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FileAudit 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

FileAudit
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
44th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (43rd)
Microsoft Sentinel
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
91
Ranking in other categories
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (1st), 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 FileAudit is 0.1%, up from 0.1% 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

AntoSebastin - PeerSpot reviewer
A scalable SIEM solution for monitoring a user's activity in the file server
The most valuable features of the solution are its quick and simple features related to advanced permissions for files, allowing for what permission needs to be granted to the users when it comes to the monitoring folder in the solution. If someone who has been denied permission to use a particular folder tries to go to that folder, then the administrator gets a notification. In general, the administrator can easily gather and maintain records if a person who has been denied permission to a particular confidential folder tries to access it.
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

"Our customer acquires the complete report which is kept for future auditing purposes."
"Alerting upon file changes is the most valuable aspect of the product."
"It is a good and stable solution...It is a scalable solution."
"It is always correlating to IOCs for normal attacks, using Azure-related resources. For example, if any illegitimate IP starts unusual activity on our Azure firewall, then it automatically generates an alarm for us."
"What is most useful, is that it has a good connection to the Microsoft ecosystem, and I think that's the key part."
"The best functionality that you can get from Azure Sentinel is the SOAR capability. So, you can estimate any type of activity, such as when an alert was triggered or an incident was found."
"Sentinel has features that have helped improve our security poster. It helped us in going ahead and identifying the gaps via analysis and focusing on the key elements."
"Previously, it was a little bit difficult to find where an incident came from, including which IP address and which country. So in Sentinel, it's very easy to find where the incident came from since we can easily get the information from the dashboard, after which we take action quickly."
"There are a lot of things you can explore as a user. You can even go and actively hunt for threats. You can go on the offensive rather than on the defensive."
"The most valuable feature is the onboarding of the workloads. You can see all that has been onboarded in your account on the dashboards."
"Sentinel is a Microsoft product, so they provide very robust use cases and analytic groups, which are very beneficial for the security team. I also like the ability to integrate data sources into the software for on-premise and cloud-based solutions."
 

Cons

"The updates management and central management console could be improved."
"Whenever someone cuts and paste, it shows as "file is deleted"."
"The DLP function, including installation of the agent on the workstation and controlling the DLP restrictions, are areas where the product lacks."
"It could have a better API to be able to automate many things more extensively and get more extensive data and more expensive deployment possibilities. It can gain some points on the automation part and the integration part. The API is very limited, and I would like to see it extended a bit more."
"When it comes to ingesting Azure native log sources, some of the log sources are specific to the subscription, and it is not always very clear."
"The pricing tiers of Microsoft Sentinel should be improved. There are complexities in calculating the right pricing tier for different customers, which makes it difficult for me as a consultant during upfront pricing."
"They only classify alerts into three categories: high, medium, and low. So, from the user's point of view, having another critical category would be awesome."
"Sentinel still has some anomalies. For example, sometimes when we write a query for log analysis with KQL, it doesn't give us the data in a proper way... Also, the fields or columns could be improved. Sometimes, it is not giving the desired results and there is a blank field."
"They need to work with other security vendors. For example, we replaced our email gateway with Symantec, but we couldn't collect these logs with Azure Sentinel. Instead of collecting these logs with Azure Sentinel, we are collecting them on Qradar. We couldn't do it with Sentinel, which is a problem for us."
"There is room for improvement in terms of integrations."
"The only thing is sometimes you can have a false positive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"FileAudit provides a trial license for 30 days, and after that, customers can choose between perpetual licensing or the annual-based licensing option offered by FileAudit."
"Microsoft Sentinel is pretty expensive, and they recently announced that they will increase the price of all Microsoft services running in Azure by 11 percent. Luckily, I'm not responsible for the financial side. For one of my clients, the estimated cost is 880,000 euros for one year. There are additional costs for the service agreement."
"Sentinel is a pay-as-you-go solution. To use it, you need a Log Analytics workspace. This is where the logs are stored and the cost of Log Analytics is based on gigabytes... On top of that, there is the cost of Sentinel, which is about €2 per gigabyte. If a customer has an M365 E5 license, the logs that come from Microsoft Defender are free."
"It varies on a case-by-case basis. It is about $2,000 per month. The cost is very low in comparison to other SIEMs if you are already a Microsoft customer. If you are using the complete Microsoft stack, the cost reduces by almost 42% to 50%. Its cost depends on the number of logs and the type of subscription you have. You need to have an Azure subscription, and there are charges for log ingestion, and there are charges for the connectors."
"From a cost perspective, there are some additional charges in addition to the licensing."
"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."
"There are no additional costs other than the initial costs of Sentinel."
"Microsoft Sentinel is expensive."
"I have had mixed feedback. At one point, I heard a client say that it sometimes seems more expensive. Most of the clients are on Office 365 or M365, and they are forced to take Azure SIEM because of the integration."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about FileAudit?
It is a good and stable solution...It is a scalable solution.
What needs improvement with FileAudit?
The DLP function, including installation of the agent on the workstation and controlling the DLP restrictions, are areas where the product lacks. It would be great if the aforementioned details wer...
What is your primary use case for FileAudit?
My company uses FileAudit as an SIEM solution, and it is used for monitoring the file server activity to find out what users did in the file server, which may include modifying the file, deleting i...
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

CommuniCare Health Centre, DP World, BAE Systems, Moet Hennessy, Ernst & Young, Honda, Volswagon, VTech, GlakoSmithKline, Lockheed Martin, US Navy, University of Alabama, Ministry of Interior Saudi Arabia, Total
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 FileAudit vs. Microsoft Sentinel and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
848,253 professionals have used our research since 2012.