CrowdStrike vs. Palo Alto Networks
Don’t settle for a high cost platform that’s hard to use, hard to deploy, and hard to manage.
Why customers choose CrowdStrike vs. Palo Alto Networks
Hard to use, weakly connected point products
Palo Alto Networks offers a platform of disjointed security modules spread across multiple consoles and interfaces, causing usability challenges and coverage gaps. With five separate consoles across Cortex and Prisma Cloud, each with unique workflows, SOC analysts face decreased productivity as they juggle multiple UIs.
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CrowdStrike difference
CrowdStrike consolidates cybersecurity to reduce complexity and maximize SOC productivity through a unified platform with a single agent, single console architecture, and cross-product data sharing across endpoints, identities, cloud workloads, and data, leading to 2x more effective security teams, and 66% faster investigations.1
Hard to deploy, hard to maintain
With Palo Alto Networks, customers deal with multiple agents, significant endpoint resource consumption, reboots on deployment for full exploit protection, excessive tuning, and a faulty automated update process that forces customers to deploy updates manually. This dramatically increases operational burden and lengthens deployment time.
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CrowdStrike difference
CrowdStrike’s single, lightweight agent deploys to thousands of endpoints in seconds, with no reboots required for full protection. This simplifies the deployment process and allows customers to focus on what matters most: stopping breaches. There's no required tuning and all agents update automatically, reducing the operational load for customers.
High cost platform
The total cost of ownership (TCO) of managing disjointed, lagging products far surpasses the initial licensing fee, despite any “free” offers from Palo Alto Networks. Complex initial configuration, cumbersome operations, and usability challenges inflate the TCO, compelling customers to invest in costly professional services or to hire more staff to manage the platform.
See the CrowdStrike difference
CrowdStrike difference
The CrowdStrike Falcon® platform saves customers time and money. It’s easy to deploy and operate, featuring a revolutionary single agent, simplified operations, and a user-friendly unified console across endpoints, identities, cloud workloads, and data. Customers can free up already burdened staff to focus on security, not IT operations.
Proven by MITRE
CrowdStrike is the only vendor to score highest in each of the most recent MITRE detection tests - one open-book and one closed-book - scoring 100% in Enterprise Round 5, and 99% in Managed Security Services Providers.
Figure 1. CrowdStrike detects 143 (100%) steps during the MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK Evaluation: Enterprise Round 5 with high-quality analytics (Tactic and Technique). Updated November 2023. Source
Figure 2. CrowdStrike detected 99% of adversary techniques during MITRE ATT&CK Evaluations for Managed Security Services Providers. Source
Compare CrowdStrike to Palo Alto Networks
Palo Alto Networks
Endpoint Security
Architected for modern endpoint security
CrowdStrike dominated the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms, named a “Leader” and positioned best for Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute. CrowdStrike’s single lightweight agent and fully automated updates streamline deployment and operations, and ensure no performance impacts.
Palo Alto Networks
Poor architecture prevents effective endpoint security
Palo Alto Networks has made a series of poor architecture decisions that hinders endpoint security effectiveness. The Cortex agent consumes a significant amount of RAM and disk space that bogs down customer endpoints, has high network bandwidth requirements, requires reboots on deployment for full exploit protection, and has a faulty automated update process.
Identity Protection
Leading AI-powered identity threat protection
CrowdStrike delivers 85% faster detection of identity attacks using an anomaly detection engine that compares live traffic against behavior baselines and policies2. Customers can leverage an array of responses, such as enforcing MFA and password resets, to prevent threats in real-time, not just detect them, all delivered in a unified agent.
Palo Alto Networks
Identity protection that can’t stop attacks
Palo Alto Network’s Identity Threat Module is “detect-only” with no ability to block or prevent on-going threats. It lacks critical response capabilities like risk-based access controls and step-up MFA enforcement of legacy apps, and has a complex installation process that requires a separate Cloud Identity Engine and agent.
