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IBM Watson for Cyber 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Watson for Cyber Security
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
55th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
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 IBM Watson for Cyber Security is 0.2%, down from 0.3% 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

Elena Stefanovska - PeerSpot reviewer
Knowledgeable support, reliable, and useful compliance policies
IBM Watson for Cyber Security can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud and it is used as a SIEM solution The most valuable features of IBM Watson for Cyber Security are ease of use and out-of-the-box reports and compliance policies. Additionally, if there are aspects that are missing IBM add…
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

"The customer support is very good."
"The most valuable features of IBM Watson for Cyber Security are ease of use and out-of-the-box reports and compliance policies. Additionally, if there are aspects that are missing IBM add them in the next release."
"IBM Watson for Cyber Security is very stable."
"The most valuable feature of this product is innovation, where the research and upgrading of technology never ends."
"Investigations are something really remarkable. We can drill down right to the raw logs by running different queries and getting those on the console itself."
"The most valuable feature is the onboarding of the workloads. You can see all that has been onboarded in your account on the dashboards."
"We’ve got process improvement that's happened across multiple different fronts within the organization, within our IT organization based on this tool being in place."
"The standout feature of Sentinel is that, because it's cloud-based and because it's from Microsoft, it integrates really well with all the other Microsoft products. It's really simple to set up and get going."
"The main benefit is the ease of integration."
"The solution has features that helped improve the security posture of our clients. It provides the ability to correlate a large variety of log sources very cost-effectively, especially for Microsoft sources."
"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."
"Sentinel enables us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem. In addition to integrating our Cisco ASA Firewall logs, we get our Palo Alto proxy logs and some on-premises data coming from our hardware devices... That is very important and is one way Sentinel is playing a wider role in our environment."
 

Cons

"The dashboard could improve in IBM Watson for Cyber Security."
"In the future, I would like to see threat intelligence included."
"They need to continue to build the AI capabilities."
"This is an expensive product, so making it more cost-effective would be an improvement."
"The pricing could be improved."
"The learning curve could be improved. I am still learning it. We were able to implement the basic features to get them up and running, but there are still so many things that I don't know about all its features. They have a lot of features that we have not been able to use or apply. If they could work on reducing the solution's learning curve, that would be good. While there is a training course held by Microsoft to learn more about this solution, there is a cost associated with it."
"Microsoft Sentinel should provide an alternative query language to KQL for users who lack KQL expertise."
"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."
"Given that I am in the small business space, I wish they would make it easier to operate Sentinel without being a Sentinel expert. Examples of things that could be easier are creating alerts and automations from scratch and designing workbooks."
"The playbook development environment is not as rich as it should be. There are multiple occasions when we face problems while creating the playbook."
"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."
"They should integrate it with many other software-as-a-service providers and make connectors available so that you don't have to do any sort of log normalization."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"IBM Watson for Cyber Security is very simple to license and is priced well."
"The price of this solution should be lower, although I understand why IBM charges a premium price."
"It is consumption-based pricing. It is an affordable solution."
"From a cost perspective, there are some additional charges in addition to the licensing."
"It comes with a Microsoft subscription which the customer has, so they don't have to invest somewhere else."
"The solution is expensive and there is a daily usage fee."
"Sentinel is costly compared to other solutions, but it's fair. SIEM solutions like CrowdStrike charge based on daily log volume. They generally process a set number of logs for free before they start charging. Microsoft's pricing is clearer. It's free under five gigabytes. Some of these logs we ingest have a cost, so they don't hide it. I believe the tenant pays the price, and Microsoft helps create awareness of the cost."
"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."
"It is a consumption-based license model. bands at 100, 200, 400 GB per day etc. Azure Sentinel Pricing | Microsoft Azure"
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
17%
Real Estate/Law 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
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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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 IBM Watson for Cyber Security vs. Microsoft Sentinel and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
847,959 professionals have used our research since 2012.