Best MDR providers for dental practices compared (2026)

A dental practice buying MDR is doing something unusual: shopping a product category built and priced for organisations ten to a hundred times its size. Three of the six options below publish no price at all, and the one that publishes the cleanest numbers — Huntress — sets a floor of fifty seats if you buy it directly, which is ten times a typical practice.

Disclosure: Obsidian Ridge is the last row of this table. It resells Huntress, which is also a row here, and nothing else in the table. Every other cell comes from that vendor's own website, fetched 29 and 30 September 2026 and cited at the end. Where a vendor publishes nothing, the cell says "Not published" rather than a guess, and no per-endpoint figure has been borrowed from a comparison site.

The two questions that actually decide it for a dental practice

Do you run Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace? This is the question most MDR comparisons skip and the one that eliminates options fastest. Identity is where practice breaches start — a hijacked mailbox, a filter quietly deleting invoice emails, a payroll redirect — and identity coverage is not uniform. Huntress states on its own Managed ITDR page that the product protects both Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace with the same SOC. Sophos leads with Microsoft depth on its MDR page. Blackpoint and Sophos document Google Workspace integrations on separate pages rather than on the MDR page itself, and Arctic Wolf and Defendify do not state Google Workspace coverage on their MDR pages. Ask each one directly, and ask whether containment on Google is automatic or manual.

How many computers do you actually have? Not seats, not staff — endpoints with an agent on them. A four-chair practice with six workstations and a practice-management server has seven. At seven, a fifty-seat minimum is not a discount question, it is a disqualification.

The comparison

The caveat in our own row, stated before you find it

Huntress' identity feature set is not identical across the two platforms, and the gap matters for a practice on Google. Identity Isolation, Rogue Apps / OAuth consent review, adversary-in-the-middle detection and the exfiltration timeline are Microsoft 365 only. On Google Workspace, monitoring and detection work, but account containment is performed manually — by us, within one business day, not automatically at 3am.

So if you are on Google Workspace and someone's mailbox is taken over at two in the morning, Huntress detects it and cuts the session, and the human steps sit inside a business day. If you are on Microsoft 365, more of that is automatic. No vendor comparison table we could find says this out loud, and it is the single most useful thing in this article for a Google-based practice.

What "who does the response" is really asking

Read the last column again, because it is the one that separates products from services.

Huntress buying direct: the SOC investigates and stages a remediation, and the incident report lands in someone's inbox at the practice. That someone has to read it, decide, and act. Huntress says so plainly on its own pricing page — the price "does not include deployment, integration, or the day-to-day operational and portal management that Huntress Partners can provide." If the practice manager is the person who reads it, direct purchase is a poor fit no matter what it costs.

Sophos and Arctic Wolf both put their own staffed teams behind the alert, which is a genuinely stronger position than Huntress direct, and neither publishes what it costs, so you cannot compare it to anything until you are in a sales process.

Blackpoint is built for MSPs by its own description, so the practical question is not what Blackpoint does but which MSP you would be hiring around it.

When you don't need MDR yet

Two honest cases, and both are common in dentistry.

The free controls aren't on yet. If staff share one login for the practice-management system, if multi-factor authentication is "allowed" rather than enforced on Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, if the only administrator account is also someone's daily email, or if nobody has restored from a backup to check it works — fix those first. They cost nothing but time, and they block more real attacks than monitoring does. MDR layered on a practice where everyone shares a password buys you a faster notification of a breach you were always going to have. (Backup is not something we sell; get it from whoever runs your IT, and test it.)

You are a solo practice already paying for tooling you have not turned on. Two or three computers, no on-premise server, everything in Microsoft 365 with a Business Premium licence that already includes Defender for Business. Turn on what you own, enforce MFA, separate the admin account, and reassess. At three endpoints the honest recommendation is to spend the money on a HIPAA risk analysis instead — the thing OCR actually asks for first, and the thing no MDR product produces.

Both of those are reasons to wait. A provider who will not name a case where you should wait is selling.

Six questions for whichever vendor you call

1. At my exact endpoint count, what is the monthly figure — not the per-unit rate?
2. What is the minimum, and what is the term?
3. Do you monitor Google Workspace identities, and is containment there automatic or manual?
4. When an alert fires at 3am, who acts — a person, a rule, or my practice manager?
5. When my carrier sends a renewal questionnaire, what exactly do you hand me?
6. What is explicitly out of scope?

Question one catches the seat minimum. Question three catches the Microsoft assumption. Question six catches everything else.

Sources

Every competitor fact above was taken from the page listed here, fetched 29 or 30 September 2026. No aggregator, directory or third-party ranking was used, and no per-endpoint price was carried over from a comparison site.

• Huntress — $7.99/endpoint and $3.60/identity at 100 units (product cards, above the note "Pricing shown is at 100 units. Your per-unit rate goes down as volume goes up"), $8.99/endpoint and $4.80/identity at 50 on the in-house-teams calculator; the 50-seat minimum per product on direct and reseller purchases; no Huntress-required minimum through an MSP; the 12-month standard term for MSPs, direct customers and resellers; and the note that the price excludes deployment, integration and portal management: huntress.com/pricing. Managed ITDR covering both Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace with the same SOC: Managed ITDR. Identity Isolation supporting Microsoft 365 only, with access revoked (not suspended) on Google Workspace: Huntress Identity Isolation for ITDR for Google Workspace. Healthcare compliance reporting: HIPAA Compliance in Cybersecurity.
• Blackpoint Cyber — MSP positioning, the 24/7 human-led SOC, and the per-seat subscription with no setup fees and no long-term lock-in: Managed Detection & Response for MSPs. Google Workspace detection and containment: Google Workspace integration.
• Sophos — "Threats are fully removed, not just contained. No hourly caps.", and the Microsoft depth claim: Sophos MDR. Google Workspace integration: Sophos MDR and Sophos XDR now integrate with Google Workspace. HIPAA: HIPAA Security. Audit-ready reporting for HIPAA among other standards: Healthcare.
• Arctic Wolf — Arctic Wolf Security Teams, the Concierge Experience, the Aurora Agentic SOC, the Security Operations Warranty of up to $3 million, and the absence of any published price or minimum: Managed Detection and Response. HIPAA reporting: Industry Compliance.
• Defendify — MDR with 24/7/365 monitoring: defendify.com. Package starting prices (Detection & Response from $325 a month, All-In-One from $925 a month, customised by modules and assets): Pricing. Checked for a compliance product page on 29 September 2026; https://www.defendify.com/solutions/compliance/ returned 404.
• Obsidian Ridge — tiers and terms: /pricing. Readiness Sprint scope and fee: /cyber-insurance-readiness. Identity coverage and the Microsoft-versus-Google containment difference: /services/managed-itdr. Dental programme: /industries/dental.