CrowdStrike vs SentinelOne vs Defender EDR Compared 2026

A run of actively exploited zero-days hit Cisco, Citrix and Adobe Commerce between September and October 2026, and the Australian Cyber Security Centre has been pushing out advisories at a pace most IT teams have not seen in years. Against that backdrop, a lot of Australian businesses are reopening a question they thought they had settled: which endpoint detection and response platform actually catches the next attack, and which one just has the best marketing deck. This comparison lines up CrowdStrike Falcon, SentinelOne Singularity and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint on pricing, independent test results, platform coverage and real incidents, so the decision is based on numbers rather than vendor slides.

All three remain the dominant names in endpoint detection and response for mid-size and enterprise Australian organisations in October 2026, but they solve the problem in different ways and at very different price points. CrowdStrike leans on a specialist cloud-native sensor and a widely cited MITRE evaluation claim. SentinelOne sells autonomous, no-human-needed remediation as its headline differentiator. Microsoft bundles endpoint defence into licensing many businesses already own. None of that matters if the platform cannot stop what is currently hitting Australian networks, so this piece treats the September-October 2026 exploit wave as the test case throughout.

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Why Endpoint Security Is Back in the Spotlight for Australian Businesses

The timing of this comparison is not an accident. Microsoft’s September 2026 Patch Tuesday addressed 974 individual defects across its product line, including two vulnerabilities that attackers were already exploiting in the wild before the patch shipped. Cisco separately warned customers about an actively exploited zero-day in its Secure Email Gateway product the same month, and a static-credential flaw tracked as CVE-2026-20316 in Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center was also confirmed under active attack. Citrix confirmed two exploited zero-days in NetScaler ADC and Gateway, CVE-2026-88771 and CVE-2026-88772, both carrying a CVSS v4 score of 9.5, with CVE-2026-88771 described as an unauthenticated remote-code-execution flaw.

Separately, attackers were reported to be exploiting an Adobe Commerce and Magento zero-day nicknamed StyleSmuggler to inject PHP code through the platform’s template system, deliberately hiding the payload inside style properties to dodge detection and backdoor online stores. The Australian Signals Directorate’s Cyber Security Centre has been advising organisations through its alerts and advisories page to assess exposure to a separate critical flaw, CVE-2026-63077, rated 9.8 in severity. None of these flaws live on the endpoint itself, but every one of them becomes an endpoint problem the moment an attacker pivots from a compromised server or gateway onto a workstation, which is exactly where EDR and XDR platforms are supposed to pick up the trail.

There is also a data breach dimension driving the renewed interest. Education technology company Mathspace disclosed a breach affecting roughly 1.08 million students, carers and staff across Australia and New Zealand after attackers exploited an unpatched, self-hosted Metabase instance to gain administrator access without needing legitimate credentials. The exposed data included names, email addresses, usernames, account types and countries, though not passwords, which security teams have flagged as prime material for convincing phishing campaigns against the same population. It is the kind of incident that pushes IT leaders to ask whether their current endpoint tooling would have even seen the lateral movement that typically follows an admin-panel compromise like this one.

EDR vs XDR: What Each Term Actually Covers

Endpoint detection and response, or EDR, is software that watches activity on a laptop, server or virtual machine, flags suspicious behaviour and gives a security team the tools to isolate or remediate the device. Extended detection and response, or XDR, takes the same detection logic and correlates it across endpoints, identity systems, email, cloud workloads and network telemetry, so an analyst sees one attack chain instead of five disconnected alerts. All three platforms Market themselves as XDR to some degree now, but the depth of that correlation differs sharply depending on how much of an organisation’s stack already sits inside the vendor’s own ecosystem.

This distinction matters commercially as well as technically. CrowdStrike and SentinelOne build XDR by pulling third-party telemetry into their own platform through integrations and partnerships. Microsoft builds XDR by correlating signals that are already flowing through products most Australian businesses already run, such as Entra ID, Microsoft 365 and Defender for Cloud. Neither approach is universally better, but it changes what an organisation is actually buying when it picks one platform over another, and it is the single biggest factor behind the pricing gap covered later in this article.

