Microsoft Defender for Business vs Microsoft Sentinel comparison

Microsoft Defender for Business vs. Microsoft Sentinel

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Helped 814,763 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Defender for Busi...

Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite

18th

Average Rating

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (41st)

Microsoft Sentinel

Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite

5th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (2nd), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Microsoft Security Suite category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Business is 2.8%, down from 3.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Sentinel is 5.6%, down from 6.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Microsoft Security Suite

Featured Reviews

Tim_Howard

CEO at CarbonCents

Sep 11, 2024

Provides good protection against viruses but support needs improvement

The product's initial setup phase wasn't too bad. The product's installation phase wasn't terrible, but it could have been good to club the things in the process, especially for the ones who are doing it for the first time, and it would be good if Microsoft offered users, someone, to talk to who knows the product. You will be gambling if you use Google for the tool because who knows if it really knows what Microsoft Defender for Business is all about. On a scale of one to ten, if ten is the easiest, I rate the setup phase as an eight out of ten. The setup phase was straightforward. As the tool was needed in a small shop, the solution's deployment was done in a couple of days. The solution was deployed in my company with the help of a small team of ten people. I had my head of IT help me in rolling it out in our company.

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Nitin Arora

Security Delivery Senior Analyst at Accenture

Nov 2, 2022

Gives us one place to investigate and respond to threats, and automation eliminates manual work

They can work on the EDR side of things. It is already really superb, because of the kinds of features we get with the EDR solution. It's not a standard EDR and they have recently enhanced things. But the problem is with onboarding devices. I have different OS flavors, including a large number of Linux, Windows, macOS, and some on-prem machines as well. Every time we need to onboard these kinds of machines into the EDR, we need to do it with the help of Intune, to sync up the devices, and do the configuration. I'm looking for something on the EDR side that will reduce this kind of work. They can eliminate having to do manual configuration for the machines, and check the different types of configurations for each OS. In some cases, it does not support some OSs. If they could reduce this type of work, that would be really amazing.

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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

"If you're an Intune user, you can bring in certain capabilities like system-hardening policies, which further enhances the security."

"I haven't had any problems with the tool's stability."

"Microsoft Defender for Business is good for small and medium-sized businesses. It offers solid security flexibility and integration with tools like Microsoft Lighthouse and some other software. It takes some of the features of Defender for Endpoint EDR and provides those services for small and medium-sized business environments."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is its central console."

"It is scalable."

"A few things are valuable. One is the alerting we see when any kind of intrusion is happening, any kind of malware is being deployed across the endpoints, or any kind of suspicious activity is going on. We have a footprint across all of North America, Canada, and Mexico, so we want to make sure that all our endpoints are protected and we are able to look for any anomalous activity."

"The interface is quite user-friendly."

"The solution provides good scalability."

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

"The ability of all these solutions to work together natively is essential. We have an Azure subscription, including Log Analytics. This feature automatically acts as one of the security baselines and detects recommendations because it also integrates with Defender. We can pull the sysadmin logs from Azure. It's all seamless and native."

"I like the ability to run custom KQL queries. I don't know if that feature is specific to Sentinel. As far as I know, they are using technology built into Azure's Log Analytics app. Sentinel integrates with that, and we use this functionality heavily."

"The part that was very unexpected was Sentinel's ability to integrate with Azure Lighthouse, which, as a managed services solution provider, gives us the ability to also manage our customers' Sentinel environments or Sentinel workspaces. It is a big plus for us. With its integration with Lighthouse, we get the ability to monitor multiple workspaces from one portal. A lot of the Microsoft Sentinel workbooks already integrate with that capability, and we save countless amounts of money by simply being able to almost immediately realize multitenant capabilities. That alone is a big plus for us."

"The dashboard that allows me to view all the incidents is the most valuable feature."

"The analytics has a lot of advantages because there are 300 default use cases for rules and we can modify them per our environment. We can create other rules as well. Analytics is a useful feature."

"One of the most valuable features of Microsoft Sentinel is that it's cloud-based."

"We are able to deploy within half an hour and we only require one person to complete the implementation."

More Microsoft Sentinel pros

Cons

"The biggest one is that Defender needs to be more proactive to the emerging threats. There can be tighter integration with email, especially how it integrates with our email system, which is the Microsoft Outlook suite. There should be the ability to react a lot quicker to emerging threats because sometimes, it takes a few days before some of these new threats are fully identified, and we need that to be a few hours."

