What is the best antivirus and EDR for a business in 2026?

Defender for Business is the small business edition of Microsoft's EDR. It covers up to 300 users with five devices each, across Windows, macOS, iOS and Android. On top of antivirus you get behavioral detection, automated investigation and response, and automatic attack disruption: a compromised device gets isolated without waiting for someone to click.

It has the clearest price in the market: $3 per user per month, billed yearly, no minimum. For 25 users that's $900 a year. And if you already pay for Microsoft 365 Business Premium at $22 per user per month, Defender for Business is included, which means you may own an EDR you never switched on. There is a 7-day window to cancel with a prorated refund.

What admins report: it is widely recommended for smaller companies, but two traps keep coming up. Servers aren't covered; you need the separate Defender for Servers add-on. And if you manage devices through Intune, those policies clash with Defender's simplified configuration. A few false positives also show up after some updates.

Tip: before you buy anything, open the Microsoft 365 admin center and check which licenses you already hold. Plenty of businesses pay for Business Premium and never onboard their devices to Defender.

CrowdStrike is the enterprise benchmark. The Falcon platform covers next-gen antivirus, EDR, threat hunting and, with Falcon Complete, fully managed detection and response. Unusually for this market, prices are public: Go at $59.99, Pro at $99.99 and Enterprise at $184.99 per device per year. The 15-day trial needs no credit card.

The trap is in the tiers. Go, capped at 100 devices, gives you antivirus, device control and mobile protection. EDR and threat hunting are only clearly described in Enterprise. For 25 endpoints that's $2,499.75 a year on Pro, but $4,624.75 on Enterprise.

It's mostly bought by large organizations: only a small share of its reviews come from companies with 50 or fewer employees, and users say alerts need tuning. And in 2024, a faulty content update crashed Windows machines worldwide. Microsoft estimated 8.5 million devices were hit, under 1% of all Windows machines.

Tip: if you have nobody to work the alerts, price Enterprise against a Falcon Complete quote. A powerful EDR nobody monitors is worth little more than good antivirus.

Huntress sells managed EDR: the agent plus a 24/7 security operations center that investigates, contains and remediates threats for you. That answers the question every other product on this list leaves open: who looks at the alert on a Sunday night? Huntress also manages Microsoft Defender Antivirus, so it pairs naturally with the protection you may already have.

Pricing is per endpoint per month on a 12-month commitment, with discounts as volume grows, and the standard minimum is 50 agents. No dollar figure is posted on the official page, so you'll need a quote.

The 50-agent minimum is the real limit: a 15-person office will either buy through an MSP that pools clients or look elsewhere. And because Huntress leans on Defender for the antivirus layer, your Windows fleet should be in decent shape before you start.

Tip: if you already pay for Defender for Business, ask Huntress how it works alongside it. You keep Microsoft's engine and add the human SOC on top.

SentinelOne bets on automation. Its agent detects, blocks and remediates without waiting for a human, and can roll a machine back after an attack. Prices are public: Complete at $179.99 per endpoint per year, with EDR and 14 days of data retention. Commercial, at $229.99, adds identity protection, 90 days of retention and managed threat hunting. These prices apply from 5 to 100 endpoints, and a partner's price takes precedence if you buy through one.

For 25 endpoints, Complete runs $4,499.75 a year. It's among the priciest entry points here, but EDR is in the very first tier, which isn't true everywhere.

Reviews are strong, 4.8 out of 5 on one platform with over a hundred reviews, but the complaints are specific: lots of false positives for some, exclusions that are hard to define, weaker Mac management than Windows, confusing tiers and heavy scans on older machines. In 2025, SentinelOne chose not to take part in the MITRE evaluation.

Tip: start in detect-only mode on a pilot group for two to three weeks, log every false positive, then switch to protect with your exclusions ready.

Bitdefender is a Romanian vendor, and GravityZone is its business console, combining antivirus, EDR and endpoint management in one interface. Its strength is measurable: in 2026, GravityZone Business Security Enterprise was one of nine products certified by AV-Comparatives in its EDR detection validation. Users also praise a light agent and one console for the whole fleet.

There's no public price. It's set by endpoint count at purchase, from Bitdefender or a reseller. Get at least two quotes, and confirm which tier includes EDR: it isn't the entry one.

Negative reviews line up: the console is full of technical jargon, unfriendly for a tiny shop without IT staff, reporting lacks depth, and scans slow down older PCs.

It ranks below Huntress and SentinelOne here only because it's quote-and-reseller only, not for weaker detection.

Tip: have the reseller handle initial deployment, including exclusions for your line-of-business apps. That's where the first weeks of false positives get decided.

ESET organizes its offer into readable tiers. Entry protects endpoints and servers from a cloud console. Advanced adds encryption and mobile defense. Complete adds patch management, email and cloud app protection. Elite adds XDR and multi-factor authentication. An MDR tier hands monitoring to ESET.

The price isn't legible on the official page; you get it on a quote or from a reseller, by tier and endpoint count. The classic trap: Entry is very good antivirus, but full detection and response only arrives in Elite.

Users praise ransomware protection and simple setup, with an 8.5 out of 10 for ease of admin on a large review platform. The most common gripe is migrating from the old on-premises console to the cloud one, described as painful.

Tip: if you still run the on-prem console, treat the migration as a small project and export your policies before switching.

Sophos offers a single agent that combines antivirus and EDR. Its best-known feature, CryptoGuard, spots file encryption in progress, stops it and restores the affected files. For a small business, that's the protection that matters most against ransomware.

EDR and XDR sit in the higher tiers. Sophos's real asset is its MDR service: a team watches your alerts 24/7 and steps in during an attack, so you buy tool and monitoring under one contract.

No public pricing; it all goes through a quote, often via a reseller. The 30-day trial lets you check how the agent behaves on your machines before you sign.

Tip: during the trial, run your oldest line-of-business apps and usual spreadsheet macros on a pilot device. That's where you'll see whether the agent blocks legitimate work.