All the Microsoft Defender for Endpoint options

It is important to understand that there are current 3 plans for Defender for Endpoint

1. P1

2. Defender for Business

3. P2

Note: that Defender for Business is currently in preview.

The indicated general available is late February/early March per the above Message Center item.

I have perhaps been some what cavalier in the screens I have shared with a few posts of late. This could potentially lead to confusion about what plans include when I am showing screens from plans that maybe different from what people assume it is.

The issue is not with the functionality, the issue is that what I have shown may not be identical to the specific plan I’m focusing on. In essence, if you look at your screen and what I have shown, you might see differences in the total number of options available for example.

So, let’s clear all that up with a look at the three plans and their differences.

This is probably the best place to start:

Compare Microsoft Defender for Business to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Plans 1 and 2

The following provides a more current granular break down:

Some other helpful links:

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

Overview of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Plan 1

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Plan 1 and Plan 2

Microsoft Defender for Business

Overview of Microsoft Defender for Business (preview)

Compare security features in Microsoft Defender for Business to Microsoft 365 Business Premium

There are also differences in the options available in the interface. For example with Defender for Endpoint P2 you see the following in Settings | Endpoints:

While in Defender for Business you only see:

Key items like Onboarding, Offboarding and Web content filtering etc. still appear but a significant amount of other don’t. This is where some of the confusion may lie with my previous content (sorry). Hopefully people aren’t too fazed by stuff not being there as they can still get to the stuff I do call out. However, it is on me to do a like for like if I do show screens. So, going forward I’ll do my best to do that to avoid the confusion around all these Defender for Endpoints.

Of course, this will change over time and I’ll try and update my future articles to reflect that.