Best EDR solutions in 2026: how the leading platforms compare

EDR buying guides often try to arrange every product into one neat top-10 list. That is convenient, but it is not especially useful.

A platform built for a global security operations center is solving a different problem from one designed for a five-person IT team. An MSP protecting hundreds of customer environments will have different priorities again. The best EDR solution is therefore not simply the one with the highest rating. It is the one that combines credible detection and response with an operating model your team can sustain.

Endpoint detection and response continuously monitors activity across laptops, workstations, servers and other protected workloads. It collects endpoint telemetry, identifies suspicious behavior, helps analysts reconstruct what happened and provides actions for containing or remediating an incident. That added visibility is particularly valuable when an attack does not resemble a conventional malicious file, as with credential abuse, fileless techniques, living-off-the-land activity and some zero-day exploitation.

This guide compares the EDR platforms most likely to appear on a 2026 shortlist. It draws on customer-review platforms, Info-Tech and SoftwareReviews data, independent security tests and MITRE ATT&CK evaluations rather than relying on vendor claims alone.

Readers who are still getting familiar with the category can start with our guide to how EDR works, including its architecture, telemetry, detection and response workflow. This article is about choosing a product; the companion guide explains the technology behind it.

There is no universal winner, but there are clear strengths across the current market:

• Best for large enterprises with a mature SOC: CrowdStrike Falcon
• Best for autonomous remediation and rollback: SentinelOne Singularity Endpoint
• Best for organizations already centered on Microsoft: Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
• Best for buyers placing significant weight on Gartner Peer Insights: Sophos Endpoint, powered by Intercept X
• Best for teams that want a fully managed EDR service: Huntress Managed EDR
• Highest 2026 Info-Tech composite score: ThreatDown EDR
• Best for MSPs that want EDR, backup and recovery in one platform: Acronis Cyber Platform (formerly Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud)

These are use-case recommendations rather than a single overall ranking. Review scores, technical tests and adversary emulations measure different things, and treating them as interchangeable creates a distorted picture.

Customer-review platforms are useful because they reveal what products are like to deploy and operate. They can surface recurring concerns about usability, support, licensing and performance that rarely appear in feature sheets. They do not, however, test whether a product will detect a particular attack.

G2 and Gartner Peer Insights also use different review populations, category definitions and scoring systems. Gartner explicitly says that Peer Insights content represents the opinions of individual users and should not be interpreted as a Gartner analyst endorsement.

Info-Tech’s Data Quadrant, powered by SoftwareReviews, takes a different approach. It aggregates verified end-user feedback into a composite score that covers areas such as likelihood to recommend, feature satisfaction, vendor capabilities and the customer’s emotional experience with the vendor. It creates a more normalized comparison, but it is still based on customer feedback rather than malware testing.

Technical laboratories such as AV-TEST, SE Labs and AVLab evaluate security products against defined test sets. Those results should always be attached to the product version, operating system, configuration and date of the test. A result from January 2025 cannot be treated as directly comparable with another vendor’s result from June 2026.

MITRE ATT&CK Evaluations provide another kind of evidence. MITRE emulates documented adversary behavior and publishes what participating products observed or prevented. It does not declare winners or produce a vendor leaderboard.

For that reason, the comparison below keeps these signals separate.

Ratings and review counts change over time. The G2 figures above are product-level ratings displayed in its current EDR category listings. A dash in the Info-Tech column means the product was not one of the six vendors named as a 2026 Data Quadrant Champion; it does not mean the product was absent from the broader market. MITRE participation is not a quality ranking.

CrowdStrike remains one of the default names on a large-enterprise EDR shortlist. Falcon combines endpoint telemetry, threat intelligence, investigation, real-time response and broader XDR capabilities through a cloud-native platform.

It scored 9.0 in Info-Tech’s 2026 Data Quadrant, placing second overall behind ThreatDown’s 9.1 and slightly ahead of Acronis at 8.9. It also has the largest Gartner Peer Insights review population among the directly comparable endpoint vendors discussed here, with a 4.7 rating across 3,112 reviews on the comparison page checked for this article.

