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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’m Mike Pearlstein, CISSP. I’ve built and run 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. That gap is what MDR supplies, and it is exactly the gap the incident below exposed.
One of our clients, a marketing agency running our standard stack with the Huntress agent on every endpoint, 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 tooling.
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.
MDR, EDR, or antivirus: what a small business actually needs
According to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, reported business losses run into hundreds of millions of dollars each year, led by business email compromise and ransomware, and the centre itself cautions that most fraud is never reported at all. The losses that category hides are exactly what a staffed detection layer exists to prevent.
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.
| Layer | What it does | Who acts on it at 2am |
|---|---|---|
| Antivirus | Blocks known malicious files | Nobody. It runs silent until it misses. |
| EDR | Flags suspicious behaviour on the endpoint | Your team, if someone is watching the console |
| MDR (Huntress) | Detects, triages, and guides response | A staffed 24/7 security operations centre |
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.
That’s why Huntress pairs its agent with a 24/7 security operations centre staffed by analysts, and why our own value lives in the staffed response behind the product. The 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
According to the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security’s Baseline Cyber Security Controls for small and medium organizations, 13 baseline controls spanning MFA, patching, backups, and incident response aim to deliver roughly 80 percent of the security benefit for 20 percent of the effort, and they align with CIS Controls v8.1.
When we put Huntress up against any other detection vendor, we score it on the same five things. Huntress is where we land, and here is the honest reasoning I 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 per endpoint through partners and scales with the size of the fleet, so a growing SMB isn’t paying for capacity it won’t use for years.
For context, our managed cybersecurity programs that include Huntress-backed MDR run $130 to $180 per user per month, and the detection layer is a fraction of that. 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 a SOC finding on one of your endpoints 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, including its annual SMB threat reporting. 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.
“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
According to Statistics Canada’s 2023 Canadian Survey of Cyber Security and Cybercrime, about 1 in 6 Canadian businesses were hit by a cyber security incident that year, and recovery spending doubled from roughly $600 million in 2021 to $1.2 billion in 2023. Small firms absorb that impact with the leanest security teams.
A fair Huntress review names the alternatives and says where they win. None of these are bad products. They are built for different buyers, and I have deployed or inherited every one of them.
- 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.
Two objections we hear before every Huntress deployment
According to the Huntress SMB Threat Report (December 2023), 56 percent of incidents against small and mid-sized businesses were effectively malware-free, 65 percent involved abuse of legitimate remote management tools, and 60 percent of ransomware traced to unknown or defunct strains. Signature-based prevention alone cannot see most of that.
Two objections come up in almost every Huntress conversation, so let me meet them directly. The first is that cyber insurance covers it. Insurance pays a claim, it does not stop an intrusion the way a SOC does, 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. Our cyber insurance coverage checklist breaks down the exact controls Canadian underwriters now verify at renewal.
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?
- How many hours until your people are working again?
MDR exists to keep you from ever needing the answer.
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.
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 and our Toronto cybersecurity services.
That’s our Huntress review, written from the SOC alerts up. The product is excellent. The team behind it is the reason we sleep at night.
Free download
The Network Security Controls Checklist (2026)
The five vendor criteria above are only half the picture. This checklist covers the controls an MDR tool sits on top of, across perimeter, segmentation, identity, endpoint, backup, and testing, each written as a yes/no you can audit.
No sales call required. Want the answers verified against your environment? Book a consultation.
Delivered by a CISSP-led team, one of Canada’s 50 Best Managed IT Companies (2024 & 2025).
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.
How much does Huntress cost in Canada?
Huntress is priced per endpoint and sold through partners, so the number to budget is the managed program around it. Our managed cybersecurity programs that include Huntress-backed MDR, 24/7 SOC coverage, and remediation run $130 to $180 per user per month. Compare that against the $1.2 billion Canadian businesses spent recovering from incidents in 2023, and the math is short.
Is Huntress better than SentinelOne for a small business?
They solve different problems. SentinelOne is a powerful EDR platform built for organizations with an in-house team to tune and monitor it. Huntress bundles detection with a 24/7 human SOC that acts on what it sees. For a 10 to 100 person business with no security analysts on staff, we recommend Huntress in nearly every case.
Does Huntress protect Microsoft 365 accounts?
Yes. Beyond endpoints, Huntress offers identity threat detection for Microsoft 365 that watches for account takeover and malicious inbox rules. That matters because most of the business email compromise we investigate starts in the cloud, not on a laptop. We deploy the Microsoft 365 protection alongside the endpoint agent for nearly every client.
How long does Huntress take to deploy?
Days, not months. The agent pushes silently through standard RMM tooling, and a typical 25 to 75 endpoint rollout completes inside a business week, including the Microsoft 365 identity connection. There’s no rip-and-replace: Huntress runs alongside Microsoft Defender and most existing antivirus, so nothing has to come out before protection goes in.
Do I still need antivirus if I have Huntress?
Yes, and they’re designed to stack. Huntress manages Microsoft Defender on Windows endpoints and layers its own detection, SOC review, and human response on top. Prevention still blocks commodity malware. The Huntress SMB Threat Report found 56 percent of incidents were effectively malware-free, and that’s the share a staffed detection layer exists to catch.