CrowdStrike Falcon: Platform Overview

CrowdStrike Falcon is a cloud-native EDR and XDR platform built around a lightweight endpoint sensor and a single shared threat-intelligence graph across its customer base. The core EDR module is called Falcon Insight, and CrowdStrike’s detection approach is built on what it calls Indicators of Attack, a behavioural model designed to catch the techniques an attacker uses rather than waiting to match a known file signature. Beyond the base sensor, Falcon’s module lineup includes threat hunting, vulnerability management, identity protection and cloud workload security, all sold as add-ons layered onto the core platform.

For organisations that do not want to run detection and response in-house, CrowdStrike offers Falcon Complete, a fully managed detection and response service where CrowdStrike’s own analysts handle triage and containment. This is the tier most relevant to the current zero-day wave, since a managed service is specifically designed to catch and contain novel exploitation attempts in the window between disclosure and patching, rather than relying on an internal team to notice an unfamiliar technique at 2am. CrowdStrike positions Falcon toward organisations with a mature or at least functioning security operations capability, and pricing reflects that enterprise-first posture.

SentinelOne Singularity: Platform Overview

SentinelOne’s Singularity platform is built around autonomous detection and response, meaning the agent is designed to make containment decisions, such as killing a process or rolling back file changes, without waiting for a human analyst to approve the action first. That rollback capability is the platform’s clearest differentiator: where ransomware manages to execute before being blocked, Singularity is designed to reverse the file-level damage automatically, which is a meaningfully different value proposition from platforms that focus purely on prevention and detection.

SentinelOne’s tiers split prevention, device control, EDR and higher-order XDR response into separate licensing levels, Singularity Core through Singularity Complete, so the autonomous response and rollback features that get the most attention in marketing are only available on the higher tiers. The platform also includes Ranger for unmanaged device discovery on a network, identity and cloud-security extensions depending on licence, and a managed threat-hunting service called WatchTower for organisations that want expert oversight layered on top of the autonomous agent rather than instead of it.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint: Platform Overview

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is sold in two main tiers. Plan 1 covers next-generation antivirus and attack-surface-reduction rules, essentially hardening a device against common exploitation techniques. Plan 2 adds the actual EDR capability: automated investigation and remediation, threat intelligence feeds and vulnerability management. Both plans connect into Microsoft Defender XDR, which is where Microsoft’s pitch gets interesting for businesses already standardised on its ecosystem, because Defender XDR correlates endpoint signals with identity activity from Entra ID, email and collaboration signals from Microsoft 365, and cloud posture data from Defender for Cloud, all inside one console.

Microsoft also layers Security Copilot on top for AI-assisted investigation where an organisation has licensed it, and Microsoft Sentinel provides the SIEM and SOAR functionality many enterprises need to centralise logging and automate response playbooks across a wider estate than endpoints alone. Critically, a meaningful share of Defender for Endpoint’s capability is already included inside Microsoft 365 E5 and Business Premium bundles that many Australian organisations are paying for anyway, which is the main argument in Microsoft’s favour on total cost of ownership.

Specs Compared: CrowdStrike vs SentinelOne vs Microsoft Defender

The table below lines up the core technical specifications side by side. Operating-system and workload coverage can vary by specific SKU and version, so treat this as a starting point for a vendor conversation rather than a final procurement spec.