CrowdStrike also took part in MITRE’s 2025 Enterprise evaluation. That round included scenarios inspired by Scattered Spider and Mustang Panda, including MITRE’s first attack emulation originating and operating within cloud infrastructure.

Falcon makes the most sense for organizations with analysts who can take advantage of its investigation depth, threat hunting and wider platform. Cost is the most common practical objection. G2’s category data includes “expensive” as a frequently cited concern, and the broader platform can be more than a lean IT team needs.

SentinelOne is closely associated with autonomous response. Its Storyline technology connects related endpoint events into an attack narrative, while supported response actions include remediation and rollback.

That makes it appealing to teams that want the platform to do more than raise an alert. It can help reduce the manual work involved in piecing together process activity, understanding an attack sequence and reversing malicious changes on supported endpoints.

SentinelOne holds a 4.7 rating across 2,883 Gartner Peer Insights reviews in the comparison checked for this guide. It did not participate in MITRE’s published 2025 Enterprise round, so there is no current result from that evaluation to compare with CrowdStrike, Sophos or Acronis.

The main buying question is not whether SentinelOne offers enough capability. It is whether the team has a clear plan for configuring automation, validating rollback behavior and managing the resulting platform. A proof of concept should include the operating systems and business applications that matter most, rather than relying on a generic demonstration.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is the natural starting point for organizations already using Windows, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Intune, Entra and the wider Defender security ecosystem.

Its strongest advantage is not simply that it is made by Microsoft. It is that endpoint incidents can sit within a wider operational context that includes identity, email, cloud applications and device management. Microsoft also provides automated investigation and remediation capabilities that can examine alerts and take supported response actions.

Defender for Endpoint scored 8.6 in Info-Tech’s 2026 Data Quadrant, placing it among the named Champions. Its current G2 category rating is 4.4 across 312 reviews, while the Gartner comparison page shows 4.4 across 1,942 reviews.

The economics can be attractive when the necessary capabilities are already included in the organization’s Microsoft licensing. That value becomes less straightforward when advanced features, data retention or adjacent Microsoft security services require additional licensing.

Buyers should also test the experience across macOS, Linux and any non-Microsoft infrastructure. A Microsoft-native environment is where Defender’s integrations are most compelling; a highly heterogeneous estate may place more weight on vendor-neutral workflows.

Sophos now presents the product as Sophos Endpoint, powered by Intercept X. It combines endpoint protection and EDR with technologies such as behavioral detection, exploit prevention and CryptoGuard ransomware protection and rollback.

Among the directly comparable Gartner endpoint pages in this guide, Sophos has the highest rating: 4.8 across 2,061 reviews. Its current G2 category rating is 4.7 across 837 reviews.

Sophos also participated in MITRE’s 2025 Enterprise evaluation. This gives buyers a current public adversary-emulation result to examine alongside those for Acronis and CrowdStrike, although MITRE does not turn those results into a ranking.

Sophos is particularly relevant for organizations prioritizing ransomware defenses or already using Sophos Central and related Sophos products. MSPs may also value the centralized service-provider model.

As with every endpoint agent, performance and compatibility should be tested on representative workloads. G2’s category summary includes slow performance among the recurring concerns raised by reviewers, so a pilot should include heavily used workstations and servers rather than a clean test image alone.

Huntress is different from a conventional self-operated EDR platform because the managed service is central to the product.

Its EDR technology is backed by a 24/7, human-led security operations center that investigates suspicious activity, filters noise and helps contain or remediate confirmed threats. For a small IT team, that changes the buying decision from “Which console can we operate?” to “Which provider can reliably help operate this for us?”

Huntress has the highest current G2 rating in the comparison table at 4.8 across 890 reviews. G2’s July 2026 editorial also identified it as the best fully managed detection and response option in its shortlist.

The service is a strong fit for SMBs, MSPs and organizations that cannot staff continuous security monitoring. It can also complement existing endpoint protection, including Microsoft Defender.

The tradeoff is control. Teams that want to own every detection rule, tuning decision and response workflow may prefer a self-managed platform. G2 reviewers have also raised limitations around reporting and exports, while minimum license commitments can matter for the smallest deployments.

