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Most software reviews are written by people who installed the trial. This one is written after running the product across thousands of endpoints for our clients since 2023. I am Mike Pearlstein. I have built and managed security for Canadian small businesses at Fusion Computing since 2012, and Huntress is the managed detection and response platform we trust to watch those endpoints around the clock.
So this is a working review, not a feature tour. I want to show you the moment that earned our confidence, the five things we actually grade an MDR vendor on, and where Huntress, SentinelOne, Blackpoint, and RocketCyber each genuinely fit.
The 30 minutes that showed us why we run Huntress
According to the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (2025), attackers increasingly operate outside business hours, and the gap most SMBs have is detection and response, not prevention tooling, which is what managed detection and response supplies.
One of our clients, a marketing agency, hired a new employee who wanted to make a strong first impression. She clicked a link in an email that looked routine. That click started a social-engineering chain that dropped PowerShell into the Windows Run dialog and quietly pulled down command-and-control software.
Roughly 30 minutes later, that foothold tried to deploy ransomware.
Here is the part that still matters most to me. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint was installed, and it saw the activity. It never raised an alert. The signal sat there, technically detected and operationally invisible.
The Huntress security operations centre caught the same activity, escalated it, and walked us through remediation before the ransomware ever ran. Huntress published the full account as a Fusion Computing case study, and it remains the cleanest illustration I can give of what we buy when we buy MDR.
Detection without a human who acts on it is just a log entry waiting to be read after the damage is done.
Want to know if Huntress is the right fit for your environment →
MDR, EDR, or antivirus: what a small business actually needs
The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre logs hundreds of millions of dollars in reported business losses each year, led by business email compromise and ransomware, and notes that the majority of fraud goes unreported.
The fastest way to make sense of a Huntress review is to place it on the right shelf. Antivirus blocks known bad files. Endpoint detection and response, or EDR, watches behaviour and flags suspicious activity. Managed detection and response, or MDR, adds the piece the agency story turned on: a staffed team that reads those flags and acts, every hour of every day.
For a small business, the tool matters less than the people watching it. Defender saw the attack. No human on our client’s side was positioned to act on what it saw at that hour. MDR closes exactly that gap, and it is the category Huntress was built for.
This is also why our value lives in the staffed response behind the software. That human response, more than any feature list, is what stops the loss for the businesses we protect.
The five things we judge an MDR vendor on
The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security publishes Baseline Cyber Security Controls for small and medium organizations, a starting set spanning MFA, patching, backups, and incident response that aligns with CIS Controls v8.1.
When we evaluate any detection vendor, we score it on the same five things. Huntress is where we land, and here is the honest reasoning we walk every client through.
1. Cost and value
Security tooling that prices like enterprise software punishes a 40-seat business for being small. Huntress prices in a way that scales with the size of the fleet, so a growing SMB is not paying for capacity it will not use for years. Value, for us, is measured against the cost of a single ransomware event, not against the line item.
2. Support that answers when it is real
The test of support is not the sales call. It is who picks up at 2am when an alert is genuine. With a managed SOC behind the product, our clients get a triaged finding and a clear remediation, not a ticket in a queue. Fusion Computing has leaned on that response under live pressure, and it held.
3. Community engagement
Huntress invests heavily in a public community, free training, and open threat research. That openness is a signal. A vendor that shares what it finds, and teaches defenders for free, tends to be a vendor that is honest about what its product does and does not do. We have learned from that community, and it has made our team sharper.
4. The people who run it
Tools reflect the culture that builds them. Huntress is run by people with a security-first, attacker-minded background, and you can see it in how findings are written. The remediation guidance reads like it was authored by someone who has actually chased an intruder out of a network, because it was.
5. Our own field experience
The last criterion is the one a trial cannot give you. Fusion Computing has run Huntress across thousands of endpoints since 2023. That track record, not a datasheet, is why it stays our backbone. We have watched it catch what other layers missed, and we have watched the human SOC turn a near miss into a non-event.
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“Fusion gave us a CISSP-led security review in three weeks flat. We’d been quoted twelve weeks by two larger MSPs. They found a domain-admin gap our previous provider missed for two years.”
Operations Director, 85-employee Toronto law firm (client name on file)
Where Huntress, SentinelOne, Blackpoint, and RocketCyber each fit
Statistics Canada’s survey of cyber security and cybercrime finds that small and medium businesses absorb a disproportionate share of incident impact while running the leanest security teams.
A fair review names the alternatives and says where they win. None of these are bad products. They are built for different buyers.
- Huntress is our pick for small and mid-sized businesses, and for the MSPs that serve them, where a managed SOC and sane pricing matter more than a deep configuration surface.
- SentinelOne is strong when an organization has enterprise scale and wants autonomous, agent-driven EDR with rich tuning, and the in-house team to run it.
- Blackpoint Cyber fits shops that want an aggressive, response-first 24/7 SOC model and value rapid active containment as the centrepiece.
- RocketCyber, now part of Kaseya through the Datto acquisition, fits providers already standardized on the Kaseya stack who want their SOC tooling inside that ecosystem.
We deliberately keep this comparison on criteria rather than a feature-by-feature pricing grid. Those grids go stale within a quarter, and they distract from the question that decides outcomes: who is watching, and will they act.
What our Huntress review means for your business
If you remember one thing, make it this. You do not really buy Huntress. You buy a team that runs it for you and acts before a bad morning becomes a bad quarter.
Two objections come up often, so let me meet them directly. The first is that cyber insurance covers it. Insurance pays a claim, it does not stop one, and across roughly 30 renewal cycles I have watched premiums climb while questionnaires turned into 60-question security audits. The policy is the floor, not the ceiling, and MFA, EDR, and a documented response plan are now what the renewal questionnaire is actually buying you.
The second is that the existing backup is fine. A backup that has never been restored is a hope, not a plan. We ask three questions: when was the last successful end-to-end restore test, are the backups immutable so a stolen admin credential cannot delete them, and how many hours until people are working again. MDR exists to keep you from ever needing the answer.
Talk to the team that runs MDR across thousands of endpoints →
Fusion Computing deploys and manages Huntress for businesses across Toronto, Hamilton, and Vancouver, alongside our broader cybersecurity services. If you want a straight answer about whether it fits your environment, talk to us.
That is our Huntress review, written from the SOC alerts up. The product is excellent. The team behind it is the reason we sleep at night.
Fusion Computing helps Canadian businesses across Toronto and the GTA, Hamilton, and Metro Vancouver with managed IT, cybersecurity, and Microsoft 365.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Huntress worth it for a small business?
For most small businesses, yes. The value is the staffed security operations centre behind the software, not just the agent. Antivirus and basic EDR can detect an attack and still stay silent. Huntress adds people who read those alerts around the clock and act before ransomware runs. We have watched that catch real attacks across thousands of client endpoints since 2023.
What is the difference between Huntress and Microsoft Defender?
Microsoft Defender is endpoint protection that detects threats. Huntress is managed detection and response, which means a 24/7 team reviews what tools like Defender surface and then responds. In one client incident, Defender saw the attack and never alerted, while the Huntress SOC caught it and stopped the ransomware. Defender is a layer. Huntress is the layer that acts on it.
Does Huntress replace my IT provider?
No. Huntress is the detection and response platform, not the team that runs your day-to-day IT. It works best when deployed and managed by an MSP like Fusion Computing, who tunes it, responds alongside the SOC, and folds it into your wider security plan. You get the Huntress technology plus a local team accountable for the outcome.
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