Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Azure Bastion vs Microsoft Sentinel comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Azure Bastion
Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite
19th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (25th), Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) (7th)
Microsoft Sentinel
Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
90
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (3rd), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (1st), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Microsoft Security Suite category, the mindshare of Azure Bastion is 1.5%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Sentinel is 5.4%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Microsoft Security Suite
 

Featured Reviews

Aladin Steiner - PeerSpot reviewer
Has good scalability and provides secure access to the virtual machines
The product improved the security posture of our organization. We don’t have open ports and connect them to servers using it. We can carry out two-factor authentication to protect the devices with conditional access features. It would be nice to have a feature to copy and paste the files into servers. I rate the product a nine out of ten.
KrishnanKartik - PeerSpot reviewer
Every rule enriched at triggering stage, easing the job of SOC analyst
It's a Big Data security analytics platform. Among the unique features is the fact that it has built-in UEBA and analytical capabilities. It allows you to use the out-of-the-box machine learning and AI capabilities, but it also allows you to bring your own AI/ML, by bringing in your own IPs and allowing the platform to accept them and run that on top of it. In addition, the SOAR component is a pay-per-use model. Compared to any other product, where customization is not available, you can fine-tune the SOAR and you'll be charged only when your playbooks are triggered. That is the beauty of the solution because the SOAR is the costliest component in the market today. Other vendors charge heavily for the SOAR, but with Sentinel it is upside-down: the SOAR is the lowest-hanging fruit. It's the least costly and it delivers more value to the customer. The SOAR engine also uniquely helps us to automate most of the incidents with automated enrichment and that cuts out the L1 analyst work. And combining M365 with Sentinel, if you want to call it integration, takes just a few clicks: "next, next finish." If it is all M365-native, it is a maximum of three or four steps and you'll be able to ingest all the logs into Sentinel. That is true even with AWS or GCP because most of the connectors are already available out-of-the-box. You just click, put in your subscription details, include your IAM, and you are finished. Within five to six steps, you can integrate AWS workloads and the logs can be ingested into Sentinel. When it comes to a third party specifically, such as log sources in a data center or on-premises, we need a log collector so that the logs can be forwarded to the Sentinel platform. And when it comes to servers or something where there is an agent for Windows or Linux, the agent can collect the logs and ship them to the Sentinel platform. I don't see any difficulties in integrating any of the log sources, even to the extent of collecting IoT log sources. Microsoft Defender for Cloud has multiple components such as Defender for Servers, Defender for PaaS, and Defender for databases. For customers in Azure, there are a lot of use cases specific to protecting workloads and PaaS and SaaS in Azure and beyond Azure, if a customer also has on-premises locations. There is EDR for Windows and Linux servers, and it even protects different kinds of containers. With Defender for Cloud, all these sources can be seamlessly integrated and you can then track the security incidents in Microsoft's XDR platform. That means you have one more workspace, under Azure, not Defender for Cloud, where you can see the security incidents. In addition, it can be integrated with Sentinel for EDR deep-dive analytics. It can also protect workloads in AWS. We have customers for whom we are protecting their AWS workloads. Even EKS, Elastic Kubernetes Service, on AWS can be integrated, as can the GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine). And with Defender for Cloud, security alert ingestion is free

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It provides all the security to us. Without getting on the internet, we can access our servers. We can access our desktop through our web browser. We don't need to run the mstsc command and login to the VM. All those things are not required."
"The product's setup is easy."
"Overall, I had a very positive experience."
"As an Azure consultant, for me, it is the best way to give the administrator access as you can manage the permission - including who can access Bastion."
"The solution's most valuable feature is that it is easy to use...It is modernized, so I can create complex infrastructures."
"The interface is available in the edit portal."
"The connection to virtual machines is very useful."
"The ability to operate the product with scripting is excellent."
"Free ingestion for Azure logs (with E5 licence)"
"The pricing of the product is excellent."
"We are able to deploy within half an hour and we only require one person to complete the implementation."
"The connectivity and analytics are great."
"Sentinel has an intuitive, user-friendly way to visualize the data properly. It gives me a solid overview of all the logs. We get a more detailed view that I can't get from the other SIEM tools. It has some IP and URL-specific allow listing"
"There are some very powerful features to Sentinel, such as the integration of various connectors. We have a lot of departments that use both IaaS and SaaS services, including M365 as well as Azure services. The ability to leverage connectors into these environments allows for large-scale data injection."
"What is most useful, is that it has a good connection to the Microsoft ecosystem, and I think that's the key part."
"Microsoft Sentinel provides the capability to integrate different log sources. On top of having several data connectors in place, you can also do integration with a threat intelligence platform to enhance and enrich the data that's available. You can collect as many logs and build all the use cases."
 

