Huntress vs CrowdStrike Falcon Go: the dollar that isn't the difference

Buyers put these two side by side because the numbers look almost identical. CrowdStrike Falcon Go is $7.99 per device per month. Huntress publishes Managed EDR at $7.99 per endpoint per month at 100 endpoints, above a note saying the per-unit rate goes down as volume goes up, and Huntress' in-house-teams calculator reads $8.99 at 50 endpoints. So at a hundred endpoints the list prices are the same figure, and below that Huntress is a dollar dearer. Either way the decision looks like a coin toss on price.

That comparison is wrong before it starts, and not by a little.

Disclosure: Obsidian Ridge is a Huntress MSSP partner and delivers Huntress-powered managed detection and response. Read the recommendation below with that in mind. The "buy Falcon Go instead" cases below are the ones we tell prospects to run themselves before deciding.

Short answer: Falcon Go does not include EDR

CrowdStrike's own pricing page lists Falcon Go as including next-gen antivirus, device control, mobile device protection and Express Support. It lists endpoint detection and response, threat hunting and firewall management as not included.

(CrowdStrike pricing, retrieved 28 August 2026.)

So the product whose name gets typed into the same search box as "Huntress" is a prevention tool. It stops things it recognises. It does not record what happened, it does not let anyone reconstruct an intrusion afterwards, and nobody outside your business is watching it.

Huntress Managed EDR is the other thing. Detection, recorded telemetry, and a 24/7 security operations centre that triages the alert and tells you what to do about it.

One dollar does not buy a SOC. The dollar is not the difference.

What each CrowdStrike tier actually contains

CrowdStrike publishes this, which is to their credit and makes the comparison easy to run honestly. As of 28 August 2026, from crowdstrike.com/en-us/pricing:

Read the third row again. EDR — the capability the entire category is named after — first appears at $19.99 per device per month, two and a half times the Falcon Go price you were comparing against.

And Falcon Enterprise still is not managed. It gives you the console and the telemetry. Somebody on your side has to sit in front of it. The managed tier is Falcon Complete, and CrowdStrike does not publish its price.

The word doing all the work is "managed"

Every vendor in this market uses it and it means something specific: a human being who is not you looks at the alert, decides whether it matters, and tells you what to do.

That is the whole product. Everything else — the agent, the console, the detections — is the machinery that makes the human's judgement possible.

When you compare a $7.99 prevention licence against a managed service at $7.99 to $8.99 depending on volume, you are comparing the machinery against the machinery plus the person for roughly the same money. The interesting question is not which costs more. It is whether you have the person.

What changes on Monday morning

This is the part feature grids never show you.

With Falcon Go, an alert fires. It lands in a console. Nothing else happens until someone with a login opens that console, understands what a suspicious PowerShell parent-child relationship implies, and decides whether to isolate the machine.

At 2am on a Saturday, that person is asleep. On the Thursday you are closing a quarter, that person is busy. The alert is still correct and still unread.

With managed detection and response, the same alert goes to an analyst first. Most alerts die there, which is the point — you never hear about them.

The ones that survive triage arrive as an instruction: this machine, this account, do this now. Your job shifts from interpretation to action.

The honest version of the trade: you are not buying better detection. You are buying somebody whose entire job is to look.

Two structural limits worth knowing before you shop

Falcon Go caps at 100 devices. CrowdStrike's pricing page states that "purchases of Falcon Go are limited to a maximum of 100 devices."

If you are growing through that number, you are planning a migration into Pro or Enterprise, at $99.99 or $184.99 per device per year, at exactly the moment you are least able to absorb a project.

Huntress has a 50-seat minimum if you buy direct. Huntress's pricing page states a 50-seat minimum per product for direct purchases and for reseller purchases, and no Huntress-required minimum when buying through an MSP.

A twelve-person law firm cannot buy Huntress directly without paying for thirty-eight seats it will never deploy. We walk through that math in Huntress pricing 2026: direct vs managed.

Those two limits point in opposite directions, and together they explain most of the market. CrowdStrike built Falcon Go to be bought with a credit card by a business with no security staff.

