MDR vs EDR vs MSSP vs SOC-as-a-Service: An Operator's Decision Tree for Small Business
MDR, EDR, MSSP, and SOC-as-a-service compared honestly for small business buyers — what each delivers, what each costs.
Category
EDR, MDR, XDR, Huntress, SentinelOne, CrowdStrike, Defender, and practical endpoint detection guidance.
Endpoint security is one of the clearest dividing lines between organizations that can absorb an incident and organizations that get blindsided by one. The challenge is that the market is crowded with overlapping acronyms, aggressive vendor claims, and buying motions that assume a level of in-house maturity many teams do not have.
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MDR, EDR, MSSP, and SOC-as-a-service compared honestly for small business buyers — what each delivers, what each costs.
Articles
ThreatLocker blocks what is not on the list. Huntress watches what gets through. Most businesses comparing them are asking the wrong question.
Todyl sells a six-module platform including the network layer, channel-only, with no published pricing. Huntress sells a layer and publishes its rates.
Both run a 24/7 SOC for small businesses. Huntress publishes its prices and sells direct. Blackpoint publishes none and sells mainly through MSPs.
If you pay for Microsoft 365 Business Premium you already have EDR. The question is who reads the alerts — and Microsoft will not sell you that service.
Falcon Go is $7.99 per device and contains no EDR. Huntress Managed EDR is $8.99 and includes a 24/7 SOC. The price gap is not the difference.
FAQ
It is primarily for SMB owners, IT leads, and enterprise security teams evaluating endpoint protection, detection, and response strategies.
They will be opinionated and practical. When Obsidian Ridge has direct experience with a platform, that experience will be stated clearly rather than hidden.
No. They help narrow decisions and frame tradeoffs, but tool selection and rollout still depend on environment, staffing, and risk tolerance.
Huntress publishes its prices and requires a 50-seat minimum to buy direct. Through an MSP there is no minimum. The math, including where direct wins.
Arctic Wolf integrates the security tools you already own. Huntress brings the detection layer with it.
A practical restore-testing guide for small businesses that need to prove backups will actually support recovery before ransomware, an outage.
A plain-English guide to small-business EDR options that actually publish pricing, with official vendor numbers normalized into monthly cost.
A hands-on comparison of the best managed EDR options for small businesses already running Microsoft Defender.