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Elastic Security vs Microsoft Sentinel comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
5.9
Elastic Security provides positive ROI in 18-24 months, affordable for SMEs, though premium support may be lacking.
Sentiment score
7.2
Microsoft Sentinel ROI is mixed; challenges exist, but benefits include automation savings, enhanced security, and reduced staffing needs.
It does not require hefty security budgets and can be deployed for enterprise security effectively.
If a customer is already using Microsoft’s ecosystem, the ROI can be positive due to seamless integration.
Microsoft Azure was not fitting for short-term cost savings but promised a better ROI over three to five years for medium to large companies.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.4
Elastic Security support varies; open-source praised for community help, commercial support seen as responsive but with some improvement needed.
Sentiment score
6.7
Microsoft Sentinel's support is praised for quick response, with premium tiers offering expert help and strong community resources.
Most of the time when my team encounters issues, they receive responses within 24 hours.
Support is prompt and helpful.
Their solutions' integration simplifies resolving issues compared to those caused by third-party products.
When my team needs to escalate issues to Microsoft, especially for Microsoft Sentinel, the response is fast through their French entity.
Working with a Sentinel engineer helped us tune settings effectively.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Elastic Security is praised for scalability, easily supporting small to large businesses and adaptable through configuration adjustments.
Sentiment score
8.0
Microsoft Sentinel's cloud scalability enables effortless resource management and meets large-scale needs, making it ideal for extensive monitoring.
It allows us to think about specific use cases, such as gathering malicious IPs in a single view and analyzing threats based on geolocation.
Office 365 and Exchange are running on it, covering about 35,000 users efficiently.
Being a SaaS solution, the scalability of Microsoft Sentinel is robust.
As our organization uses Microsoft Azure and Defender, everything grows together, and we can integrate various features seamlessly.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Elastic Security is stable and reliable, but requires proper setup and resource management; frequent updates can disrupt some users.
Sentiment score
7.8
Microsoft Sentinel is stable and reliable with 99.9%+ uptime; issues typically arise from external factors or misconfigurations.
In terms of stability, I would rate Elastic a solid eight out of ten.
In the past two years, our team hasn't encountered any issues with the stability of Microsoft Sentinel from an operations perspective.
So far, we have not experienced any issues, and it has been stable from the beginning.
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.
 

Room For Improvement

Elastic Security faces challenges in usability, integration, scalability, and awareness, requiring enhancements in features and user support.
Users recommend improvements to multi-tenancy, log ingestion, interface intuitiveness, and integration, with concerns over pricing and AI enhancement.
CrowdStrike and Defender have more established threat intelligence integration due to having a larger client base.
My security testing team continuously reports vulnerabilities, and we have to fix and update the versions frequently.
Elastic Security consumes a lot of resources, requiring a substantial deployment setup.
There are complexities in calculating the right pricing tier for different customers, which makes it difficult for me as a consultant during upfront pricing.
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.
 

Setup Cost

Elastic Security is cost-effective for SMEs but advanced features and lack of included support can increase costs.
Microsoft Sentinel offers scalable, cost-effective pricing with discounts, especially beneficial for E5 users and high-volume data ingestion.
The pricing is reasonable, especially for Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs), making it a viable option for businesses building their security infrastructure.
This is beneficial for SMEs as they do not need extensive budgets for security solutions.
Elastic Security is considered cost-effective, especially at lower EPS levels.
Microsoft Sentinel offers more capabilities than Bastion, with a more intuitive experience.
Setting up the right cost model for customers is intricate, requiring careful consideration of various components and licensing tiers.
We already had the necessary licensing for Sentinel, so we didn't need to spend extra money.
 

Valuable Features

Elastic Security offers rapid search, scalability, and affordability with strong machine learning and customizable dashboards for efficient threat detection.
Microsoft Sentinel offers seamless integration, AI-driven threat detection, automated responses, and scalability for efficient, comprehensive security management.
The platform provides more visibility and requires less effort in monitoring.
We require rapid processing speed for alerts and event data, and Elastic Security is very efficient at handling this level of data.
Elastic Security offers good insight regarding alerts, reports, and cases.
The best feature of Microsoft Sentinel is its ability to unify all dashboards or functions into one modern SecOps dashboard.
Custom workbooks are valuable. It is one of the crucial points in dealing with potential security threats in an automated way without requiring too much manpower.
The most valuable features for us include threat collection, threat detection, response, and the knowledge base for investigation.
 

Categories and Ranking

Elastic Security
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
5th
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
64
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (7th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (16th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (8th)
Microsoft Sentinel
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
3rd
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
91
Ranking in other categories
Microsoft Security Suite (6th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of Elastic Security is 6.6%, down from 9.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Sentinel is 7.4%, down from 9.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

SyedAli17 - PeerSpot reviewer
Centralized monitoring improves security posture through rapid data processing
The processing part of Elastic Security ( /products/elastic-security-reviews ) is very interesting for us since we handle almost 7,000 to 8,000 alerts per minute. We require rapid processing speed for alerts and event data, and Elastic Security is very efficient at handling this level of data. Additionally, Elastic Security helps improve the security posture of Pakistan through centralized visibility and real-time processing.
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
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
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

Datadog vs ELK: which one is good in terms of performance, cost and efficiency?
With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately using the dashboards we have created with Datadog; they are very good c...
What do you like most about Elastic Security?
Elastic provides the capability to index quickly due to the reverse indexes it offers. This data is crucial as it contains critical information. The reverse index allows fast data indexing because ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Security?
Elastic Security is considered cost-effective, especially at lower EPS levels. However, a direct comparison was not made due to different pricing structures.
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

Elastic SIEM, ELK Logstash
Azure Sentinel
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Texas A&M, U.S. Air Force, NuScale Power, Martin's Point Health Care
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 Elastic Security vs. Microsoft Sentinel and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
847,772 professionals have used our research since 2012.