EDR Vs Antivirus – What’s the Difference & Which One Do You Need

What Is Antivirus?

What is antivirus? Antivirus often appears as software that is designed to help detect, prevent, and remove malware from your computer systems. There are many types of cyber threats hidden everywhere to pose potential dangers on your computers.

To cope with those threats, people develop all kinds of antivirus programs to enhance data protection. For example, Windows security and firewall have similar functions to prevent virus or malware infiltration.

What Is EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response)?

What is EDR? The full name of EDR is Endpoint Detection and Response, also known as endpoint threat detection and response. It is mainly used as an endpoint security solution to continuously monitor and respond to cyber threats on computer workstations and other endpoints.

The greatest specialty of EDR is that it can provide continuous and comprehensive visibility into security breaches and develop a rapid response to potential threats happening on endpoints in real-time.

EDR vs Antivirus

According to what we have introduced above, both EDR and antivirus are used for the same purpose – to protect your computer from cyber-attacks, but what are the differences between them?

To compare EDR to antivirus, we can start with their different features.

Antivirus vs EDR in Features

Antivirus Features:

1. There are many types of antivirus programs developed to detect and prevent malware with varied ways and techniques. Most of them can provide real-time scanning.

2. Antivirus mainly relies on its database in which most existing virus or malware types have been recorded, so it is important to make sure your antivirus software is capable of installing updates automatically and frequently.
3. Antivirus programs protect multiple vulnerable apps from potential dangers.
4. It can give you warnings about possibly malicious sites.
5. Since antivirus is signature-based, it only recognizes threats that are known.

EDR Features

1. EDR provides greater visibility for cyber-attacks, including the information of the attack and its propagation.
2. EDR can give a greater guarantee for data security because all abnormal and suspicious patterns of activity are under its supervision.

3. EDR can provide real-time monitoring for threats that may not be easily recognized or defined by standard antivirus.
4. EDR has forensic capabilities to help determine what has happened during a security event.
5. EDR can protect data by using a sandbox to isolate and quarantine suspicious items and users’ systems won’t be disrupted.
6. EDR is highly automated and operates in real-time. Since EDR is installed on all terminals, the faster the system runs, the more effective the tool can perform.

How to Choose between EDR and Antivirus?

After reading the above contents, some of you may wonder is that available to use EDR instead of antivirus if EDR can include a larger range of danger prevention and control.

Generally, EDR can’t replace traditional tools like antivirus and firewalls. EDR is usually used to enhance security capabilities, providing better security for networks.

Besides, the greatest drawback of EDR is that EDR tools heavily rely on behavioral analysis. The analysis will cost some time and that requires high efficiency when EDR tools detect the threat that was already executed on the endpoint. It is a race against time.

However, even though we recommend that EDR could be a better security enhancement, the combination with antivirus is often applied by businesses because of slowness or other technical issues triggered by heavy burdens.

For individuals, choosing a trustworthy antivirus or firewall program can meet your demands. Besides, to further protect your data as the last guarantee, you’d better prepare a backup plan for your important data.

Protect Your Data via Backup

To back up your important data, you can use this free backup software – MiniTool ShadowMaker. This backup tool allows you to back up systems, files & folders, and partitions & disks. In the backup task, you can apply backup schedules and backup schemes to facilitate the process.

Download and install the program that allows you to try 30 days for free.

MiniTool ShadowMaker TrialClick to Download100%Clean & Safe

Step 1: Open the program and click Keep Trial.

Step 2: In the Backup tab, choose the backup source and destination. We recommend you use an external hard drive as your backup destination. Besides, NAS devices are also available.

Step 3: After that, click Back Up Now to start the task immediately or Back Up Later to put off the process. The delayed task can be found in the Manage tab.

MiniTool ShadowMaker also provides backup options to customize the backup task, such as File size, Compression, and Password. More tools including Clone Disk, Sync, and Media Builder, are available for you to choose from.

Don’t know how to choose between antivirus and EDR? This article gives you their distinctions and tells you the way to choose them. If you like the post, you can share it on Twitter.Click to Tweet

Bottom Line:

This article has introduced both antivirus and EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response). They both play important roles in protecting users from cyber-attacks. If you are struggling between them, now this article about EDR vs antivirus may be helpful.

In addition, if you have any better solution to solve this issue, you can share it in the comment zone. And if you have any problem with the MiniTool ShadowMaker, you can contact us via email at support@minitool.com.