ThreatDown deserves a place in the guide because it had the highest composite score in Info-Tech’s 2026 EDR Data Quadrant: 9.1.

That puts it ahead of CrowdStrike at 9.0, Acronis at 8.9 and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint at 8.6 in that specific user-feedback model. It also holds a 4.6 G2 rating across 1,089 reviews.

ThreatDown positions its EDR around simpler deployment and administration. Its Advanced EDR package includes endpoint detection and response, patch and firewall management, managed threat hunting and ransomware rollback. A managed detection and response tier adds continuous analyst monitoring.

This makes it especially relevant to small and midsize businesses that need more than antivirus but do not want to build an enterprise-scale security stack around the product.

Info-Tech’s result is a meaningful customer signal, but it should not be mistaken for a malware test. Buyers with complex enterprise environments should still validate integration depth, API coverage, data retention, reporting and support for specialized workloads.

Acronis takes a broader approach to endpoint security. Rather than positioning EDR as a separate managed service, it makes Acronis EDR available within Acronis Cyber Platform (formerly Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud), a multitenant platform designed around MSP operations. The platform brings together endpoint security, backup, disaster recovery and endpoint management instead of treating EDR as an isolated console.

That integration is the main reason Acronis belongs on this shortlist. It can reduce handoffs between security and data-protection workflows. Depending on the licensed services, protected workload and nature of the incident, an MSP can investigate and contain an endpoint threat, then use the relevant supported remediation, patching or backup-based recovery capabilities as appropriate.

The independent evidence is strong, although it does not show Acronis leading every category:

• Info-Tech named Acronis Cyber Platform a 2026 Data Quadrant Champion with an 8.9 composite score. That was 0.1 behind CrowdStrike, 0.2 behind ThreatDown and 0.3 ahead of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint.
• G2’s current small-business EDR listing shows Acronis Cyber Platform (formerly Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud) at 4.7 across 1,442 reviews.
• G2’s July 2026 editorial selected Acronis as the best option for integrated backup and endpoint security.
• Gartner Peer Insights shows Acronis Cyber Platform (formerly Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud) at 4.6 across 413 ratings.

The Gartner number needs context. Its Acronis page is an “All Markets” product profile that includes backup as a service, disaster recovery as a service and other markets. It is a useful indication of customer sentiment toward the wider platform, but it is not an EDR-only score that can be compared directly with Gartner’s endpoint protection pages.

Naming also varies by source. SoftwareReviews now calls the product Acronis Cyber Platform and notes that it was previously named Acronis Cyber Platform (formerly Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud). Acronis continues to use the Cyber Platform (formerly Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud) name for its service-provider platform and associated services.

Acronis is most compelling for MSPs and businesses that see cyber resilience as one workflow: prevent what can be prevented, detect what gets through, contain it and recover affected systems or data. A company seeking only a standalone EDR tool may prefer a more specialized endpoint vendor.

Customer reviews reveal how products feel to use. They do not tell you how a particular build performed against a particular attack set. That is where technical tests and adversary emulations add useful context.

Acronis, CrowdStrike and Sophos participated in MITRE’s 2025 Enterprise evaluation. The round included adversary behavior inspired by Scattered Spider and Mustang Panda, with scenarios covering identity abuse, cloud exploitation, persistence and espionage.

The Scattered Spider scenario marked the first time MITRE’s Enterprise evaluations included an attack originating and operating within cloud infrastructure. The round also added the ATT&CK Reconnaissance tactic.

MITRE states plainly that the evaluations do not rank vendors. The useful questions are more specific: What did the platform observe? What did it prevent? How much context did the analyst receive? Did the resulting alerts map to the attack techniques relevant to the organization?

Acronis Cyber Protect received six out of six points for protection, performance and usability in the February, April and June 2026 AV-TEST business Windows cycles. That produces an overall score of 18 out of 18 in each of those three cycles.

This is strong current evidence, but it should be described precisely. AV-TEST evaluated Acronis Cyber Protect on business Windows clients. The result is not a guarantee that every Acronis package, operating system or future release will produce identical results.

