CrowdStrike Falcon Complete vs SentinelOne Vigilance vs Microsoft MDR: Real Managed Security Cost
Short answer
All three vendors require an underlying endpoint license before managed detection and response (MDR) can be added, and none publishes a clean, single MDR price. CrowdStrike's Falcon Complete and SentinelOne's Vigilance are reported to price within a narrow band of each other once the underlying platform license and the MDR layer are both counted — with multiple independent sources describing Singularity Complete plus Vigilance MDR as "usually cheaper" than Falcon Complete, though the gap is described as modest rather than dramatic. Microsoft's MDR offering, Defender Experts for XDR, is priced entirely separately from its Plan 1/Plan 2 base licenses and negotiated per organization rather than published — and for any company already on Microsoft 365 E5, the underlying endpoint license itself is "already paid for," a genuine structural advantage none of the other two can offer.
Pricing at a glance
| CrowdStrike (Falcon + Falcon Complete) | SentinelOne (Singularity + Vigilance) | Microsoft (Defender + Defender Experts) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Underlying endpoint license (confirmed, top public tier) | Falcon Enterprise: $184.99/device/year | Singularity Complete: $179.99/device/year — within about $5/device/year of CrowdStrike's equivalent tier | Defender for Endpoint Plan 2: included in Microsoft 365 E5; standalone pricing not officially published |
| MDR/managed-response layer | Falcon Complete: reported $168–264/device/year at list (equivalent to $14–22/device/month); a separate, broader industry framing cites $25–45/device/month for CrowdStrike's fully managed enterprise offering — a notably different, higher figure that may reflect a different service scope | Vigilance Respond/Detect: reported to start around $209.99/device/year for the "Commercial" package including managed services; a separate industry framing cites SentinelOne mid-market MDR generally at $7–25/device/month | Defender Experts for XDR: priced separately from base licenses, typically negotiated per organization rather than published |
| Minimum endpoint counts | Not confirmed as a hard minimum, though volume discount conversations are reported to begin around 500 endpoints | Not confirmed | Not confirmed |
| Bundled response architecture | Streams telemetry to CrowdStrike's cloud for processing (Security Cloud) | Runs autonomous AI directly on the endpoint, including one-click ransomware rollback without requiring an analyst in the loop | Human Microsoft analysts triage alerts as an add-on service; base Defender for Business itself has no staffed human response |
| Notable recognition | Falcon Complete: named a Leader in the 2025 Forrester Wave for MDR and a 2026 Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice for MDR | Vigilance: no equivalent named industry award found in available sources, though SentinelOne matches CrowdStrike's Gartner Peer Insights rating (4.7/5) | Not applicable in the same competitive-MDR-award sense |
| Volume discount behavior | Reported: 500+ endpoints begins volume discount conversations (10–15% off); 1,000+ with multi-year commitment (10–15%); 2,500+ moves to custom enterprise tiered pricing | Not specifically reported | Not applicable to Defender for Business/Endpoint pricing directly; E5 bundling itself is the primary "discount" mechanism |
What headline pricing excludes
None of the three vendors' MDR figures include the underlying endpoint license as a separate cost — they're two different line items that must both be priced. A company evaluating "CrowdStrike's MDR cost" using only the Falcon Complete figure, without also counting the Falcon Enterprise (or equivalent) base license underneath it, will significantly understate the real total.
Microsoft's MDR offering has no published price at all, unlike CrowdStrike's and SentinelOne's reported (if imprecise) figures — Defender Experts for XDR is described consistently as negotiated per organization, which means a company can't even build a rough estimate the way it can for the other two without a direct sales conversation.
The reported range for CrowdStrike's fully managed MDR service is genuinely wide across different sources — $168–264/device/year in one framing, versus $300–540/device/year (equivalently $25–45/month) in another. This likely reflects different service tiers or scopes being described under the same "Falcon Complete" name rather than one source being simply wrong, but it means a company should treat any single reported CrowdStrike MDR figure with real caution until confirmed by a direct quote.
For a company already licensed for Microsoft 365 E5, the "underlying endpoint license" cost is effectively zero incremental, since Defender for Endpoint Plan 2 is included in that bundle — a structural advantage that changes the entire cost comparison for this specific buyer segment, independent of how Defender Experts for XDR itself is priced.
