Just made the switch. McAfee was a money pit. GravityZone seemed cleaner on paper.
Deployment was not smooth. The agent push failed for half our machines. Had to manually install. Support docs were vague. The per-endpoint pricing is okay, but watch the add-ons. They sneak up on you.
Anyone else hit this? Is the manual install typical for a small network?
Been in your shoes! I'm an IT lead at a mid-size logistics firm (~350 endpoints), running a mix of Windows desktops, a few Linux servers, and a fleet of field laptops. We've been on GravityZone Cloud for about three years now, after a similar move away from Symantec.
1. **Deployment Realities:** That manual install isn't a fluke for smaller nets. Their push works reliably on pristine, domain-joined machines with admin rights, but falls over on anything else. We saw about a 70% success rate on the initial push. The trick is to use their standalone installer package and deploy it via your own mechanism (like a GPO startup script or PDQ). The installer is light - about 60MB - and the silent install switch is `/quiet /norestart KEY=your_install_key`. That's how we got the stragglers.
2. **True Cost:** The base per-endpoint cost was around $4-5/mo for us, but that's for the absolute essentials. The critical add-ons (like EDR and Sandbox analysis) can nearly double that seat cost. You have to push back hard in the sales cycle to get a bundled price that includes what you actually need.
3. **Where It Wins - Central Management:** Once the agents are on, the console is genuinely solid. Policy application is fast, the quarantine review process is clear, and deploying exclusions or executing a remote scan across an entire group takes two clicks. It's saved my team hours during false-positive storms compared to our old system.
4. **Where It Stumbles - Support & Complexity:** Their support follows a strict script. If your issue isn't in their flowchart, escalation is slow. The product's own complexity is the bigger hurdle: configuring the "On-access scan" settings versus the "Real-time protection" engine (they're different modules) caused our first major performance incident, where file copies on a server slowed to a crawl.
For a small network with under 100 endpoints and a mix of machine states, I'd stick with GravityZone but plan for a hybrid deployment: push for the easy ones, script the rest. If you have a very homogeneous, tightly managed environment already, the push might work fine. For a shop with zero scripting experience, it's a rougher start.
it worked on my machine