"Defender's threat protection should be fine-tuned to reduce false positives. It could be more targeted, reflecting a continuous evolution in detecting. Also, it could be easier to integrate into other environments."

"The tool's support is an area of concern where improvements are needed."

"We faced some issues while running some applications on Mac."

"The security could always be improved."

"Talking with the tool's technician about any problem is very complicated."

"Defender's reporting is rather scattered, and its URL filtering mechanism doesn't really work."

"The solution's AI is notorious for false positives, and the time you have to spend training it is ridiculous."

"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."

"If Azure Sentinel had the ability to ingest Azure services from different tenants into another tenant that was hosting Azure Sentinel, and not lose any metadata, that would be a huge benefit to a lot of companies."

"At the network level, there is a limitation in integrating some of the switches or routers with Microsoft Sentinel. Currently, SPAN traffic monitoring is not available in Microsoft Sentinel. I have heard that it is available in Defender for Identity, which is a different product. It would be good if LAN traffic monitoring or SPAN traffic monitoring is available in Microsoft Sentinel. It would add a lot of value. It is available in some of the competitor products in the market."

"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."

"There are certain delays. For example, if an alert has been rated on Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, it might take up to an hour for that alert to reach Sentinel. This should ideally take no more than one or two seconds."

"Sentinel should be improved with more connectors. At the moment, it only covers a few vendors. If I remember correctly, only 100 products are supported natively in Sentinel, although you can connect them with syslog. But Microsoft should increase the number of native connectors to get logs into Sentinel."

"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."

"Sentinel's reporting is complex and can be more user-friendly."

More Microsoft Sentinel cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Since we're a nonprofit, we get pretty good discounts on the tool."

"The tool's cost has been a little high, but I do not think it was terrible."

"It has to get more competitive because we are starting to see some of the competitors providing better pricing, and some of it, of course, is to gain market share. The Defender product pricing is probably a little higher than the competitors."

"The tool is cheap, while some other solutions are more expensive. I remember the tool cost about five euros for a workstation or for a user on a monthly basis."

"Defender for Business is included by default with an Office 365 premium subscription."

"Good monthly operational cost model for the detection and response outcomes delivered, M365 logs don't count toward the limits which is a good benefit."

"We are charged based on the amount of data used, which can become expensive."

"Sentinel is expensive relative to other products of the class, so it often isn't affordable for small-scale businesses. However, considering the solution has more extensive capabilities than others, the price is not so high. Pricing is based on GBs of ingested daily data, either by a pay-as-you-go or subscription model."

"Microsoft Sentinel can be costly, particularly for data management."

"The pay-as-you-go model is beneficial to customers."

"From a cost perspective, there are some additional charges in addition to the licensing."

"Pricing is pay-as-you-go with Sentinel, which is good because it all depends on the number of users and the number of devices to which you connect."

"The are two native advantages for customers that use M365 Security and Sentinel. The first advantage is that the log or security-event ingestion into Sentinel is free. Cost-wise, they're saving a lot and that is a major advantage."

More Microsoft Sentinel pricing and cost advice

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814,763 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Microsoft Defender for Business?

A few things are valuable. One is the alerting we see when any kind of intrusion is happening, any kind of malware is being deployed across the endpoints, or any kind of suspicious activity is goin...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Defender for Business?

The tool's cost has been a little high, but I do not think it was terrible.

What needs improvement with Microsoft Defender for Business?

The tool's support is an area of concern where improvements are needed. I have had issues trying to get support or even trying to get to somebody. I often give up chasing the support and end up goi...

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...

HP Wolf Security vs Microsoft Defender for Business

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Cortex XSIAM vs Microsoft Sentinel

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Google Chronicle Suite vs Microsoft Sentinel

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Product Reports

Microsoft Defender for Business

Download Microsoft Defender for Business product report

Microsoft Sentinel

Download Microsoft Sentinel product report

Also Known As

No data available

Azure Sentinel

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Microsoft

Overview

Microsoft Defender for Business is a new endpoint security solution that was designed especially for the small and medium-sized business (up to 300 employees). With this endpoint security solution, your company's devices are better protected from ransomware, malware, phishing, and other threats.

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.

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.

Microsoft Defender for Business vs. Microsoft Sentinel