We performed a comparison between Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender for Cloud based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Microsoft Defender for Cloud comes out ahead of Microsoft Sentinel. Both products have good parameters in terms of technical support and initial setup, but our reviewers found that Microsoft Sentinel has a high price.
"The product has given us more insight into potential avenues for attack paths."
"Most importantly, it's an integrated solution. We not only have Defender for Cloud, but we also have Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Office 365, and Defender for Identity. It's an integrated, holistic solution."
"It isn't a highly complex solution. It's something that a lot of analysts can use. Defender gives you a broad overview of what's happening in your environment, and it's a great solution if you're a Microsoft shop."
"The technical support is very good."
"The most valuable features are ransomware protection and access controls. The solution has helped us secure some folders on our systems from unauthorized modifications."
"The integration with Logic Apps allows for automated responses to incidents."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the vulnerability assessments and the glossary of compliance."
"Defender lets you orchestrate the roll-out from a single pane. Using the Azure portal, you can roll it out over all the servers covered by the entire subscription."
"The in-built SOAR of Sentinel is valuable. Kusto Query Language is also valuable for the ease of writing queries and ease of getting insights from the logs. Schedule-based queries within Sentinel are also valuable. I found these three features most useful for my projects."
"The most valuable feature is the alert notifications, which are categorized by severity levels: informational, low, medium, and high."
"The Identity Behavior tab furnishes us with the entire history linked to each IP or domain that has either accessed or attempted to access our system."
"The dashboard that allows me to view all the incidents is the most valuable feature."
"Its inbuilt Kusto Query Language is a valuable feature. It provides the flexibility needed to leverage advanced data analytics rules and policies and enables us to easily navigate all our security events in a single view. It helps any user easily understand the data or any security lags in their data and applications."
"Sentinel uses Azure Logic Apps for automation, which is really powerful. This allows us to easily automate responses to incidents."
"Azure Application Gateway makes things a lot easier. You can create dashboards, alert rules, hunting and custom queries, and functions with it."
"I believe one of the main advantages is Microsoft Sentinel's seamless integration with other Microsoft products."
"For Kubernetes, I was using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). To see that whatever is getting deployed into AKS goes through the correct checks and balances in terms of affinities and other similar aspects and follows all the policies, we had to use a product called Stackrox. At a granular level, the built-in policies were good for Kubernetes, but to protect our containers from a coding point of view, we had to use a few other products. For example, from a programming point of view, we were using Checkmarx for static code analysis. For CIS compliance, there are no CIS benchmarks for AKS. So, we had to use other plugins to see that the CIS benchmarks are compliant. There are CIS benchmarks for Kubernetes on AWS and GCP, but there are no CIS benchmarks for AKS. So, Azure Security Center fell short from the regulatory compliance point of view, and we had to use one more product. We ended up with two different dashboards. We had Azure Security Center, and we had Stackrox that had its own dashboard. The operations team and the security team had to look at two dashboards, and they couldn't get an integrated piece. That's a drawback of Azure Security Center. Azure Security Center should provide APIs so that we can integrate its dashboard within other enterprise dashboards, such as the PowerBI dashboard. We couldn't get through these aspects, and we ended up giving Reader security permission to too many people, which was okay to some extent, but when we had to administer the users for the Stackrox portal and Azure Security Center, it became painful."
"After getting a recommendation, it takes time for the solution to refresh properly to show that the problem has been eliminated."
"Sometimes, it's very difficult to determine when I need Microsoft Defender for Cloud for a special resource group or certain kinds of products. That's not an issue directly with the product, though."
"Azure Security Center takes a long time to update, compared to the on-premises version of Microsoft Defender."
"The product must improve its UI."
"I would suggest building a single product that addresses endpoint server protection, attack surface, and everything else in one solution. That is the main disadvantage with the product. If we are incorporating some features, we end up in a situation where this solution is for the server, and that one is for the client, or this is for identity, and that is for our application. They're not bundling it. Commercially, we can charge for different licenses, but on the implementation side, it's tough to help our end-customer understand which product they're getting."
"Defender is occasionally unreliable. It isn't 100% efficient in terms of antivirus detection, but it isn't an issue most of the time. It's also somewhat difficult to train new security analysts to use Defender."
"I would like to have the ability to customize executive reporting."
"Sentinel could improve its ticketing and management. A few customers I have worked with liked to take the data created in Sentinel. You can make some basic efforts around that, but the customers wanted to push it to a third-party system so they could set up a proper ticketing management system, like ServiceNow, Jira, etc."
"We are invoiced according to the amount of data generated within each log."
"The solution should allow for a streamlined CI/CD procedure."
"If Sentinel had a graphical user interface, it would be easier to use. I would also like it to be more customizable."
"It would be good to have some connectors for third-party SIEM solutions. Many customers are struggling with the integration of Azure Sentinel with their on-premise SIEM. Microsoft is changing the log structure many times a year, which can corrupt a custom integration. It would be good to have some connectors developed by Microsoft or supply vendors, but they are not providing such functionality or tools."
"When we pass KPIs to the governance department, there's no option to provide rights to the data or dashboard to colleagues. We can use Power BI for this, but it isn't easy or convenient. They should just come up with a way to provide limited role-based access to auditing personnel"
"We'd like to see more connectors."
"Sentinel can be used in two ways. With other tools like QRadar, I don't need to run queries. Using Sentinel requires users to learn KQL to run technical queries and check things. If they don't know KQL, they can't fully utilize the solution."
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 2nd in Microsoft Security Suite with 46 reviews while Microsoft Sentinel is ranked 6th in Microsoft Security Suite with 85 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0, while Microsoft Sentinel is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Cloud writes "Provides multi-cloud capability, is plug-and-play, and improves our security posture". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Sentinel writes "Gives a comprehensive and holistic view of the ecosystem and improves visibility and the ability to respond". Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with AWS GuardDuty, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Defender XDR, Wiz and Azure Firewall, whereas Microsoft Sentinel is most compared with AWS Security Hub, IBM Security QRadar, Splunk Enterprise Security, Elastic Security and Wazuh. See our Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Microsoft Sentinel report.
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We monitor all Microsoft Security Suite reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