Cloud Security
Pre-built cloud detections and automated alert correlation
CrowdStrike Falcon® Cloud Security includes a comprehensive set of pre-built runtime detections, on-sensor machine learning, and fully integrated threat intelligence. SOC analysts benefit from better out of the box detections and alert context all in a unified console with other CrowdStrike modules, enabling enhanced protection and rapid investigation.
Palo Alto Networks
Cloud security that struggles out of the box
Prisma Cloud relies on static behavioral baselines for detection, leaving customers vulnerable to breach for 24 hours after any new workload is deployed. Since these baselines don't automatically update, customers need to manually tune the baselines to weed out both false positives and false negatives.
Log Management / SIEM
Unmatched speed and performance at better cost
Built for the speed and scalability requirements of the modern SOC, CrowdStrike Falcon® Next-Gen SIEM lets you stop breaches with real-time alerting, blazing-fast search, and world-class threat intelligence. LogScale ingests petabytes of data with sub-second latency, all at a cheaper cost than competing SIEM solutions.
Palo Alto Networks
XSIAM can’t effectively address SIEM use cases
XSIAM struggles to address traditional SIEM use cases, with slow search speeds, limited data visualization options, and an arduous data onboarding process. Their “automation” is nothing more than standard SOAR playbooks that require extensive manual configuration and on-going maintenance, or expensive professional services.
Managed Services
Industry-leading managed detection and response
CrowdStrike is the #1 leader in MDR by market share (Gartner). Our service delivers end-to-end response to conclusively remediate attacks, with zero customer handoffs that waste time and increase risk. We also manage identity, cloud and platform/agent maintenance, closing the skills gaps for our customers.
Palo Alto Networks
Incomplete MDR leaves you with homework
Palo Alto Networks’ MDR only offers basic remediation through standard agent actions unless licensed for costly IR hours, putting the burden on the customer to fully mitigate attacks. Any remediation beyond basic endpoint response is limited to guidance, not action. Palo Alto Networks’ MDR also provides no platform/agent maintenance, and cannot respond to identity-based threats.
Threat Intelligence
Global leader in threat intelligence
Fully integrated, world-class threat intelligence enables SOC analysts to do their jobs faster and more effectively. Leverage a list of recently published IOCs, adversary attribution, and an automated malware sandbox, all within a single user interface. 230+ adversaries tracked, 200k new IOCs published per day.
Palo Alto Networks
Ineffective threat intel provides little context to analysts
Palo Alto Networks’ threat intel lacks adversary profiles, and fails to provide meaningful alert context to SOC analysts. Even with Autofocus, customers only get adversary attribution, but no robust adversary information or profiles to help aid SOC analyst investigations and enhance productivity.
Data Protection
A modern approach to effortlessly stop data theft
Built on CrowdStrike’s single unified agent, CrowdStrike Falcon® Data Protection reliably detects and prevents the movement of sensitive data by combining both content and context across endpoints, identities, data, and egress channels.
Palo Alto Networks
Network-based data protection creates visibility gaps
Palo Alto Networks' data loss prevention technology is network-based only, with no ability to reliably detect and prevent sensitive data egress from endpoints, particularly for endpoints not connected to corporate networks.
Leadership validated by industry analysts
More than 23,000 customers trust CrowdStrike to protect what matters most
Ericsson
"We work with partners like CrowdStrike to help us handle the volume…to do threat hunting together with us."
Jan Willekens, Head of Cyber Defense
Ericsson
Aspen Skiing Company
"One of the benefits we've seen with the CrowdStrike and Netskope integration is we get to share intelligence across those two platforms. Which I think is really important. The sharing of security intelligence is key to helping to protect everyone."
Duane Monroe, Manager Cyber Security
Aspen Skiing Company
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1 IDC Study: The Business Value of the CrowdStrike Falcon® XDR Platform
2 Results are from customer Business Value Assessments against various incumbent solutions. Individual results may vary.