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Microsoft Defender for Identity vs Splunk User Behavior Analytics comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Defender for Iden...
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (5th), Microsoft Security Suite (7th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (1st)
Splunk User Behavior Analytics
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
8.7
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (16th), User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Network Security Systems solutions, they serve different purposes. Microsoft Defender for Identity is designed for Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) and holds a mindshare of 31.7%, down 38.8% compared to last year.
Splunk User Behavior Analytics, on the other hand, focuses on User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA), holds 9.8% mindshare, down 11.8% since last year.
Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR)
User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA)
 

Featured Reviews

Sachin Vinay - PeerSpot reviewer
Easily detects advanced attacks based on user behavior
The best feature is security monitoring, which detects and investigates suspicious user activities. It can easily detect advanced attacks based on the behavior. The credentials are securely stored, so it reduces the risk of compromise. It will monitor user behavior based on artificial intelligence to protect the identities in your organization. It will even help secure the on-premise Active Directory. It syncs from the cloud to on-premise, and on-premise modifications will be reflected in the cloud. Identity harvesting is the most common threat. Legacy Microsoft solutions and Amazon face the same issues in the cloud. Users don't implement other security mechanisms in the cloud. In an on-premise environment, we would have multiple security devices like firewalls and several layers of security. Cloud users are less bothered because cloud features are there and only need to be configured. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is the best solution because all threats are completely visible, and it has a great dashboard. The dashboard displays each threat and score, so we can identify the threat rating and act efficiently to avoid compromising user identities. We have a single sign-on feature on the cloud. If we lose a single set of identities, it can compromise the entire organization, including cloud and on-premise. The same identities are being used everywhere. The user activity has to be completely visible on the dashboard, and it has to generate a pattern. It will notify us if there is any security breach. It is a complete monitoring set. Minor changes in the user identity can lead to data leakage. If a password is changed in the cloud, it will be reflected automatically in the on-premise. This minor change will trigger an alert in Microsoft Defender for Identity. It ensures that each cloud identity is well protected from spoofing. It has a comprehensive database of well-known spoofing techniques, enabling us to provide cloud identity protection completely. It has a vast scope because it is completely single sign-on. In the emerging industry, we use single sign-on because users need to authenticate, but it's challenging to remember multiple passwords. Once your user signs in, you can access all the data. An identity compromise would lead to various issues and affect the data on-premises. Defender maintains a constantly updated database with the latest signatures, attack models, and threats. If it detects one threat, it will monitor the suspicious event and give us frequent alerts. Identity protection is vital because we use an identity mechanism for everything, including firewall-related activities. The exact identity used in the cloud is used in the most complex firewalls. We require an excellent migration technique to regain this user credential if something gets compromised. Blocking this requires a massive set of procedures. Microsoft Defender comprehensively monitors identity and provides frequent alerts regarding any issue, so we don't need to think of anything else. Defender's bidirectional sync capabilities are helpful because we need to sync data from multiple directions, including tenant-to-tenant, on-premise-to-cloud, and cloud-to-cloud syncing. As a university, we have multiple tenants, so we need to sync or access data across platforms. That way, everything is more secure, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud also provides ample security for cloud transfers. The bidirectional sync capabilities are flawless—10 out of 10. Our on-premise Active Directory is perfectly synced with the Azure AD. Everything is synced with on-premise, and changes are reflected in minutes. If a problem with identity is addressed on the cloud, the fix will be mirrored on-premise and vice versa. Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Identity are bundled. If we have these two solutions, we don't need to worry about anything else or third-party antivirus. Microsoft Defender for Identity acts as a link to all the Microsoft security features that require identity-based validation. Microsoft Defender instantly provides identity security for all our applications, and users need not worry about typing their passwords. Even in situations with less complex encryption mechanisms, users don't need to worry about typing in their passwords. Defender will check and monitor if there are any flaws in that, and it will let us know if there are any issues. We're a Microsoft shop, so everything works together. If one feature isn't working, everything will be affected. If Defender isn't working, half of our Microsoft security features will be dead. Without identity security, user data can easily be compromised, and data can fall into the hands of intruders or other hackers. The solutions have to complement each other. If anything got wrong, the entire setup would have flaws. Microsoft security has a legacy security mechanism. A while back, we might have gone with Defender for Endpoint, but Microsoft has also grown into the face of the cloud. The same Defender solution is completely maintaining cloud security. We can imagine Microsoft's vast scale and how Defender can protect the cloud environment from vulnerabilities and attacks. We are definitely delighted with Microsoft products. The dashboard features are fantastic because it provides a comprehensive overview. It has a great alert mechanism and log inspector that tracks when users access various servers. With this kind of identity validation, we can control which servers the users can access. We have total visibility from the dashboard. We can track identity usage even if there are no issues. That is an essential advantage.
Sharath Chander - PeerSpot reviewer
It's more user-friendly than other solutions we tried, but it could use more features like process mining and automation
We want to have an automated system for bot hunting that enables us to detect anomalies predictively based on historical data. It would be helpful if Splunk included process mining as an alternative option. We have a threat workflow, but it would be useful if we could supplement that with some process mining capabilities over time.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The feature I like the most about Defender for Identity is the entity tags. They give you the ability to identify sensitive accounts, devices, and groups. You also have honeytoken entities, which are devices that are identified as "bait" for fraudulent actors."
"The best feature is security monitoring, which detects and investigates suspicious user activities. It can easily detect advanced attacks based on the behavior. The credentials are securely stored, so it reduces the risk of compromise. It will monitor user behavior based on artificial intelligence to protect the identities in your organization. It will even help secure the on-premise Active Directory. It syncs from the cloud to on-premise, and on-premise modifications will be reflected in the cloud."
"All the integration it has with different Microsoft packages, like Teams and Office, is good."
"The feature I like most is that you can create your own customized detection rules. It has a lot of default alerts and rules, but you can customize them according to your business needs."
"The solution’s alerting is fairly efficient."
"One of our users had the same password for every personal and company account. That was a problem because she started receiving phishing emails that could compromise all of her accounts. Defender told us that the user was not changing their password."
"The solution offers excellent visibility into threats."
"This solution has advanced a lot over the last few years."
"The product is at the forefront of auto-remediation networking. It's great."
"It's straightforward in terms of configuration and troubleshooting and log management and monitoring as well. These are the edge points in addition to it being a modular solution where you can capitalize on your current licenses with extra licensing models, which can match the customer's business requirement and it can help the customer to design or to actually plan for their own roadmap."
"The solution is definitely scalable."
"The solution is fast, flexible, and easy to use."
"It is a solution that helps test and measure customer satisfaction."
"The most valuable feature is being able to take data and put it into other systems so that we could see the output, and to see where we need to apply our focus."
"Splunk is more user-friendly than some competing solutions we tried."
"The solution's most valuable feature is Splunk queries, which allow us to query the logs and analyze the attack vectors."
 

