Cortex XDR vs Elastic EDR - which gives better value for a 500-seat shop?

Hey folks, I've been neck-deep in evaluating EDR platforms for a mid-sized Kubernetes-heavy environment (around 500 endpoints, mix of Linux nodes, Windows workstations, and cloud workloads). The shortlist has come down to Palo Alto's Cortex XDR and Elastic Security with its EDR capabilities. While both have their merits, I'm trying to peel back the marketing layers to see which one truly delivers operational value and integrates smoothly into a modern, GitOps-driven pipeline.

My primary lens is around integration overhead and the "day-2" operational experience. For instance, with Elastic, you're buying into the entire ELK stack. That can be powerful if you're already using it for logging, but it's also a significant deployment. Here's a super simplified snippet of how you might deploy the Elastic Agent via a DaemonSet for your nodes:

```yaml
apiVersion: apps/v1
daemonSet:
metadata:
name: elastic-agent
spec:
selector:
matchLabels:
app: elastic-agent
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: elastic-agent
spec:
serviceAccountName: elastic-agent-sa
containers:
- name: elastic-agent
image: docker.elastic.co/beats/elastic-agent:8.10.0
env:
- name: FLEET_URL
value: "https://my-fleet-server:8220"
- name: FLEET_ENROLLMENT_TOKEN
valueFrom:
secretKeyRef:
name: fleet-enrollment-token
key: token
```

With Cortex XDR, the agent management feels more turnkey from a traditional endpoint perspective, but I've found its posture in a declarative, infrastructure-as-code world a bit less transparent. My big questions for the community are:

* **Deployment & Management:** For a 500-seat shop, which platform's agent is less burdensome to roll out, update, and maintain at scale, especially when dealing with immutable infrastructure patterns?
* **Kubernetes & Cloud-Native Visibility:** How do their detection engines compare for container runtime threats and suspicious pod behavior? Does Elastic's tight coupling with its own observability data give it a notable edge?
* **Total Cost of Ownership:** Beyond the license fees, where does the hidden operational complexity lie?
* Is it in the compute/resources needed for the backend (Elasticsearch clusters for Elastic)?
* Is it in the need for specialized skills to tune alerts and maintain detection rules?
* **Automation & GitOps:** How amenable is each platform to having its policies, detection rules, and exceptions managed as code (e.g., in a Git repo, applied via Terraform or Helm)? I've seen some Terraform providers for Elastic, but how mature are they really?

We're leaning towards a "single pane of glass" that can cover our cloud workloads and traditional endpoints, but not at the cost of creating a monstrously complex internal platform to manage. Any war stories, detailed config insights, or even Helm chart snippets for managing these deployments would be incredibly valuable!