Capability	CrowdStrike Falcon	SentinelOne Singularity	Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Core EDR module name	Falcon Insight	Singularity EDR agent	Defender for Endpoint Plan 2
Detection approach	Indicators of Attack, behavioural AI	Behavioural AI and machine-learning engine	Next-gen antivirus plus cloud-delivered ML
Ransomware rollback	Via Falcon modules and partner integrations	Native autonomous rollback on higher tiers	Remediation via automated investigation, not native file rollback
Windows support	Yes	Yes	Yes, native
macOS support	Yes	Yes	Yes
Linux support	Yes, broad enterprise distro coverage	Yes, distro and version dependent	Yes, distro and version dependent
Mobile coverage	Via adjacent Falcon and identity modules	Depends on licensed Singularity modules	Strong, via Intune integration
Cloud workload protection	Falcon Cloud Security	Singularity Cloud Security	Defender for Cloud / Defender for Servers
Identity protection module	Falcon Identity Protection	Singularity Identity	Native via Microsoft Entra ID integration
Managed detection and response	Falcon Complete	WatchTower	Via Microsoft or third-party MDR partners
SIEM/SOAR pairing	Third-party or Falcon LogScale	Third-party SIEM integrations	Microsoft Sentinel
AI-assisted investigation	Falcon-native analyst tooling	Singularity AI-driven workflows	Microsoft Security Copilot, licensed separately
Deployment model	Cloud-managed sensor, no on-prem console in standard SaaS	Cloud-managed agent and console	Built-in or deployed agent, Microsoft-managed portal

Pricing Compared: What Australian Businesses Actually Pay

Pricing is where the three platforms diverge the most, and it is also where buyers get tripped up, because Microsoft prices per user while CrowdStrike and SentinelOne price per device or endpoint. A single Microsoft 365 user licence can cover several devices, so a straight per-seat comparison understates what Microsoft actually delivers for the money. The figures below are published list prices and widely cited reseller estimates in US dollars, converted to an approximate Australian dollar figure at roughly A$1.50 to US$1. Actual Australian invoices will differ once GST, minimum endpoint commitments, support tiers and negotiated enterprise discounts are applied, so treat this table as a budgeting starting point rather than a quote.

Vendor	Tier	Indicative USD price	Approx. AUD equivalent	What it includes
CrowdStrike Falcon	Falcon Go	~US$59.99/device/year	~A$90/device/year	Entry-level next-gen antivirus for small teams
CrowdStrike Falcon	Falcon Pro	~US$99.99/device/year	~A$150/device/year	Adds EDR and improved threat intelligence
CrowdStrike Falcon	Falcon Enterprise	~US$184.99/device/year	~A$277/device/year	Full EDR/XDR with threat hunting add-ons available
CrowdStrike Falcon	Falcon Complete (MDR)	Quote-based	Quote-based	Fully managed detection and response by CrowdStrike analysts
SentinelOne Singularity	Core	~US$69.99/endpoint/year	~A$105/endpoint/year	Prevention-focused AI antivirus replacement
SentinelOne Singularity	Control	~US$79.99/endpoint/year	~A$120/endpoint/year	Adds device control and firewall management
SentinelOne Singularity	Complete	~US$179.99/endpoint/year	~A$270/endpoint/year	Full EDR/XDR, autonomous response and rollback
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint	Plan 1	~US$3/user/month	~A$4.50/user/month	Next-gen antivirus and attack-surface reduction
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint	Plan 2	~US$5.20/user/month	~A$7.80/user/month	Adds EDR, automated investigation and remediation
Microsoft Defender for Business	Standalone SMB tier	~US$3/user/month	~A$4.50/user/month	SMB-focused Defender capability outside E5/Business Premium

The practical read on these numbers is straightforward. For an Australian business already paying for Microsoft 365 E5 or Business Premium, a meaningful chunk of Defender for Endpoint’s cost is sunk already, making the effective incremental spend far lower than the list price suggests. For a 200-device fleet, Falcon Enterprise at roughly A$277 per device per year works out to around A$55,400 annually before any MDR add-on, compared with SentinelOne Complete at around A$54,000 for the same fleet size, and a Defender Plan 2 deployment that, for an organisation already licensed for Microsoft 365 E5, may add close to nothing in incremental software cost. That gap is the reason Microsoft’s share of the endpoint security market has grown so quickly, a point covered in the market data section further down.