Cons

"There is room for improvement with AI features. I would like to see integrated AI features with Azure Bastion, especially for connectivity issues."
"There are some challenges because Bastion is more compatible with Edge but not with the other browsers. As an organization, it doesn't make sense that we have to use only Edge. We should be able to access Bastion over Chrome, Mozilla, or Opera. It should be our choice."
"The protocol speed could be faster."
"You are charged for retrieving your own data."
"While general support is valuable, having a detailed breakdown of the specific issues would contribute to a more streamlined and efficient resolution process."
"The solution breaks down sometimes."
"When you have a boot issue on Windows, you cannot use Azure Bastion to fix it. You have to use the Azure console or the VM console, and it is very limited."
"We are not able to copy and paste files directly into the server over the patch host. We have to transfer files over to Azure Storage."
"Currently, the watchlist feature is being utilized, and although there have been improvements, it is still not fully optimized."
"Azure Sentinel will be directly competing with tools such as Splunk or Qradar. These are very established kinds of a product that have been around for the last seven, eight years or more."
"We'd like to see more connectors."
"The built-in SOAR is not really good out-of-the-box. The SOAR relies on logic apps and you almost need to have some kind of developer background to be able to make these logic apps. Most security people cannot develop anything..."
"In terms of features I would like to see in future releases, I'm interested in a few more use cases around automation. I do believe a lot of automation is available, and more is in progress, but that would be my area of interest."
"As of now, there have been only benefits. However, I am curious about potential AI integration and whether it will be affordable for us because all the compliance costs are rising with all the new features."
"The solution could be more user-friendly; some query languages are required to operate it."
"There is room for improvement in terms of integrations. We have some tools, such as our off-site Meraki firewalls, that have not fully integrated with Sentinel. We lack integration for Syslogs into Sentinel."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is cheaply priced. I would say that the product is free to use."
"It does not save money for us."
"Azure Bastion's pricing is good."
"The pricing is a lower decision point than high-quality security for our organization. Better security comes at a cost, but it's worth it, and that's what we tell our customers."
"We are charged based on the amount of data used, which can become expensive."
"From a cost point of view, it is not a cheap product. It's, like, an enterprise-level application. So if you compare it with a low-level application, it's expensive, but if you compare it with the same-level application, it's pretty much cost-effective, I think."
"The price is reasonable because Sentinel includes features like user behavior analytics and SOAR that are typically sold separately. Overall, a standalone on-prem solution would require some high-end servers, and there's a different cost. It is a cloud-based solution, so there are backend cloud computing costs, but they are negligible."
"The pricing is reasonable, and we think Sentinel is worth what we pay for it."
"From a cost perspective, there are some additional charges in addition to the licensing."
"Sentinel can be expensive. When you ingest data from sources that are outside of the cloud, you're paying a fair amount for that data ingestion. When you're ingesting data sources from within the cloud, depending on what your retention periods are, it's not that expensive."
"Azure Sentinel is very costly, or at least it appears to be very costly. The costs vary based on your ingestion and your retention charges."
"Sentinel's price is comparable to pretty much everything out there. None of it is cheap, but we didn't think we could save money by going a different route. Sentinel was part of our Azure expenditures, so it was easier to add the expense instead of having a completely separate vendor."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Microsoft Security Suite solutions are best for your needs.
842,388 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Azure Bastion?
Azure Bastion makes it easy to provide quick virtual machine access to our customers.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Bastion?
The tool is cheaply priced. I would say that the product is free to use.
What needs improvement with Azure Bastion?
I think the tool is pretty good. It is like having a tool that just works. If there are better tools that Azure comes up with, then that is a separate thing. In the current scenario, Azure Bastion ...
Is there a common threat intelligence tool that aggregates multiple threat intelligence sources?
Yes, Azure Sentinel is a SIEM on the Cloud. Multiple data sources can be uploaded and analyzed with Azure Sentinel and its Threat Hunting functionality with AI available as templates or customized ...
What is a better choice, Splunk or Azure Sentinel?
It would really depend on (1) which logs you need to ingest and (2) what are your use cases Splunk is easy for ingestion of anything, but the charge per GB/Day Indexed and it gets expensive as log ...
Which is better - Azure Sentinel or AWS Security Hub?
We like that Azure Sentinel does not require as much maintenance as legacy SIEMs that are on-premises. Azure Sentinel is auto-scaling - you will not have to worry about performance impact, you will...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Azure Sentinel
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Microsoft Sentinel is trusted by companies of all sizes including ABM, ASOS, Uniper, First West Credit Union, Avanade, and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Bastion vs. Microsoft Sentinel and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
842,388 professionals have used our research since 2012.