McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator vs Microsoft Sentinel comparison

McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator vs. Microsoft Sentinel

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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

McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)

8th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Microsoft Sentinel

Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)

1st

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (3rd), Microsoft Security Suite (5th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (6th)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category, the mindshare of McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is 0.5%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Sentinel is 19.6%, down from 20.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)

Featured Reviews

DavidJones7

Head of Content at Pharmaflow

Offers automation alert features with easy integrations and impressive scalability

I would rate the initial setup an eight out of ten. There are a few technical challenges with the deployment, but it can easily solved by an experienced professional but not by a beginner user of the tool. The complete implementation and migration to McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator will take around three months. If someone is using a software platform already with implemented use cases in their environment, it might be difficult to implement the same use cases when the customer is migrating to McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator. The conditions and prior alert settings needs to be accurate when migrating to McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator, otherwise false positive alerts might get generated.

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KrishnanKartik

Cyber Security Consultant at Inspira Enterprise

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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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We implemented data transfer protection, which allows transfer in one direction only. Users can copy from the PC to the USB but not from the USB to the PC. That way, if someone is carrying a virus on a USB, it will not be transferred to the PC."

"The central manager policy means we have almost all client modules in one solution."

"It is a highly scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."

"The most valuable features of this solution are the antivirus and the DLP."

"The automation alert for the ticketing tool is one of the vital features"

"The security is a key feature and the console is very user friendly."

"The best part is management in McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator."

"You have to have some experience, however, it's pretty simple to understand."

More McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator pros

"The most valuable feature is the onboarding of the workloads. You can see all that has been onboarded in your account on the dashboards."

"What is most useful, is that it has a good connection to the Microsoft ecosystem, and I think that's the key part."

"We feel safe knowing that we have a solution that we can use to react in case of an emergency."

"If you know how to do KQL (kusto query language) queries, which are how you query the log data inside Sentinel, the information is pretty rich. You can get down to a good level of detail regarding event information or notifications."

"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."

"The most valuable features for us include threat collection, threat detection, response, and the knowledge base for investigation."

"Microsoft Sentinel has helped by streamlining our security. We have a nine-member network team, with three members managing security for the city, and Sentinel allows us to operate an unofficial SOC."

"Having your logs put all in one place with machine learning working on those logs is a good feature. I don't need to start thinking, "Where are my logs?" My logs are in a centralized repository, like Log Analytics, which is why you can't use Sentinel without Log Analytics. Having all those logs in one place is an advantage."

More Microsoft Sentinel pros

Cons

"We need to consolidate multiple features into one console. It would be beneficial to have all the important features on a single platform."

"One thing that I don't like is that McAfee products change very often and upgrade very often."

"The solution is difficult to tune to avoid false positives."

"They have to do something to make the solution more resilient or recoverable from power failure events, which may include creating their own database."

"There should be more insights and completeness into the cyber kill chain, similar to CrowdStrike and SentinelOne. It just seems a little outdated in being 100% signature-based without all of the insights and protections that come with CrowdStrike and SentinelOne. Overall, they've got some catching up to do if they plan to compete in the comprehensive EDR space."

"Sometimes agents hang. We have to reinstall the agents."

"McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator needs to upgrade its technology since the solution's EDR function is not good compared to other vendors in the market."

"We would like to see more integration with different platforms and extend this to other platforms. We are migrating to the cloud and want to extend it from our on-premises setup to the cloud."

More McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator cons

"Sometimes, we are observing large ingestion delays. We expect logs within 5 minutes, but it takes about 10 to 15 minutes."

"Sometimes, it is hard for us to estimate the costs of Microsoft Sentinel."

"They're giving us the queries so we can plug them right into Sentinel. They need to have a streamlined process for updating them in the tool and knowing when things are updated and knowing when there are new detections available from Microsoft."

"I think the number one area of improvement for Sentinel would be the cost."

"If their UI was a bit more streamlined and easy to find when I need it, then that would be a great improvement."

"Microsoft Sentinel's search efficiency can be improved, especially for queries spanning large datasets or long timeframes like 90 days compared to competitors like Splunk."

"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."

"There is a wider thing called Jupyter Notebooks, which is around the automation side of things. It would be good if there are playbooks that you can utilize without having to have the developer experience to do it in-house. Microsoft could provide more playbooks or more Jupyter Notebooks around MITRE ATT&CK Framework."

More Microsoft Sentinel cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Compared to other Antivirus products, the cost of this solution is a bit high."

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."

"This solution is priced in the mid-range."

"For large enterprise companies, the price should be alright, but for small businesses, the uptake might be slow because, for these clients, the price doesn't look very attractive."

"McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is not an expensive solution."

"There is a license required to use this solution. If we use the additional components, such as DLP encryption, there is an additional cost. However, it is similar to a separate product altogether. If you want to use that or not, it is optional, but when you use it, it will cost you additional pricing."

"It is attractively priced. It is a fraction of what we're going to pay for CrowdStrike or SentinelOne, but it only has a fraction of the capabilities as well."

"McAfee tries to package different things into different products, then sell them as different products with different licenses. They just split everything up into multiple things. That's just their sales pitch and how they do it."

More McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator pricing and cost advice

"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."

"I'm not happy with the pricing on the integration with Defender for Endpoint. Defender for Endpoint is log-rich. There is a lot of information coming through, and it is needed information. The price point at which you ingest those logs has made a lot of my customers make the decision to leave that within the Defender stack."

"It is kind of like a sliding scale. There are different tiers of pricing that go from $100 per day up to $3,500 per day. So, it just kind of depends on how much data is being stored. There can be additional costs to the standard license other than the additional data. It just kind of depends on what other services you're spinning up in Azure, or if you're using something like Azure log analytics."

"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."

"Sentinel is a bit expensive. If you can figure a way of configuring it to meet your needs, then you can find a way around the cost."

"The combination of the ease of accessibility and the free cost of the service is great. But we buy storage based on our events per second and on how many sources are integrated into the solution."

"I am not involved on the financial side, but from an enterprise-wide use perspective, I think the price is good enough."

"We only pay for the amount of data we bring in, which is fair."

More Microsoft Sentinel pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) solutions are best for your needs.

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842,388 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Government

14%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Which is better - Mcafee's MVision ePO or ePolicy Orchestrator?

Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether Mcafee's MVision ePO or ePolicy Orchestrator network security software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Mcafee's ePolicy O...

What do you like most about McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator?

I like the solution's feasibility. McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is also better and easier to use than other ePOs.

What needs improvement with McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator?

The installation process is quite difficult and requires technical support.

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...

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Product Reports

McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

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Microsoft Sentinel

Download Microsoft Sentinel product report

Also Known As

McAfee ePO, ePolicy Orchestrator, Intel Security ePolicy Orchestrator, McAfee MVISION ePO

Azure Sentinel

Overview

McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (McAfee ePO) is the most advanced, extensible, and scalable centralized security management software in the industry. Unifying security management through an open platform, McAfee ePO makes risk and compliance management simpler and more successful for organizations of all sizes.

McAfee

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.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

Brelje & Race, Cognizant, Sutherland Global Services, Eagle Rock Energy, Arab National Bank, Bank Central Asia, Kleberg Bank, Leading Mexican Bank, SF Police Credit Union, Macquarie Telecom, Seagate Technology, Blackburn & Darwen Council, California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation, IRCEP, Major U.S. State Government, State of Alaska, State of Colorado, Cemex, Deutsche Edelstahlwerke

Microsoft Sentinel is trusted by companies of all sizes including ABM, ASOS, Uniper, First West Credit Union, Avanade, and more.

McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator vs. Microsoft Sentinel