Total Cost of Ownership: Three Example Australian Businesses

Published per-device pricing only tells part of the story, because the real cost of an EDR platform includes what an organisation already owns and how much internal staff time it will consume. These three scenarios, built from the pricing tiers above, show how the total cost of ownership shifts depending on starting point rather than vendor alone.

A 50-person Sydney accounting firm already paying for Microsoft 365 Business Premium is close to the best-case scenario for Defender for Endpoint, since the EDR capability included in that bundle adds close to zero incremental software spend. The same firm choosing SentinelOne Core instead would add roughly A$5,250 a year in new licensing on top of the Microsoft 365 subscription it is already paying for, for a tool that still needs someone on staff to action its alerts manually unless a higher tier or a managed add-on is purchased.

A 250-device Melbourne manufacturer running a largely non-Microsoft stack, with on-site industrial control systems and a mixed Windows and Linux server estate, is a different calculation entirely. Here, Defender’s bundling advantage mostly disappears, because the organisation is not already paying for the Microsoft 365 licensing that makes Defender look cheap elsewhere. In that scenario, SentinelOne Complete at roughly A$270 per endpoint per year, or around A$67,500 annually for the fleet, starts to look more competitive against Falcon Enterprise’s roughly A$69,250 for the same device count, with the final decision coming down to whether the manufacturer’s small IT team can operate CrowdStrike’s deeper module set or needs SentinelOne’s more autonomous posture instead.

A 1,200-seat Brisbane health provider running a 24/7 security operations centre sits at the opposite end of the spectrum again. At this scale, the per-device cost gap between vendors, potentially more than A$200,000 a year between Defender and Falcon Enterprise across the full fleet, is weighed against what the SOC team can actually extract from each platform’s threat hunting, identity protection and managed response modules. For an organisation handling sensitive patient data and facing the kind of application-layer attacks seen in the Mathspace breach, the calculation often shifts toward whichever platform the existing SOC staff already have the deepest operational experience running, since familiarity during an active incident tends to matter more than a marginal percentage difference in a lab test.

How Each Platform Would Handle an Active Zero-Day Exploit

The September and October 2026 exploitation wave against Cisco, Citrix and Adobe Commerce is a useful stress test for thinking through how each platform actually behaves once an attacker is past the network perimeter, since none of the three EDR vendors Control the vulnerable product itself. A flaw like the Citrix NetScaler remote-code-execution bug or the Adobe Commerce StyleSmuggler campaign gives an attacker a foothold on a server or gateway, not a user endpoint, which means the EDR platform’s job starts the moment that attacker tries to move laterally, drop a second-stage payload or harvest credentials from a connected workstation.

CrowdStrike’s pitch in this scenario rests on its Indicators of Attack model, which is designed to flag the behavioural signature of lateral movement, such as unusual process spawning or credential access attempts, rather than waiting for a known malware signature tied to a specific exploit. SentinelOne’s autonomous response model is built to react once malicious behaviour is actually detected on the endpoint, automatically killing the process and rolling back any file changes without waiting for an analyst, which matters most in organisations that cannot guarantee a human will be watching the console in real time overnight. Microsoft Defender’s advantage in this exact scenario is correlation: because Defender XDR already ties endpoint signals to Entra ID sign-in activity and Microsoft 365 behaviour, a compromised account trying to access unusual resources after a server-side breach is more likely to get flagged through identity telemetry even before the endpoint agent itself fires an alert, provided the organisation’s identity infrastructure genuinely runs through Microsoft.

None of this is a substitute for patching the underlying Cisco, Citrix or Adobe Commerce vulnerability in the first place. Every vendor Would describe their platform as a second line of defence for exactly this kind of attack chain, not a replacement for timely patch management, and the ACSC’s own advisory guidance treats vendor patching as the primary mitigation with EDR and XDR coverage as the backstop for the gap between disclosure and a fully patched estate.

