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CRN’s “11 Best Endpoint Protection Platforms” is a historical customer-review ranking, not a current Gartner recommendation or a malware-protection test. The article reports three medal positions and eight honorable mentions based on Gartner customer reviews. Its accessible text does not show an exact publication date, although it refers to activity in 2017. Treat every score below as a snapshot of the period covered, not as a current product comparison.
What the CRN ranking actually measures
CRN says Gartner surveyed end-user professionals about their experience with endpoint-protection-platform vendors. The reported dimensions included overall performance, product capabilities, evaluation and contracting, pricing flexibility, integration and deployment, ease of deployment, service and support, vendor-response timeliness, and technical-support quality.
According to CRN’s account, Gartner used more than 30,000 customer reviews across company sizes and industries. Vendors needed at least 50 reviews to be included, and the ranking combined review scores with the number of published reviews using a weighted calculation. The accessible article does not provide the complete report, sampling details, or full weighting formula, so this is CRN’s description of Gartner’s method rather than an independently audited methodology.
Customer ratings describe reported user experience. They do not establish comparative malware-blocking performance under controlled laboratory conditions, and they do not prove that a product is the best fit for a particular operating system, industry, region, or security team.
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The 11 platforms in CRN’s historical list
| Position | Vendor | Overall peer rating | Willing to recommend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gold | Symantec | 4.5/5 | 78% |
| Silver | Cylance | 4.6/5 | 92% |
| Bronze | ESET | 4.6/5 | 82% |
| Honorable mention | Microsoft | 4.1/5 | 62% |
| Honorable mention | Sophos | 4.2/5 | 77% |
| Honorable mention | Trend Micro | 4.3/5 | 78% |
| Honorable mention | Carbon Black | 4.4/5 | 79% |
| Honorable mention | Malwarebytes | 4.4/5 | 88% |
| Honorable mention | Kaspersky Lab | 4.6/5 | 87% |
| Honorable mention | Crowdstrike | 4.7/5 | 89% |
| Honorable mention | Webroot | 4.7/5 | 91% |
These figures are the historical values printed in CRN’s article. The article’s “high” category language uses CRN’s stated 4.5/5 threshold; that threshold should not be treated as a Gartner award cutoff. The spelling “Crowdstrike” follows CRN’s presentation.
How to read the medals, ratings and recommendation percentages
The medal order is not a current product leaderboard
Symantec, Cylance and ESET received Gold, Silver and Bronze labels in CRN’s historical presentation. The labels reflect that ranking exercise at that time. They should not be applied to today’s product portfolios, corporate ownership, pricing, support arrangements or threat landscape.
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A higher average is not automatically a higher rank
Cylance and ESET are each shown at 4.6/5, while Symantec is shown at 4.5/5, yet the medal order differs. That is consistent with CRN’s description of a weighted score that considered both review ratings and review volume. A recommendation percentage answers a different question from an average score: it indicates how many reviewers said they would recommend the vendor, not how well the product performed in a controlled test.
Review context matters
Results can vary with reviewer role, company size, industry, geography, deployment complexity and expectations for support. A platform favored by a large security operation may be a poor match for a small organization without dedicated endpoint specialists.
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What an endpoint protection platform means today
Gartner’s current category describes endpoint protection platforms as security software for managed endpoints such as desktop and laptop PCs, virtual desktops, mobile devices and, in some cases, servers. Endpoint agents connect to centralized analytics and management consoles. Prevention is one layer of defense in depth; detection and response capabilities investigate and contain threats that bypass prevention.
Mandatory prevention and attack-surface capabilities
Gartner’s feature description, updated September 2025, identifies these core areas:
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- Malware and fileless-attack protection using real-time scanning and antimalware techniques.
- Attack-surface reduction, including controls such as device control, host firewalls, exploit protection and application control.
- Behavioral analysis of endpoint, application and user activity to detect and block suspicious behavior.
Detection and response scope
Confirm whether the offering includes the investigation, hunting, isolation, remediation and evidence workflows your team needs, or whether those functions require a separate endpoint-detection-and-response tier, managed service or security-operations integration.
Supported environments and integration
Verify supported operating systems, virtual-desktop platforms, servers and mobile devices directly with each vendor. Check identity, email, network, cloud, SIEM, ticketing and orchestration integrations; agent conflicts; bandwidth requirements; policy migration; and how the product behaves when an endpoint is offline.
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How to compare platforms for a purchase in 2026
- Define the endpoint estate. Inventory physical PCs, Macs, Linux systems, virtual desktops, mobile devices and any servers in scope. Record versions, ownership models and remote-work requirements.
- Set prevention requirements. Map malware, fileless-threat, exploit, application-control, firewall and device-control needs to the platform’s licensed tier rather than assuming they are included.
- Specify response workflows. Decide who investigates alerts, who can isolate devices, how remediation is approved and what evidence must be retained for audits or incident reviews.
- Test deployment and operations. Measure agent rollout, policy staging, performance impact, update behavior, rollback, tamper protection, offline operation and integration with existing tools.
- Evaluate service and support. Compare support hours, severity definitions, response commitments, escalation paths, technical-account coverage, documentation and the vendor’s record of communicating during incidents.
- Model the contract. Ask for pricing by endpoint and by required modules, minimum commitments, renewal increases, true-up rules, bundled entitlements, cancellation terms and the cost of adding temporary or seasonal devices.
- Normalize customer evidence. Compare reviews from similar company sizes, industries, regions and deployment dates. Check review volume and recency instead of relying on a single average.
Where to check the current Gartner category
Gartner Peer Insights maintains a live endpoint-protection-platform category (also presented as transitioning to “Endpoint Protection”). Its product set, ratings and review counts change over time. The page includes filters for reviewer company size, industry, region and recency, plus comparison views. Use those filters to create a current shortlist rather than carrying forward CRN’s historical medal order.
Gartner’s notice states: “Gartner Peer Insights content consists of the opinions of individual end users based on their own experiences, and should not be construed as statements of fact, nor do they represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates.” Gartner also says it does not endorse the vendors or products displayed. That disclaimer applies when using current Peer Insights ratings as well as when interpreting older customer rankings.
Why the old list should not be used as a current buying guide
- The CRN page does not expose an exact publication date; its figures are tied to an earlier period and reference 2017 activity.
- Vendor products, names, ownership, licensing, support models and threat capabilities can change substantially over time.
- Current Gartner listings include products such as CrowdStrike Falcon, SentinelOne Singularity Endpoint, Sophos Endpoint, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Trellix Endpoint Security Suite, Symantec Endpoint Security Complete, TrendAI Vision One, ESET PROTECT Platform, ThreatDown Endpoint Detection and Response, Check Point Endpoint Security, Bitdefender GravityZone and Cortex XDR, among others.
- Current ratings and review totals are live values, not the historical numbers in CRN’s article.
Use the CRN list to understand how customers were ranked in that historical snapshot. For a present procurement decision, validate technical coverage, operating-environment support, deployment effort, response processes, service quality, commercial terms and comparable recent reviews for your own organization.
Quick Recap
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