily contained via the automated response SentinelOne's agents provide. This has given us a significant piece of mind.

Incentivized