MITRE ATT&CK, AV-Comparatives and Independent Benchmark Results

Benchmark claims in endpoint security are notoriously hard to compare cleanly, because vendors interpret the same underlying test data differently, and MITRE itself does not publish a single winner. With that caveat upfront, here is what the available 2025 and 2026 evaluation data actually shows.

CrowdStrike has published the most aggressive claim from the 2025 MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise Evaluation round, stating it achieved 100% detection and 100% protection with zero false positives under its own interpretation of the results. CrowdStrike has separately cited a 97.7% detection coverage figure and a four-minute mean time to detect for its managed-services evaluation, though both of these are vendor-presented figures rather than numbers published independently by MITRE itself. Reporting on how SentinelOne and Microsoft Defender fared in the same evaluation round was inconsistent across sources at the time of writing, with some material suggesting one or both vendors did not field a directly comparable public submission for that round, which makes a clean three-way MITRE scorecard impossible to state with confidence right now. Buyers evaluating MITRE claims should ask vendors for the underlying technique-level data rather than accepting a single marketing percentage.

Independent malware-protection testing tells a narrower but more trustworthy story. A March 2025 enterprise malware-protection comparison test found both Microsoft Defender and CrowdStrike achieving 99.3% protection rates with zero false alarms in that specific test configuration, effectively a tie between the two on raw malware-blocking ability under those test conditions. No directly comparable independent AV-Comparatives or AV-TEST score for SentinelOne was available from the same testing round, which is itself a useful data point: SentinelOne’s marketing leans much harder on MITRE and analyst commentary than on traditional antivirus-style lab testing.

Customer satisfaction data offers a third angle. Gartner Peer Insights, which aggregates verified customer reviews rather than analyst scoring, has shown CrowdStrike rated around 4.7 out of 5, SentinelOne around 4.6 out of 5 and Microsoft Defender around 4.4 out of 5 in recent comparison summaries. These are customer satisfaction scores, not Gartner Magic Quadrant positions, and should be read as a signal of day-to-day usability and support experience rather than a detection-efficacy ranking.

Real-World Incidents Shaping EDR Buying Decisions in 2026

Numbers on a spec sheet only matter if they hold up against actual attacks, so here are the incidents currently driving Australian procurement conversations around endpoint security.

The Mathspace breach. Roughly 1.08 million students, carers and staff across Australia and New Zealand had personal data exposed after attackers exploited an unpatched self-hosted Metabase instance to gain administrator access without stolen credentials, a reminder that application-layer compromises routinely become the opening move for an endpoint-targeted follow-up attack.
The Citrix NetScaler zero-days. CVE-2026-88771 and CVE-2026-88772 were both confirmed exploited in the wild, with CVE-2026-88771 allowing unauthenticated remote code execution against internet-facing Citrix gateways, the kind of foothold that typically precedes lateral movement onto internal endpoints.
The Cisco Secure Email Gateway zero-day. Cisco’s September 2026 warning about active exploitation of this product shows how email security infrastructure, not just the inbox client, has become a direct entry point for attackers trying to bypass endpoint controls entirely.
The Adobe Commerce StyleSmuggler campaign. Attackers used a zero-day in Adobe Commerce and Magento to inject PHP code through the platform’s own template system, deliberately hiding the payload inside style properties to avoid triggering standard detection signatures, a technique that specifically targets the blind spots of signature-based tools.
Microsoft’s September 2026 Patch Tuesday. With 974 individual defects addressed in a single release, including two zero-days already under active exploitation, the sheer volume illustrates why automated, behaviour-based detection on the endpoint matters more than ever, since no patching cadence can close every gap before an opportunistic attacker finds it.
The CrowdStrike July 2024 outage. A faulty content update caused widespread Windows system crashes across CrowdStrike’s customer base, and while it predates this comparison window, it remains the defining trust event for the entire EDR category. It is the reason every serious EDR evaluation in 2026 now includes questions about staged rollout controls, canary deployment rings and emergency rollback procedures, regardless of which vendor is being considered.

