Mandiant Managed Defense vs Mandiant Threat Defense: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)

Mandiant Managed Defense

Mid-market and enterprise security teams without dedicated 24/7 SOC capacity should evaluate Mandiant Managed Defense for its ability to compress attacker dwell time through expert-led investigation rather than automated alert forwarding alone. The service maps findings to MITRE ATT&CK and includes proactive threat hunting, which covers both the Detect and Respond functions in NIST CSF 2.0 with meaningful depth on incident analysis and mitigation. Skip this if your team prefers to own the investigation process end-to-end or if you need deep integration with non-Google security tools; Mandiant's architecture assumes Google cloud proximity and leans toward outcomes over tooling flexibility.

Mandiant Threat Defense

Mid-market and enterprise security teams without mature internal threat hunting capability should pick Mandiant Threat Defense for its human-led investigation model; the combination of AI-assisted hunting and expert analysts means actual humans validate threats before they reach your queue, not after. The service covers continuous monitoring through incident mitigation across NIST DE and RS functions, with escalation paths to Mandiant's incident response bench when things go hot. Skip this if you need a pure detection tool you can tune yourself or if your team has seasoned hunters already handling alert triage; you'll pay for expertise you don't use.