SE Labs tested Acronis Cyber Platform (formerly Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud) with the Advanced Security and XDR Pack in June 2025.

The tested configuration earned a AAA award with:

• 680 out of 680 for detection accuracy, or 100%
• 709 out of 742 for legitimate accuracy, or 96%
• 1,389 out of 1,422 for total accuracy, or 98%

This is a useful result for that specific configuration and test cycle. It should not be presented as a 2026 result or compared directly with another vendor tested against a different threat set.

In AVLab’s January 2025 Advanced In-the-Wild Malware Test, Acronis Cyber Protect blocked 759 of 759 samples.

That is a strong historical result, but January 2025 is now an older cycle. It should remain dated wherever it appears and should not be described as the latest independent Acronis result without a fresh check before publication.

The correct organization name is AVLab Cybersecurity Foundation, not “AVLabs.”

The 8.9 Info-Tech figure belongs to the published 2026 award cycle. The live SoftwareReviews product page changes as new reviews are added.

When checked on August 17, 2026, the live Acronis Cyber Platform scorecard showed:

• Composite score: 8.8 out of 10
• Customer experience score: 9.0 out of 10
• 46 reviews
• Likelihood to recommend: 91
• Plan to renew: 100

The source itself notes that live product scores can differ from the scores preserved in published awards. Both figures can be used, provided the article explains why they differ.

Acronis does not have the highest score in every source.

ThreatDown leads Info-Tech’s 2026 composite at 9.1. CrowdStrike follows at 9.0. Sophos has the highest comparable Gartner Peer Insights rating among the dedicated endpoint products discussed here, while CrowdStrike and SentinelOne each have larger endpoint-focused Gartner review populations than Acronis.

The Acronis case is therefore not “highest-rated standalone EDR everywhere.” Presenting it that way would undermine the stronger and more defensible argument.

Acronis earns its place through consolidation and recovery. For an MSP already delivering backup services, disaster recovery and endpoint management, bringing EDR into the same operational platform can reduce handoffs, fragmented policies and tool sprawl.

That distinction matters during an actual incident. Containing an endpoint is only one part of the job. The organization may still need to reverse malicious changes, restore files, recover a workload, patch the original weakness and document the work for the customer.

Dedicated endpoint vendors may provide greater standalone depth for a specialist SOC. Acronis is strongest when the buyer values a connected path from detection to recovery.

EDR pricing is rarely comparable at a glance.

A vendor may charge per endpoint, per server, per workload, per identity or by telemetry volume. Threat hunting, managed response, extended retention, cloud connectors, rollback and premium support may sit in separate packages. A low entry price can become much higher once the organization adds the capabilities it originally assumed were included.

Gartner describes Acronis Cyber Platform (formerly Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud) as a pay-as-you-go service. Costs can vary according to protected devices or workloads, storage consumption and selected services, with monthly and annual billing available.

That model gives MSPs flexibility when clients have different service needs. It is less immediately transparent than a single published per-endpoint price. TechRadar’s June 2026 endpoint-protection roundup placed Acronis fifth and highlighted its quick setup and broad feature set, while identifying complex pricing as a drawback.

Huntress emphasizes predictable managed-service pricing, although that remains a vendor positioning statement rather than an independent audit. G2’s editorial analysis notes that minimum license requirements can still affect the smallest deployments.

The fairest comparison is a complete operating-cost model. Ask each vendor to price the same environment and include:

• Workstations, servers and cloud workloads
• Endpoint and forensic-data retention
• EDR, XDR and identity or email integrations
• Managed detection and response
• Backup storage and recovery services
• Implementation, training and premium support
• Minimum commitments and overage charges

A product that costs more per endpoint may still cost less overall if it replaces other tools or reduces the amount of analyst time needed to operate them.

The first question is operational rather than technical.

Does the organization have a SOC that will monitor and investigate alerts? Will an MSP own the response? Is the team looking for a managed service that can take action outside business hours?

CrowdStrike, SentinelOne and Microsoft are commonly operated by internal security teams. Huntress is built around a managed SOC. Acronis supports both MSP-operated EDR and optional managed detection and response.

The best feature set will not help if nobody is available to investigate the alerts.