None of these incidents definitively prove that one of the three platforms Would have stopped or missed a given attack, since publicly available reporting does not include that level of per-vendor forensic detail. What they do prove is that the threat environment driving 2026 EDR purchases is defined by zero-day exploitation of edge infrastructure and SaaS platforms, not just endpoint malware, which should shape how heavily a buyer weighs XDR correlation versus pure endpoint detection.

What Analysts and Market Data Say

Market share data gives a useful reality check against vendor marketing, because it reflects what organisations are actually buying rather than what a platform claims it can do. According to IDC’s Worldwide Modern Endpoint Security Market Shares report, “Microsoft Defender accounted for 28.6% of the worldwide modern endpoint security market in 2024,” making it the largest single vendor by share in that category. That growth has been rapid: Microsoft’s own security team noted in its 2024 ranking announcement that “Microsoft Defender held more than 25.8% of the worldwide modern endpoint security market in 2023, representing a 40.7% increase in share from the previous year.”

CrowdStrike, while still a major player, trails Microsoft on this specific measure. Reporting on the same IDC dataset, as covered by CRN, put it plainly: “Microsoft’s 2024 modern endpoint security market share was 28.6%, compared with 16.8% for CrowdStrike.” That is a significant gap, and it is consistent with Microsoft’s pricing advantage for organisations that are already inside its licensing ecosystem rather than evaluating endpoint security as a standalone purchase.

Independent analyst evaluation confirms all three vendors remain in the top tier of the category on technical merit, separate from market share. Forrester’s own announcement of its most recent XDR evaluation round noted that “The Forrester Wave evaluated 11 extended detection and response platform vendors, including CrowdStrike, Microsoft, and SentinelOne, across 22 criteria in 2024.” The takeaway for buyers is that market share and technical capability are two different measurements, and a smaller market share for CrowdStrike and SentinelOne reflects pricing and packaging dynamics as much as it reflects any gap in detection capability.

Pros and Cons of Each Platform

CrowdStrike Falcon

Strongest publicly cited MITRE evaluation claims among the three platforms in this comparison
Deep module ecosystem covering identity, cloud workloads, vulnerability management and threat hunting under one platform
Falcon Complete offers fully managed detection and response for organisations without a mature internal SOC
Premium pricing, with Falcon Enterprise running roughly three to four times the cost of Microsoft’s base EDR tier
Still operating under the shadow of the July 2024 global outage, which continues to surface in procurement risk assessments

SentinelOne Singularity

Autonomous rollback is a genuinely distinct capability for organisations without 24/7 SOC coverage
Mid-point pricing between Microsoft and CrowdStrike on a per-endpoint basis
Strong Gartner Peer Insights customer satisfaction scores
Less independent AV-lab testing data publicly available compared with Microsoft and CrowdStrike
Full XDR and autonomous response features are gated behind the higher Complete tier, inflating the realistic entry price

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

Lowest incremental cost for organisations already licensed for Microsoft 365 E5 or Business Premium
Largest market share of the three by a wide margin, meaning the broadest base of real-world deployment feedback
Deepest native correlation with identity (Entra ID), email and SaaS signals for Microsoft-centric organisations
Lowest Gartner Peer Insights customer satisfaction score of the three, though still a respectable result
Best results generally require genuine Microsoft-stack investment; value drops for organisations running mixed or non-Microsoft environments

Which Platform Fits Which Business: Five Use Cases

Rather than naming a single universal winner, the right platform depends heavily on an organisation’s existing stack, SOC maturity and risk tolerance. These five scenarios cover the most common Australian buying situations in late 2026.

