Windows Server Update Services (WSUS)

WSUS is a Windows Server role that synchronises updates from Microsoft Update and lets administrators approve and distribute Microsoft product updates to computers on their own network, targeted by computer group with deadlines. Clients pull approved updates from the WSUS server through the built-in Windows Update Agent. Microsoft has deprecated WSUS: it gets no new features, but it still ships and is supported with security and quality updates. A WSUS server can also be the update source for other WSUS servers within the organization. In a WSUS implementation, at least one WSUS server on your network must be able to connect to Microsoft Update to get available update information. This change requires either an update installation or the manual addition of Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) types to Internet Information Services (IIS) on WSUS servers. Delivery is on-premises software.

Current Version

Part of Windows Server · no separate version

Product Page

learn.microsoft.com/…/windows-ser…

Market

EnterpriseMid-MarketSMB

Licence

Free

Price

Free

Record Created

2026-10-06

Last Updated

2026-10-28

Microsoft is the largest security vendor in this index by installed base, and almost none of that was bought deliberately: Microsoft Defender Antivirus is built into Windows and switched on by default, so it protects any machine whose owner has not installed something else. That changes how its results should be read — it is the baseline every other product in this index is implicitly compared against. The paid products are a different thing from the built-in one. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint adds detection and response, threat and vulnerability management and central policy to the same engine; Microsoft Defender for Business is the smaller-organisation edition; Microsoft Defender XDR correlates signals across endpoints, identity, email and cloud apps; and Microsoft Sentinel is the SIEM above them. Microsoft Defender for Individuals, included with Microsoft 365, is the consumer application. Microsoft enters the public test cycles regularly, and its results are among the most consistently available in this index — useful, because for many readers the real question is not which product is best in the abstract but whether a paid product beats the one already installed. Vendor page →

Website

microsoft.com

Country

🇺🇸United States

Headquarters

🇺🇸Redmond, United States

Year Established

1975

Customers

1.6M organisations

Users

1.4B devices protected

Revenue

$331.8B (2026)