Keithen Drury, The Motley Fool
5 min read
In This Article:
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CrowdStrike and SentinelOne have similar business models and offerings.
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CrowdStrike is much larger.
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SentinelOne trades at a steep discount to CrowdStrike.
Artificial intelligence (AI) may have many benefits, but it's also making it easier for hackers, online criminals, and other digital malefactors to threaten businesses, and those threats are getting more potent. Keeping them at bay requires a lot of funds to be devoted to cybersecurity, making companies like CrowdStrike (NASDAQ: CRWD) and SentinelOne (NYSE: S) excellent investment opportunities.
But is there an advantage to buying one over the other now?
Both companies' base products are AI-powered protection platforms that analyze digital activity and learn to spot the threats among the normal activity. They deploy their software to network endpoints -- in other words, laptops, smartphones, and other devices that can access a client's internal network. By protecting these devices, companies make it harder for cyberattackers to gain access to their internal networks, where they might steal sensitive information, delete files, interfere with systems, or even lock them down with ransomware to extort payments from their victims.
While endpoint protection is how both companies land clients, each bolsters its offerings with an array of other cybersecurity products that clients can use to create a protection suite tailored to their unique situations.
Since these two direct competitors offer highly similar product types, it's hard to declare either a winner on this front from an investor perspective.
Winner: Tie.
From a sheer size perspective, CrowdStrike is the clear winner. During its fiscal 2026 first quarter, which ended April 30, CrowdStrike's annual recurring revenue (ARR) rose to $4.4 billion. SentinelOne's ARR of $948 million in its fiscal Q1 was less than a quarter of that.
While size doesn't always matter, in this case, it does. Because so many more companies use CrowdStrike's platform, it's more likely that any given IT professional will have at least one contact already on its client list. If CrowdStrike is doing a great job with those clients, word will spread, and it will likely receive more serious consideration in future cybersecurity bidding processes.
This advantage cannot be understated. Indeed, it's one of the reasons why CrowdStrike's growth has remained strong despite its size.