Hidden costs
- SentinelOne's Vigilance MDR is confirmed to be a separate, additional line item on top of the Complete tier's base price — "the 'same price' comparison flips once you want humans watching," per one direct comparison, since SentinelOne's headline tier-parity with CrowdStrike Enterprise ($179.99 vs. $184.99) only holds before either vendor's MDR layer is added.
- CrowdStrike's 24/7 threat hunting is reported to be bundled into Falcon Enterprise itself (the base platform tier, not Falcon Complete specifically) — a real structural difference from SentinelOne, where the equivalent capability sits in the separately priced Vigilance add-on rather than the base Complete tier.
- Partner/reseller pricing is reported to run 15–40% below list price for EDR and MDR generally across this category — a company buying direct from any of these vendors, rather than through a certified partner or managed service provider, may be leaving meaningful savings unused.
- Identity protection, SIEM integration, and cloud workload security are all reported as separate add-ons on top of CrowdStrike's core platform, not included even in the higher-tier Falcon Enterprise license — a real, additional cost category for any company needing this broader coverage.
Worked scenarios
100 endpoints
| Estimated annual cost | |
|---|---|
| CrowdStrike (Falcon Enterprise base + Falcon Complete MDR) | 100 × $184.99 (base) + 100 × $168–264 (MDR) = $35,300–44,900/year, using the lower reported MDR range; the higher reported MDR range ($300–540/device/year) would push this considerably higher |
| SentinelOne — Interpretation A: $209.99 is an all-in package price | 100 × $209.99 ≈ $20,999/year |
| SentinelOne — Interpretation B: $209.99 is an MDR add-on on top of the $179.99 base | 100 × ($179.99 + $209.99) = 100 × $389.98 ≈ $38,998/year |
| Microsoft (Defender for Business standalone, no existing E5) | Defender for Endpoint Plan 1 is licensed per user at $3.00/user/month; applied here under an explicit assumption that each of the 100 protected endpoints corresponds to one licensed user: 100 × $3 × 12 = $3,600/year, plus a negotiated, unpublished Defender Experts fee on top |
| Microsoft (already on M365 E5) | $0 incremental for the base per-user license; only the negotiated, unpublished Defender Experts fee applies |
Available sources do not establish whether SentinelOne's reported $209.99/device/year "Commercial" package price already includes the Complete-tier base license or sits on top of it as a separate add-on — this article presents both interpretations rather than choosing one, since picking either would create false precision from an ambiguous source.
1,000 endpoints
| Estimated annual cost | |
|---|---|
| CrowdStrike | Base-plus-MDR cost from the 100-endpoint scenario scaled to 1,000, with a reported 10–15% multi-year discount now available — illustratively, $300,000–420,000/year before that discount, reducible to roughly $255,000–357,000/year with it applied |
| SentinelOne — Interpretation A ($209.99 all-in) | 1,000 × $209.99 ≈ $209,990/year |
| SentinelOne — Interpretation B ($209.99 as an add-on atop the $179.99 base) | 1,000 × $389.98 ≈ $389,980/year |
| Microsoft (no existing E5) | Applying the same one-user-per-endpoint assumption: 1,000 × $3 × 12 = $36,000/year base, plus negotiated Defender Experts fee |
| Microsoft (already on E5) | $0 incremental base; negotiated Defender Experts fee only |
Multiple independent sources describe SentinelOne's combined cost as "usually cheaper than Falcon Complete" at comparable scope, but none quantify this precisely enough to confirm which of the two interpretations above is correct, or to state an exact dollar gap against CrowdStrike's figure.
At this scale, a company already on Microsoft 365 E5 has a dramatic structural cost advantage over adopting either CrowdStrike or SentinelOne from scratch, since the base endpoint license — the larger, more predictable of the two cost layers for the other two vendors — is already sunk into existing licensing.
10,000 endpoints
At this scale, CrowdStrike moves into its reported custom enterprise tiered pricing (per its own disclosed volume-discount pattern, this begins around 2,500 endpoints), and neither CrowdStrike's nor SentinelOne's actual negotiated rate at 10,000 endpoints can be estimated with confidence from public information — both are reported to depend heavily on competitive pressure from parallel evaluations and multi-year commitment terms at this scale, and SentinelOne's figure carries the same base-versus-add-on ambiguity described above regardless of scale. Microsoft's position remains structurally the same: a large E5-licensed organization's base per-user cost is already absorbed into existing licensing, leaving only the negotiated Defender Experts fee as new incremental spend — a genuinely different economic starting point than either CrowdStrike or SentinelOne can offer a company not already invested in their respective platforms.
