A smaller, faster, hardware-bound EDR — and the rest of your platform.
CrowdStrike Falcon is a strong EDR. It's also a single-product company — you still need to buy identity, secrets, PAM, and CSPM elsewhere. Tessarac Sentinel is comparable EDR with a tighter footprint (under 100MB RAM, under 1% CPU, hardware-bound TPM identity), bundled with the rest of your security platform.
Why a small EDR with TPM identity
Smaller surface, harder root.
Sentinel is one daemon, owning the only kernel-touching code on the host. Its identity is an ECDSA P-384 keypair generated inside the TPM — the private half never leaves hardware. CrowdStrike has a larger native footprint, multiple binaries, and a credential file the agent reads at startup.
- < 100MB resident memory, < 1% CPU steady-state — measured across our production fleet
- Hardware-bound identity defeats the entire credential-extraction class of attack against the agent
- One daemon, audited tightly, ships small — no second binary for telemetry, cordon, or session brokering
- Out-of-band cordon backstop — even if the agent is compromised, isolation works via the cloud control plane
- Open release artifacts: Sigstore-signed images, reproducible-build attestations, full SBOM
Side-by-side: Tessarac vs. CrowdStrike
Honest assessment as of May 2026. Where CrowdStrike ships an equivalent capability we say so; where they don't we say so. Notes carry the source.
Endpoint detection + response
| Feature | Tessarac | CrowdStrike |
|---|---|---|
Kernel telemetry (eBPF / ESF / ETW) | Yes | Yes |
Multi-engine antivirus | Yes | Yes |
Behavior-based process identity | Yes | Yes |
On-host ML inference for unknowns | Yes | Yes |
Cloud-sandbox detonation | Yes | Yes |
Hardware-bound (TPM / Secure Enclave) agent identity | Yes | No |
< 100MB RAM, < 1% CPU steady-state Falcon's footprint varies; CrowdStrike does not publish a hard ceiling. | Yes | Partial |
Cordon + response
| Feature | Tessarac | CrowdStrike |
|---|---|---|
5-tier graduated host cordon | Yes | Partial |
Out-of-band cordon backstop | Yes | No |
Same agent does telemetry + cordon + session brokering | Yes | No |
Cordon recommendations with full evidence chain | Yes | Partial |
Capabilities CrowdStrike does not sell
| Feature | Tessarac | CrowdStrike |
|---|---|---|
SAML / OIDC IdP (workforce + customer) | Yes | No |
Privileged access (SSH / RDP / DB / K8s) | Yes | No |
Secrets vault + internal CA | Yes | No |
API-key management plane | Yes | No |
Open source (community edition) | Yes | No |
Deployment + audit
| Feature | Tessarac | CrowdStrike |
|---|---|---|
Air-gapped install | Yes | Partial |
Self-host (your infrastructure) | Yes | No |
FedRAMP High path | Yes | Yes |
DoD IL5 path | Yes | Partial |
Customer-visible per-tenant audit | Yes | Partial |
Audit export to BYO destination | Yes | Partial |
One bill for everything above | Yes | No |
The total-cost story
Sentinel + 7 other pillars — usually below CrowdStrike alone.
Public CrowdStrike pricing for Falcon Complete (the full suite a comparable customer would buy) lands between $90 and $150 per endpoint per year, with separate contracts for identity, secrets, and PAM. Tessarac's all-in protected-systems pricing absorbs the EDR plus the rest of the platform at a single price line. The arithmetic usually breaks even before the second product is added.
- Per-protected-system Tessarac pricing covers the agent + every other pillar
- No separate identity, secrets, PAM, or CSPM contract to negotiate
- Federal plan deploys in our sovereign US-only environment with the same pricing model — no federal premium hidden in a custom quote
- Open Community edition for labs and validation — pilot the EDR before any commercial conversation
Run Sentinel alongside Falcon — no commitment
Most fleets can install both agents and compare telemetry, footprint, and verdict accuracy on real workloads. We'll help you set it up.