1 Introduction

Both malware and anti-malware solutions have been around for a long time. Accordingly, individuals and organizations have been using an ever-changing ...

1.1 Market Segment

The anti-malware market is steady, with more than 1 billion devices deployed in the world. Mobile platforms are on the rise, and have overtaken PC-ba ...

1.2 Delivery models

Anti-malware solutions are made of two primary components: agents on the endpoint and one or more management consoles. Endpoint agents are designed ...

1.3 Required Capabilities

Various technologies support all the different requirements customers are facing today. The requirements are

• Detect and prevent infection by
  • Vi ...

2 Leadership

Selecting a vendor of a product or service must not be only based on the comparison provided by a KuppingerCole Leadership Compass. The Leadership Com ...

2.1 Overall Leadership

Several companies topped the Leader section. McAfee leads the field, showing strong ratings in all Leadership categories.

Kaspersky Lab, Symantec, E ...

2.2 Product Leadership

Product Leadership is the first specific category examined below. This view is based on the analysis of the completeness and quality of the product/se ...

Product Leadership, or in some cases Service Leadership, is where we examine the functional strength and completeness of products. McAfee is in fron ...

2.3 Innovation Leadership

Next, we examine Innovation in the marketplace. Innovation is, from our perspective, a key capability in all IT market segments. Customers require i ...

When looking at Innovation Leadership, McAfee is slightly ahead of all others, based on the product’s advanced malware and ransomware detection func ...

2.4 Market Leadership

Lastly, we analyze Market Leadership. This is an amalgamation of the number of customers, the geographic distribution of customers, the size of dep ...

Bitdefender, ESET, Kaspersky, McAfee, Microsoft, and Symantec share the top spots for Market Leadership. All Windows systems ship with Microsoft secu ...

3 Correlated View

While the Leadership charts identify leading vendors in certain categories, many customers are looking not only for a product leader, but for a vendor ...

3.1 The Market/Product Matrix

The first of these correlated views contrasts Product Leadership and Market Leadership.

Vendors below the line have a weaker market position than expected according to their product maturity. Vendors above the line are sort of “overperf ...

3.2 The Product/Innovation Matrix

This view shows how Product Leadership and Innovation Leadership are correlated. It is not surprising that there is a pretty good correlation between ...

Vendors below the line are more innovative, vendors above the line are, compared to the current Product Leadership positioning, less innovative.

Thi ...

3.3 The Innovation/Market Matrix

The third matrix shows how Innovation Leadership and Market Leadership are related. Some vendors might perform well in the market without being Innova ...

Vendors above the line are performing well in the market compared to their relatively weak position in the Innovation Leadership rating; while vendors ...

4 Products and Vendors at a glance

This section provides an overview of the various products we have analyzed within this KuppingerCole Leadership Compass on Endpoint Anti-Malware. Asid ...

4.1 Ratings at a glance

Based on our evaluation, a comparative overview of the functional ratings of all the products covered in this document is shown in table 1.

Furthermore, table 2 shows an overview which contains four additional, non-functional ratings for the vendor. While the rating for Financial Strength ...

5 Product / service evaluation

This section contains a quick rating for every product/service we’ve included in this KuppingerCole Leadership Compass document. For many of the pro ...

5.1 Bitdefender

Bitdefender is a private company, and was founded in 2001 in Bucharest, Romania. The company specializes in cybersecurity technologies for Windows PCs ...

5.2 Carbon Black

Carbon Black, was founded in the Boston area as Bit9 back in 2002. Bit9 was long known for its strong application whitelisting capabilities. Bit9 purc ...

5.3 Digital Guardian

Digital Guardian, based in Boston, provides a number of endpoint security solutions beyond anti-malware, including data discovery and classification, ...

5.4 ESET

ESET, headquartered in Bratislava, was founded in 1992, and has been in the security business since. ESET covers all Windows endpoints and servers, Ma ...

5.5 F-Secure

Founded in 1988 in Helsinki, F-Secure has been providing anti-virus and other security tools for nearly 3 decades. F-Secure provides support for all v ...

5.6 Kaspersky

Kaspersky Lab, headquartered in Moscow, was founded as an anti-virus company in 1997. Kaspersky Lab provides anti-malware and other security software ...

5.7 McAfee

Silicon Valley based McAfee was an early pioneer in the anti-virus business. McAfee was founded in 1987, acquired by Intel in 2011, then spun off from ...

5.8 Microsoft

Redmond-based Microsoft began offering Defender as an anti-spyware program more than a decade ago. Defender has evolved considerably since then, becom ...

5.9 Sentinel One

Sentinel One, headquartered in Mountain View, CA, is a 5-year old security startup focused on delivering tightly integrated anti-malware, EDR, and aut ...

5.10 Sophos

Sophos, headquartered in the UK, has been producing anti-virus and encryption solutions for 30 years. The Endpoint Protection product covers all versi ...

5.11 Symantec

Mountain View-based Symantec provides a comprehensive set of security, management, and disaster recovery tools. The Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) ...

6 Vendors and Market Segments at a glance

Aside from the vendors covered in detail in this Leadership Compass document, we also observe other vendors in the market that we find interesting. So ...

6.1 AVG

AVG started in the Czech Republic back in 1992. It has grown into a global anti-virus company, offering its anti-malware product in the “Freemium” ...

6.2 Avira

Avira is a German security software offering free versions of anti-malware and anti-spyware software for Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS. It uses both ...

6.3 Cylance

Cylance is an anti-malware startup that has developed advanced “AI” techniques to detect and prevent malware from executing. As such, they do not ...

6.4 Darktrace

Darktrace is a cybersecurity startup that uses unsupervised “AI” techniques to learn normal behavior on an endpoint, monitor for deviations, ident ...

6.5 Trend Micro

Trend Micro is a major security software vendor with a suite of products encompassing endpoint, network, email, web, and IoT protection. The enterpri ...

7 Related Research

Leadership Brief: Defending against ransomware - 70336
Buyer’s Guide: Ransomware Protection - 72599
Advisory Note: Understanding and Countering Ransomware - 70282