Crowdstrike and SentinelOne are reliable solutions for Endpoint Protection. Which of these two security solution software should you invest in? We look at some critical aspects of Crowdstrike and Sentinel One to help you pick the right security solution for your business.
The basis of this comparison study is the main capabilities of Crowd Strike and Sentinel One.
Setup and deployment
The deployment process of Crowdstrike is simpler as it can be automatically rolled out to the agents. There is no need for a reboot of the agents. This is one of the strongest points in favor of Crowdstrike because the activation and deployment are as seamless as you could expect them to be.
You will make use of Crowdstrike Falcon User interface to manage the endpoints. Endpoints need to be installed with Falcon sensor. Once the sensor has been installed on the endpoint, you need to establish connectivity with the Falcon user interface on the cloud. Once connectivity between Falcon user interface and the agent sensor is complete, Crowdstrike deployment is complete on the remote system.
If you were to choose the Falcon complete package of Crowdstrike, it becomes a completely managed service offering. You will enjoy a hands-free approach to securing endpoints on your network through Crowdstrike. You will also get access to the security operations desk on a 24x7x365 basis. Your endpoint security is monitored and managed by the SoC of Crowdstrike.
SentinelOne has a more stringent deployment process that has to be carried out manually. It involves a reboot of the agent machine.
The tedious installation of Sentinel One could be considered a roadblock for the system administrators.
For the ease of setup and deployment process, Crowdstrike is definitely a better option that SentinelOne.
Updates
Crowdstrike and Sentinel One get periodic updates at regular intervals. Updates can be rolled out to Crowdstrike agents within 15 to 30 minutes of being made available. You can, obviously, delay the update rollout to a specific time of your choice with Crowdstrike.
The Crowdstrike sensor can be updated manually by configuring the manual updates. You can even test the sensor updated on the development machines before pushing these to the live agent machines.
Most companies prefer to roll out Crowdstrike hotfixes and other releases in a timely manner. It is a good practice to roll out the hotfixes on a priority basis.
However, the agent update for Sentinel One agents requires administrator action. The intervention of the administrator makes it a more tedious process, and one that most administrators may not like.
For its instantaneous automatic rollout of updates, Crowdstrike saves time and ensures prompt compliance to the latest security updates. The update policy of Crowdstrike is better than SentinelOne’s update process.
Resource usage
Crowdstrike agents consume less than 1% CPU share of the machine resources. The impact on memory utilization is also reasonable and lower than what SentinelOne consumes.
Sentinel One is believed to consume more processor time and memory usage. In the past, there have been incidents wherein the RAM usage on agent machines went up drastically. Eventually, the high RAM usage was resolved through the release of a security update by the Sentinel One team.
The memory footprint of Sentinel One is around 20 MB. However, it remains unclear as to how the agents end up with high usage of memory.
Most system administrators who have worked with Crowdstrike and Sentinel One can vouch for the fact that Crowdstrike causes lesser processor and memory load on the agent machines.
Crowdstrike is lighter and poses less load on the processor and memory in comparison with SentinelOne agent software.
Market share
As of writing this, Sentinel One has a little over 5% share of the endpoint security market. In comparison, Crowdstrike has over 20% share of the endpoint security market.
There is a diverse range of Crowdstrike Falcon products and service offerings. There is a low barrier to entry when it comes to Crowdstrike.
Crowdstrike has a higher market share for the endpoint protection than Sentinel One. Its market share is almost four times the market share of Sentinel One.
User interface
SentinelOne has a very user-friendly interface and administrators are able to achieve desired objectives through the interface. The user experience in SentinelOne’s interface is simple, concise and achieves the desired goal.
Crowdstrike’s user interface is cumbersome to manage, especially when you are starting out. As you become more accustomed with the user interface, it tends to grow on you.
There is an initial learning curve associated with Crowdstrike. Once you read the documentation and work through the interface to perform specific actions, user experience improves.
For the user interface, SentinelOne offers better user experience that Crowdstrike because of its simplicity. Crowdstrike as an initial learning curve and it grows on your as you spend time in managing it.
Operating system interoperability
Crowdstrike has had issues in the past with Linux deployments.
On a similar basis, SentinelOne has had issues with the M1 chip of Mac computers. There have been all sorts of varied issues on the m1 chip-based computers.
System administrators have had a hard time uninstalling SentinelOne from the m1 chip to resolve these issues.
If you have m1 endpoints, you may want to reconsider working on SentinelOne. Or, you could speak to the SentinelOne team and discuss the current status of the m1 chip compatibility with Sentinel One.
There are issues with SentinelOne and m1 chip of Mac computers. Crowdstrike has certain issues on Linux deployments.
Ransomware attacks
Crowdstrike and SentinelOne do a good job in detecting ransomware attacks. Mitre att&ck reported 100% incident detection and remediation on SentinelOne.
Crowdstrike, meanwhile, has achieved 99% incident detection rate on Mitre att&ck.
However, in real-life scenarios, system administrators say that Crowdstrike is good at uncovering changes within the infrastructure and controlling ransomware attacks. It can detect 270 ransomware variations as we write this.
You can read more about Crowdstrike’s attack detection rates on this page.
Costs
On a broad scale, SentinelOne is almost a third of what Crowdstrike costs. For small businesses, SentinelOne offers endpoint protection at conservative rates.
Crowdstrike is pricier for endpoint protection services. The incremental costs could be attributed to proactive monitoring of the infrastructure by the Crowdstrike managed services team.
Crowdstrike is costlier than SentinelOne. But, it continues to be preferred endpoint security and protection solution of big companies with higher number of endpoints.
Rajesh Dhawan is a technology professional who loves to blog about smart wearables, Cloud computing and Microsoft technologies. He loves to break complex problems into manageable chunks of meaningful information.