Huntress built its economics around partners who deploy for businesses that size. Neither company is being unreasonable; they are solving the small-business problem from different ends.

When Falcon Go is the right purchase

We will lose some of these and that is fine. Buy Falcon Go when all of the following are true:

• You want prevention, not response, and you know the difference
• You have fewer than 100 devices and no plan to cross that line soon
• Somebody on your side will actually open the console — not "we'll keep an eye on it," but a named person whose job includes it
• No insurer, client questionnaire or auditor is asking you to evidence 24/7 monitoring or incident response
• You want to buy today, online, without a sales call

That is a real set of circumstances and quite a few small businesses are in it. CrowdStrike builds good software and prices this tier transparently. Paying us more for a service you will not use would be a bad trade for you and a bad client for us.

When Falcon Go is the wrong purchase

• You thought you were buying detection and response. This is the common one. The name, the price and the marketing all sit next to MDR products in search results, and the module list is where the difference lives.

• Nobody owns the console. An unmonitored console is an expense, not a control. If you cannot name the person, you do not have one.

• A carrier questionnaire is coming. Cyber insurance applications increasingly ask about EDR deployment, 24/7 monitoring and documented incident response.

  Falcon Go answers none of those three affirmatively, and these applications are warranties — a generous answer is not a harmless one. We cover what carriers actually ask in cyber insurance readiness.

• You are growing past 100 devices. Plan the migration now or buy something you can stay on.

The comparison that would actually be fair

If you want to compare CrowdStrike and Huntress on equal terms, the matchup is Huntress Managed EDR against Falcon Complete Next-Gen MDR. Both are managed. Both put analysts between the alert and you.

One publishes its price and one does not. Huntress's pricing page lists Managed EDR at $7.99 per endpoint per month at 100 endpoints, and $8.99 at 50; Falcon Complete is quote-based.

That is not a criticism — quote-based pricing is normal at the enterprise end — but it does mean you cannot run the comparison from your desk, and you should treat any per-endpoint Falcon Complete figure you find on a third-party aggregator as unverified until it is in writing from CrowdStrike.

For our own comparison of the two managed models most SMBs actually see, Huntress vs Arctic Wolf covers the architectural version of this question, and Huntress vs SentinelOne covers what changes operationally.

Buying Huntress through a partner: what Obsidian Ridge adds

Huntress is channel-first, and the route you buy through changes the terms, not the product. Bought direct or through a reseller, Huntress requires a 50-seat minimum per product and a 12-month standard term — so a twelve-device practice pays the fifty-seat floor. Bought through an MSP partner, Huntress states there are no Huntress-required minimum seat counts, which is why Obsidian Ridge can sell managed detection and response with no minimum. Ridge Core is $25 per person per month, month-to-month. What the partner layer adds on top of the licence is a named person: the Huntress SOC triages around the clock, and a CISSP reviews every escalation it sends within one business day, coordinates containment, and explains in plain English what happened and what changed. Ridge Core also includes identity monitoring (ITDR) for Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace accounts. Security awareness training is not in Ridge Core. It starts at Ridge Plus. The Huntress partner page sets out what belongs to the platform and what belongs to the relationship.

Deciding in ten minutes

Three questions, in order. The first one that returns a hard answer ends the exercise.

1. Who opens the console? Name them. If the answer is a role rather than a person, or the person already has a full-time job, you are buying managed or you are buying shelfware.
2. Is anyone going to ask you to prove this? An insurer, an enterprise client, a regulator. If yes, you need the evidence a managed service produces, and prevention-only tooling will not generate it.
3. What is the number of devices in eighteen months? If it crosses 100, Falcon Go is a stopgap and you should price the thing you will actually be on.

If all three answers point at prevention-only, buy Falcon Go and spend the savings somewhere it matters. If any one of them points at response, the $7.99 line was never the relevant number.

Our own managed detection and response runs on Huntress with no minimum seat count. Ridge Core is $25 per person per month, and our pricing is public, for the same reason CrowdStrike's is.

If you want the shorter conversation, talk with us and we will tell you which of the three questions above is the one that decides it for you.