Normalizing across billing units
CrowdStrike's and SentinelOne's per-device-per-year list pricing for both the base platform and the MDR layer makes them the most directly comparable pair in this article — though even between these two, the exact scope of "MDR" varies (CrowdStrike bundles 24/7 threat hunting into its base Enterprise tier, while SentinelOne keeps it entirely separate in Vigilance, and it remains unclear whether SentinelOne's reported Vigilance price is a standalone add-on or an all-in package). Microsoft licenses Defender per user, not per protected device — the scenario figures above apply a stated one-user-per-endpoint assumption to make a comparison possible at all, but this assumption may not hold for every organization (a single user with multiple devices, for instance, would need fewer licenses than endpoints). Microsoft's negotiated, unpublished Defender Experts pricing cannot be normalized to the same per-device unit at all without a direct quote, making a precise three-way comparison impossible beyond the base-license layer.
Break-even and crossover
The clearest calculable, well-corroborated finding in this category: CrowdStrike Falcon Enterprise and SentinelOne Singularity Complete price within approximately $5/device/year of each other at the top public tier — a near-tie at the base-license level. Once each vendor's MDR layer is added, multiple independent sources describe SentinelOne's combined Complete-plus-Vigilance cost as "usually cheaper" than CrowdStrike's combined Falcon Complete cost, though none of the sources reviewed quantified this gap precisely enough to state a specific dollar crossover, and this article cannot confirm which of the two SentinelOne pricing interpretations above is the accurate one.
Who pays more, and when
- A company without a mature in-house security operations function, needing genuine 24/7 human-staffed response, is the buyer profile all three MDR offerings are built for — and Microsoft's option is realistically limited to companies already invested in the broader Microsoft security ecosystem, given how tightly Defender Experts for XDR is coupled to the base Defender licensing.
- A company already on Microsoft 365 E5 with a reasonably mature internal security team may find Microsoft Defender's included base capability sufficient without needing full MDR at all, per at least one direct source — "Microsoft Defender may deliver adequate protection at lower incremental cost" for this specific segment.
- A 3,000-seat organization already on M365 E5 is specifically cited as a scenario where Defender for Endpoint Plan 2 "wins almost by default, since it's already paid for" — a genuine, quantifiable structural advantage over adopting CrowdStrike or SentinelOne from a cold start.
- A company prioritizing autonomous, analyst-independent remediation (one-click ransomware rollback specifically) has a real technical reason to prefer SentinelOne's architecture over CrowdStrike's cloud-processing model, independent of the pure price comparison.
- Any company evaluating CrowdStrike or SentinelOne at scale should specifically run a parallel competitive evaluation with the other vendor (and Microsoft Defender, where relevant) during negotiation — this is reported as the single most effective lever for improving pricing on either platform.
Limitations and uncertainty
CrowdStrike's and SentinelOne's base-tier list pricing ($184.99 and $179.99/device/year respectively) is well-corroborated across multiple sources. Both vendors' MDR-layer pricing shows genuine, unresolved spread across sources — CrowdStrike's reported MDR figures range from $168–264/device/year in one framing to $300–540/device/year in another, and this article has not resolved which reflects current, comparable-scope pricing. SentinelOne's reported $209.99/device/year Vigilance "Commercial" package figure carries a separate, unresolved ambiguity: available sources do not establish whether this figure already includes the Complete-tier base license or is an add-on on top of it, and this article presents both interpretations rather than choosing one. Microsoft does not publish any pricing for Defender Experts for XDR, and this article provides no estimate for it beyond noting that it is negotiated per organization. All Microsoft scenario figures apply an explicit one-licensed-user-per-protected-endpoint assumption, since Microsoft licenses Defender per user rather than per device — this assumption may not hold exactly for every organization. All figures in this article beyond the two vendors' base-tier list prices should be treated as directional rather than a number to expect in an actual quote.
Official sources
CrowdStrike's and SentinelOne's base-tier list pricing is published on each vendor's own site; Falcon Complete, Vigilance MDR, and Defender Experts for XDR pricing are not published by any of the three vendors, and figures in this article are drawn from multiple independent third-party pricing analyses.