Small business already on Microsoft 365 Business Premium. Defender for Business or the Defender capability bundled into Business Premium is almost always the most economical starting point, since identity, email and device management are typically Microsoft-based already.
SMB with no dedicated SOC staff wanting the lowest-touch ransomware protection. SentinelOne Complete’s autonomous rollback reduces how much an under-resourced IT team needs to actively monitor and manually respond to an in-progress ransomware event.
Enterprise with a mature 24/7 SOC and heavy third-party infrastructure. CrowdStrike Falcon Enterprise or Complete tends to justify its premium where threat hunting, identity protection and cloud workload coverage are all being used actively rather than left idle.
Regulated organisations needing managed detection with minimal internal headcount. Falcon Complete or SentinelOne’s WatchTower MDR service both suit organisations that need expert-level response capability without hiring a large internal team.
Enterprises fully standardised on Microsoft identity and cloud infrastructure. Defender XDR paired with Microsoft Sentinel generally delivers the broadest signal correlation at the lowest incremental licensing cost for organisations in this category, provided the internal team has genuine Microsoft security engineering depth.

Migration Guide: Switching EDR Platforms Without Opening a Gap

Swapping endpoint security platforms is one of the highest-risk changes an IT team can make, precisely because the transition window is when an organisation is most exposed. The steps below reflect standard practice for a controlled EDR migration, informed directly by the lessons of the 2024 CrowdStrike outage around staged rollout and rollback discipline.

Audit the existing endpoint inventory first. Confirm exactly which devices, server roles and operating system versions are in scope, and flag any legacy systems that may not support the new agent.
Run the new agent in passive or audit mode alongside the existing tool. Most EDR agents can coexist temporarily in a non-blocking mode, letting the team compare detection output before cutting over.
Pilot on a small, low-risk device group first. Start with a single department or test ring rather than deploying organisation-wide on day one, mirroring the staged-rollout controls every major vendor now emphasises after 2024.
Validate detection coverage with controlled test files and a tabletop exercise. Confirm the new platform actually fires alerts as expected before trusting it in production, and walk the SOC team through a simulated incident in the new console.
Migrate exclusions, policies and SIEM/SOAR integrations deliberately. Copying exclusion lists across blindly from the old platform can recreate old blind spots in the new one.
Expand the rollout in rings, monitoring each wave before moving to the next. This limits the blast radius of any unexpected agent conflict, performance issue or policy misconfiguration.
Keep dual telemetry for 30 to 60 days where licensing allows. Running both platforms in read-only mode briefly after cutover helps catch any coverage gap before fully decommissioning the old agent.
Decommission the old agent and licence only after a full reporting cycle has passed cleanly. This typically means at least one full patch cycle and one simulated incident response drill on the new platform.

Deployment Models and Platform Support

All three vendors run a cloud-managed, agent-based model as the standard deployment path, which is worth understanding before assuming an on-premises console option exists. CrowdStrike’s sensor is lightweight by design and reports into CrowdStrike’s cloud console, with no conventional customer-hosted management server in the standard SaaS offering. SentinelOne follows the same pattern, with the Singularity agent reporting into a cloud-hosted console. Microsoft Defender is built into or deployed onto supported Windows systems natively, with separate agents or connectors for macOS, Linux, servers and other platforms, managed through Microsoft’s own security portals.

This shared cloud-dependent architecture across all three vendors is precisely why the CrowdStrike 2024 outage resonated so broadly across the industry rather than being dismissed as a single vendor’s problem. Every cloud-managed EDR platform carries some version of the same systemic risk: a bad update pushed to a privileged, kernel-level agent can cause operational damage at scale regardless of which vendor’s logo is on the console. Organisations with strict data-residency requirements, air-gapped networks or disconnected environments need to validate available government-cloud or limited-connectivity options separately with each vendor, since none of the three treat this as the default deployment path.

The Verdict: Our Pick for Australian Businesses in Late 2026

There is no single platform that wins on every measure And that is the honest conclusion rather than a hedge. On raw market adoption, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is the clear leader, holding 28.6% of the worldwide modern endpoint security market against CrowdStrike’s 16.8%, driven largely by bundling economics rather than a decisive capability gap. On independent malware-protection testing, Microsoft and CrowdStrike tied at 99.3% protection with zero false alarms in the most recent comparable test. On vendor-claimed MITRE evaluation results, CrowdStrike currently has the most aggressive public claim, though that figure comes from CrowdStrike’s own interpretation rather than an independent third-party scorecard.