Cons

"There is no option to remedy an issue directly from the console. If we see an alert, we can't fix it from the console. Instead, we must depend on other Microsoft products, such as MDE. That is a significant drawback. It simply works as a scanner, which can sometimes put enough load on the sensors. Immediate actions should be possible from the dashboard because. It can prevent issues from spreading further."
"When the data leaves the cloud, there are security issues."
"And when you are working in a priority IP address, Identity is not able to know that those IPs are from the company. It sees that the IPs are from Taiwan or from Hong Kong or from India, even though they are internal IPs, resulting in a lot of false positives."
"The tracking instance needs to be configured appropriately."
"Defender for Identity gives us visibility, but we often get false positives from Azure that take us down the garden path. We go through 30 incidents each day and most of those are false positives or benign positive alerts. Occasionally, we get true positive alerts."
"The solution should provide more detailed data regarding anomaly detections."
"I would like to be able to do remediation from the platform because it is just a scanner right now. If you onboard a device, it shows you what is happening, but you can't use it to fix things. You need to go into the system to fix it instead."
"One potential area for improvement could be exploring flexibility in the installation of Microsoft Defender for Identity agents."
"I would like improved downward integration with other tools such as McAfee and other GCP solutions."
"They should work to add more built-in correlation searches and more use cases based on worldwide customer experiences. They need more ready-made use cases."
"We'd like the ability to do custom searches."
"The price of Splunk UBA is too high."
"I'm not aware of any lacking features."
"In the future I would like to see simplified statistics and analytical threats."
"If the price was lowered and the setup process was less complex, I would consider rating it higher."
"It would be good if the solution had an analytics tool that allowed us to analyze the data without writing specific queries."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Microsoft Defender for Identity comes as part of the Microsoft E5 licensing stack."
"It is very affordable considering that other SIEM solutions are much more expensive and have many more licensing restrictions and fees."
"Defender for Identity is a little more expensive than other Microsoft products. Identity and Microsoft Defender for Cloud are both a bit costly."
"You won't be able to change your tenants from where you deploy them. For example, if you select Canada, they will charge you based on Canadian pricing. If you are also in London, when you deploy in Canada, the pound is higher than Canadian dollars, but your platform resources are billable in Canadian dollars. Using your pounds to pay for any of these things will be cheaper. Or, if you deploy in London, they will charge you based on your local currency."
"The product is costly, and we had multiple discussions with accounting to receive a discounted rate. However, on the open market, the tool is expensive."
"The licensing costs is around 10,000 dollars."
"I am not aware of the price, but it is expensive."
"I hope we can increase the free license to be more than 5 gig a day. This would help people who want to introduce a POC or a demo license for the solution."
"My biggest complaint is the way they do pricing... You can never know the pricing for next year. Every single time you adjust to something new, the price goes up. It's impossible to truly budget for it. It goes up constantly."
"There are additional costs associated with the integrator."
"Pricing varies based on the packages you choose and the volume of your usage."
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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) solutions are best for your needs.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Microsoft Defender for Identity?
Microsoft Defender for Identity provides excellent visibility into threats by leveraging real-time analytics and data intelligence.
What needs improvement with Microsoft Defender for Identity?
The solution could improve how it handles on-premises Android-related attacks. Without Microsoft Defender, it can be challenging to check which accounts are compromised and to analyze activities on...
What is your primary use case for Microsoft Defender for Identity?
We use Microsoft Defender for Identity to prevent user account-level attacks such as lateral move attacks and pass-the-hash attacks on our on-premises servers. We leverage its features to mitigate ...
What do you like most about Splunk User Behavior Analytics?
The solution's most valuable feature is Splunk queries, which allow us to query the logs and analyze the attack vectors.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Splunk User Behavior Analytics?
I am not aware of the price, but it is expensive. A rough estimate would be around 150 gigabytes, given the huge amount of data. At the moment there are no additional costs for maintenance.
What needs improvement with Splunk User Behavior Analytics?
Sometimes, we need to write explicit queries. It would be good if the solution had an analytics tool that allowed us to analyze the data without writing specific queries. The solution's user interf...
 

Also Known As

Azure Advanced Threat Protection, Azure ATP, MS Defender for Identity
Caspida, Splunk UBA
 

Learn More

Video not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft Defender for Identity is trusted by companies such as St. Luke’s University Health Network, Ansell, and more.
8 Securities, AAA Western, AdvancedMD, Amaya, Cerner Corporation, CJ O Shopping, CloudShare, Crossroads Foundation, 7-Eleven Indonesia
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Defender for Identity vs. Splunk User Behavior Analytics and other solutions. Updated: July 2023.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.