A controlled proof of concept should include the organization’s actual operating systems, business applications, administrative tools and remote-work patterns.

Pay particular attention to:

• Windows, macOS and Linux feature differences
• Endpoint CPU, memory, disk and network impact
• False positives involving legitimate scripts and administration tools
• Endpoint isolation behavior
• Rollback and recovery limitations
• Data retention and export
• API, SIEM and ticketing integrations

A polished dashboard demonstration cannot replace this work.

Ask the vendor to walk through a full attack chain.

How are related events grouped? Can an analyst see the parent and child processes, affected users, network connections and persistence changes? Does the platform explain why the behavior is suspicious? What response actions are available from the incident? Which actions are automatic, and which require approval?

The goal is not to generate the largest number of alerts. It is to give the operator enough context to make the right decision quickly.

A specialized EDR platform can provide deep investigation and threat-hunting capabilities. A consolidated platform can reduce the number of products, agents, portals and integrations the team must maintain.

Organizations that need correlation beyond the endpoint should also examine extended detection and response. MSPs may place additional value on connecting security with remote monitoring and management, backup and recovery.

Neither model is automatically better. The choice depends on whether specialist depth or operational simplicity creates more value for the organization.

Include the people required to run the platform, not just the software invoice.

A self-managed tool may require analyst coverage, threat hunting, rule tuning and integrations. A managed product may carry a higher license cost but reduce the staffing burden. A consolidated platform may replace separate backup, recovery, patching or endpoint-management tools.

The most useful pricing exercise is a three-year model covering software, storage, implementation, staffing and any tools being replaced.

The leading options include CrowdStrike Falcon, SentinelOne Singularity Endpoint, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Sophos Endpoint, Huntress Managed EDR, ThreatDown EDR and Acronis Cyber Platform (formerly Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud).

The best choice depends on who will operate the platform and what the organization already uses. CrowdStrike is a strong enterprise-SOC choice, SentinelOne emphasizes autonomous response, Microsoft fits Microsoft-centered environments, Huntress provides a managed operating model, ThreatDown leads Info-Tech’s 2026 customer composite and Acronis combines EDR with backup and recovery for MSPs.

An endpoint detection and response platform continuously collects selected activity from protected devices, analyzes that telemetry for suspicious behavior and gives security teams tools to investigate and respond.

Common response actions include isolating an endpoint, stopping a malicious process, quarantining a file and collecting forensic information. Some platforms also support rollback, patching or recovery.

Our companion article provides a more detailed explanation of EDR architecture, monitoring, detection and response.

There is no single answer across every measurement.

ThreatDown has the highest Info-Tech 2026 composite score at 9.1. Sophos has the highest Gartner Peer Insights rating among the directly comparable endpoint products in this guide at 4.8. CrowdStrike is a frequent enterprise choice, while Huntress has the highest current G2 rating in the comparison table.

MITRE does not name an EDR winner. Its evaluations are designed to help buyers inspect how products handled defined adversary behaviors.

Acronis is a strong option for MSPs and organizations that want endpoint detection and response connected to backup, disaster recovery and endpoint management.

Its evidence includes an 8.9 Info-Tech 2026 award-cycle score, a current G2 rating of 4.7 across more than 1,400 reviews, participation in MITRE’s 2025 Enterprise evaluation and three 18-out-of-18 AV-TEST business Windows results in 2026.

Acronis may be less compelling for a company that wants only a standalone EDR platform and does not expect to use the broader data-protection and management capabilities.

Traditional antivirus historically focused on identifying known malicious files through signatures and related techniques. Modern antivirus and endpoint protection also use behavior monitoring, reputation, heuristics and machine learning, so the distinction is no longer as simple as “signatures versus behavior.”

EDR adds continuous endpoint telemetry, incident investigation, attack context, threat hunting and response workflows. It can help security teams understand and contain suspicious behavior even when an attack does not match a known malware signature.

Acronis connects endpoint detection and response with the backup, recovery and management capabilities MSPs use to protect client environments.

Explore how incidents move from detection and investigation to containment, remediation and recovery in a single multitenant platform.

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