For a typical Australian SMB already paying for Microsoft 365, Defender for Endpoint remains the rational default on cost alone, since the incremental spend on top of existing licensing is minimal. For a business without a 24/7 SOC that wants the strongest automatic containment story, SentinelOne Complete’s autonomous rollback is worth the mid-tier price premium. For an enterprise running a genuine security operations centre with the staff to use threat hunting, identity protection and managed response at full capacity, CrowdStrike Falcon Enterprise or Complete remains the most fully-featured specialist option, premium pricing and 2024 trust questions notwithstanding. Given the current wave of zero-day exploitation hitting Cisco, Citrix and Adobe Commerce, the single biggest factor that should influence any 2026 decision is not which vendor wins on a spec sheet, but which one an organisation’s existing team can actually operate at full capability during an active incident.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is better, CrowdStrike or SentinelOne?

Neither is universally better. CrowdStrike has the stronger publicly cited MITRE evaluation claim and a broader module ecosystem, while SentinelOne’s autonomous rollback gives under-resourced teams a stronger automatic containment story at a lower per-endpoint price than CrowdStrike’s top tiers. The right choice depends on SOC staffing and budget more than raw detection capability.

Is Microsoft Defender for Endpoint free?

No. Basic Windows Defender antivirus is free and built into Windows, but Defender for Endpoint, the enterprise EDR product covered Is a separate paid licence, priced at roughly US$3 per user per month for Plan 1 and US$5.20 for Plan 2, unless it is already bundled into a Microsoft 365 E5 or Business Premium subscription an organisation holds.

What is the MITRE ATT&CK Evaluation and why does it matter?

MITRE ATT&CK Evaluations are independent tests that simulate real attacker techniques against security products and publish the raw technique-level detection data. Vendors then interpret that raw data into their own marketing percentages, which is why two vendors can both claim strong results from the same evaluation round. Buyers should ask for the underlying technique-level breakdown rather than accepting a single headline number.

Is CrowdStrike safe to use after the July 2024 outage?

CrowdStrike remains one of the most widely deployed EDR platforms globally and continues to perform strongly in independent testing. The July 2024 outage was caused by a faulty content update rather than a security failure, and it pushed the entire industry, not just CrowdStrike, toward stronger staged-rollout and rollback controls. Organisations evaluating any EDR vendor in 2026 should specifically ask about canary deployment rings and emergency rollback procedures as standard due diligence.

How much does EDR cost for a small Australian business?

For a small business, Microsoft Defender for Business runs roughly A$4.50 per user per month, SentinelOne’s entry Core tier runs roughly A$105 per endpoint per year, and CrowdStrike’s entry Falcon Go tier runs roughly A$90 per device per year. These are indicative published list prices; actual Australian quotes will vary with GST, minimum device commitments and any bundled support.

Can I run two EDR agents on the same device at once?

Briefly, during a controlled migration, yes, most vendors support a temporary passive or audit mode specifically for this purpose. Running two EDR agents in full blocking mode simultaneously long-term is not recommended, since kernel-level agents from different vendors can conflict with each other and degrade system performance.

What is the difference between EDR and traditional antivirus?

Traditional antivirus mainly matches files against known malware signatures and blocks matches. EDR platforms add behavioural monitoring, investigation tooling and response actions such as isolating a device or rolling back changes, which is what allows them to catch novel attacks, like zero-day exploitation, that have no existing signature to match against.

Do these platforms protect Linux servers as well as Windows desktops?

All three vendors support Linux, but coverage depth varies by specific distribution and kernel version, and is generally less mature than their Windows coverage. Organisations running a Linux-heavy server estate should confirm exact distro and version support directly with each vendor before committing, rather than assuming parity with Windows support.

CrowdStrike vs SentinelOne vs Defender: 28.6% Share [2026]