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Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence vs Microsoft Sentinel comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
8.0
Microsoft Defender reduces costs and enhances security efficiency, offering significant ROI by consolidating threat intelligence and preventing data breaches.
Sentiment score
7.3
Users find Microsoft Sentinel offers positive ROI through improved visibility, automation, and efficiency, despite initial costs and quantification challenges.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.4
Users find Microsoft Defender support accessible with knowledgeable level two staff, but level one and response times need improvement.
Sentiment score
6.7
Microsoft Sentinel support is mixed; premium plans and better Microsoft relationships yield favorable experiences despite some challenges.
Level two support is knowledgeable and knows how the product works, which is very good.
Their solutions' integration simplifies resolving issues compared to those caused by third-party products.
Working with a Sentinel engineer helped us tune settings effectively.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence is scalable, efficiently manages devices, and offers robust security, despite occasional performance issues and user cost concerns.
Sentiment score
8.1
Microsoft Sentinel's cloud architecture ensures scalable, flexible data handling with minimal management, supporting large user bases and easy integration.
If there were some customizations available, I would rate its scalability as nine out of ten.
Office 365 and Exchange are running on it, covering about 35,000 users efficiently.
As our organization uses Microsoft Azure and Defender, everything grows together, and we can integrate various features seamlessly.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.3
Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence is highly stable with strong performance, though minor improvements are needed for occasional outages.
Sentiment score
7.8
Microsoft Sentinel is highly stable and reliable, with users praising its performance and noting rare, minor configuration issues.
It provides a high level of security and avoids phishing and scam emails.
So far, we have not experienced any issues, and it has been stable from the beginning.
Sentinel's stability is great.
 

Room For Improvement

Microsoft Defender needs enhancements in affordability, support, integration, stability, customization, AI, automation, documentation, and updates for better performance.
Microsoft Sentinel users seek improved third-party integration, user-friendly features, enhanced threat intelligence, and streamlined data management to reduce costs.
Providing code customization would help keep pace with new vulnerabilities and threats.
We have some tools, such as our off-site Meraki firewalls, that have not fully integrated with Sentinel.
Currently, we are happy to have a way in the middle with not so much cost, but it would be nice to have the ability to enhance the automation of workflows based on learned incidents.
 

Setup Cost

Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence offers cost-effective pricing but complex licensing; discounts and multi-year payments enhance competitiveness.
Microsoft Sentinel offers cost-effective, consumption-based pricing, benefiting from Azure integration with careful data management to control expenses.
We already had the necessary licensing for Sentinel, so we didn't need to spend extra money.
 

Valuable Features

Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence offers seamless integration, advanced protection, and a user-friendly interface within Microsoft's ecosystem for comprehensive threat security.
Microsoft Sentinel offers seamless integration, AI-driven threat detection, and automation, providing comprehensive security and ease of setup for organizations.
One of the best features is that it provides a certain level of customization, allowing us to set our spam confidence levels.
Custom workbooks are valuable. It is one of the crucial points in dealing with potential security threats in an automated way without requiring too much manpower.
 

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Defender Threat I...
Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite
18th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (11th), Threat Intelligence Platforms (4th)
Microsoft Sentinel
Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
89
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (3rd), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (1st), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Microsoft Security Suite category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence is 0.4%, down from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Sentinel is 5.3%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Microsoft Security Suite
 

Featured Reviews

Nim Nadarajah - PeerSpot reviewer
A native Microsoft solution the provides great ROI and continuously improves its offering
We have Microsoft bias. We generally don't have any significant negative feedback or improvement points around Defender, EDR and CMDR platforms. It does a good job across the board. The price point is something they can improve slightly for those who don't have an M 365 E5. I believe it's a $2.80 cents add-on. In Canadian, that's expensive. If they can drop it to a dollar, for those who don't have M 365 E5, they're going to open up market share and increase affordability for an entire market segment in the medium business category. Other than that, we have no major negative feedback.
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
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Educational Organization
11%
Government
9%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence?
It just runs in the background. I don't have to worry about, making sure it's Intelligence. So, you know, this kind of makes it very easy, have to worry about installing. It is easy to use.
What needs improvement with Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence?
There are weaknesses, and Microsoft is working on addressing them. Over the past three to four years, the ATP and other components have improved significantly, and the integration has also advanced...
What is your primary use case for Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence?
The product helps us monitor business devices for authentication and response on all endpoints, servers, passwords, and plans.
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 Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence vs. Microsoft Sentinel and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
832,138 professionals have used our research since 2012.