

Microsoft Sentinel and Cortex XSIAM are leading competitors in the cybersecurity space, focusing on threat detection and security information and event management (SIEM). Microsoft Sentinel appears to have an edge due to its deep integration with Microsoft ecosystems and robust third-party integrations.
Features: Microsoft Sentinel offers AI-driven threat detection, automation with Azure Logic Apps, and numerous out-of-box solutions, which enhance integration with Microsoft and third-party products. Additionally, its user-friendly interface and native connectors simplify third-party tool integration. Cortex XSIAM is noted for its unified approach, leveraging machine learning for efficient threat resolution, despite having fewer third-party integrations than Sentinel.
Room for Improvement: Microsoft Sentinel could improve its user interface, reduce false positives, and enhance integration and cost clarity. Refining its documentation and pricing structure would also help smaller businesses. Cortex XSIAM should expand its integration capabilities and improve developer friendliness and support responsiveness.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Microsoft Sentinel benefits from seamless integration within the Microsoft stack, offering smoother deployments in relevant environments, though support quality can vary by tier. Cortex XSIAM provides straightforward cloud deployment but requires enhancements in customer service responsiveness and technical expertise.
Pricing and ROI: Microsoft Sentinel's pricing model can be costly due to data ingestion fees, although it promises considerable ROI for customers already using Microsoft ecosystems. Cortex XSIAM offers competitive pricing, though viewed as higher upfront, aligning well with enterprise requirements for integration and advanced analytics.
If a customer is already using Microsoft’s ecosystem, the ROI can be positive due to seamless integration.
Our MTTR, mean time to response, improved by forty to fifty percent. Earlier, medium-severity incidents took two to three hours to resolve. Now, after Microsoft Sentinel, it is forty to fifty-five minutes.
We attribute our growth to Sentinel.
With premium support, core Palo Alto technical experts handle issues directly.
It is ineffective in terms of responding to basic queries and addressing future requirements.
The Palo Alto support team is fully responsive and helpful.
Their solutions' integration simplifies resolving issues compared to those caused by third-party products.
Microsoft invests significantly in support, which is crucial for companies.
Working with a Sentinel engineer helped us tune settings effectively.
Without proper integration, scaling up with more servers is meaningless.
Cortex XSIAM is highly scalable.
Office 365 and Exchange are running on it, covering about 35,000 users efficiently.
There is no need to add hardware or redesign infrastructure because it is cloud-native.
As our organization uses Microsoft Azure and Defender, everything grows together, and we can integrate various features seamlessly.
The product was easy to install and set up and worked right.
Overall, Cortex XSIAM is stable.
It works really nice and performs really efficiently after configuration.
So far, we have not experienced any issues, and it has been stable from the beginning.
In the past two years, our team hasn't encountered any issues with the stability of Microsoft Sentinel from an operations perspective.
I need to be aware of deprecated connectors as they may disconnect, but the data continues to be sent with a need for quick adaptation.
Obtaining validation for integrations from Palo Alto takes around eight months, which is quite long.
Cortex XSIAM needs improvements in terms of data onboarding, parsers, and third-party integration supports.
Cortex XSIAM is on the expensive side and requires substantial improvement in pricing.
Log ingestion and retention costs can grow quickly, and understanding which data source is driving cost is not always straightforward.
We have some tools, such as our off-site Meraki firewalls, that have not fully integrated with Sentinel.
Currently, we are happy to have a way in the middle with not so much cost, but it would be nice to have the ability to enhance the automation of workflows based on learned incidents.
The first impression is that XSIAM would be more expensive than others we tried.
The product is very expensive.
Cortex XSIAM is pretty expensive, and the licensing process is not very comfortable.
It has been beneficial that Microsoft Sentinel is included as part of the Microsoft package, making it more cost-effective.
Microsoft Sentinel is not a low-cost SIEM.
Microsoft Sentinel offers more capabilities than Bastion, with a more intuitive experience.
The advanced visualization capabilities of the product are important for understanding security trends in an organization.
One of the valued aspects of the product is its use of artificial intelligence to detect security vulnerabilities.
The flexibility for creating manual workflows stands out.
Microsoft Sentinel's ability to correlate data from multiple sources and its detection capabilities are essential.
Microsoft Sentinel has improved cost efficiency, which is one of the key areas we're able to win business against the ability to have threat intelligence.
Microsoft Sentinel's ability to correlate data from multiple sources enhances our threat detection capabilities beyond what is a simple data lake solution by filtering out the noise and consolidating the signal down to a meaningful level that is easier to investigate and see.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Microsoft Sentinel | 5.0% |
| Cortex XSIAM | 2.4% |
| Other | 92.6% |

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 9 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 2 |
| Large Enterprise | 4 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 38 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 22 |
| Large Enterprise | 45 |
Cortex XSIAM acts as a critical element for SOC foundations, integrating SIEM and EDR capabilities, valued for threat detection and seamless security orchestration with Palo Alto Networks products.
Organizations find Cortex XSIAM beneficial for SOC foundations due to its capability to integrate SIEM and EDR tools, facilitating data collection, detection, and response. It connects with third-party data sources while reducing management effort and offering cost-effective alternatives to competitors like CrowdStrike and Trend Micro. Featuring automation and integration with Palo Alto Networks products, Cortex XSIAM enhances threat detection. Unified architecture allows a comprehensive view of attacks, further supported by machine learning and integration with existing vendor solutions, ensuring that users gain insights without significant manual log analysis.
What are Cortex XSIAM's key features?
What benefits are evident in Cortex XSIAM reviews?
Industries implement Cortex XSIAM mainly in technology-driven sectors where centralized endpoint protection and automation of forensic investigation are paramount. By integrating several third-party systems for incident response, companies in competitive markets leverage its attributes for heightened operational security efficiency. However, users note areas for improvement, such as Attack Surface Management and integration enhancements, to better suit tech-heavy industries needing extensive connectivity with cybersecurity solutions.
Microsoft Sentinel is a scalable, cloud-native, security information event management (SIEM) and security orchestration automated response (SOAR) solution that lets you see and stop threats before they cause harm. Microsoft Sentinel delivers intelligent security analytics and threat intelligence across the enterprise, providing a single solution for alert detection, threat visibility, proactive hunting, and threat response. Eliminate security infrastructure setup and maintenance, and elastically scale to meet your security needs—while reducing IT costs. With Microsoft Sentinel, you can:
- Collect data at cloud scale—across all users, devices, applications, and infrastructure, both on-premises and in multiple clouds
- Detect previously uncovered threats and minimize false positives using analytics and unparalleled threat intelligence from Microsoft
- Investigate threats with AI and hunt suspicious activities at scale, tapping into decades of cybersecurity work at Microsoft
- Respond to incidents rapidly with built-in orchestration and automation of common tasks
To learn more about our solution, ask questions, and share feedback, join our Microsoft Security, Compliance and Identity Community.
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