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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 Threat Intelligence offers major ROI by saving 62% on budgets and providing comprehensive threat protection and business value.
Sentiment score
7.2
Microsoft Sentinel ROI is mixed; challenges exist, but benefits include automation savings, enhanced security, and reduced staffing needs.
If a customer is already using Microsoft’s ecosystem, the ROI can be positive due to seamless integration.
Microsoft Azure was not fitting for short-term cost savings but promised a better ROI over three to five years for medium to large companies.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.4
Microsoft Defender support experiences vary; community platforms help, technical support is inconsistent, with level two proving effective.
Sentiment score
6.7
Microsoft Sentinel's support is praised for quick response, with premium tiers offering expert help and strong community resources.
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.
When my team needs to escalate issues to Microsoft, especially for Microsoft Sentinel, the response is fast through their French entity.
Working with a Sentinel engineer helped us tune settings effectively.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence is highly scalable, serving diverse businesses effectively, though costs may rise with increased users.
Sentiment score
8.0
Microsoft Sentinel's cloud scalability enables effortless resource management and meets large-scale needs, making it ideal for extensive monitoring.
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.
Being a SaaS solution, the scalability of Microsoft Sentinel is robust.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.3
Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence offers high reliability and performance, with occasional regional outages, comparable to Office 365 stability.
Sentiment score
7.8
Microsoft Sentinel is stable and reliable with 99.9%+ uptime; issues typically arise from external factors or misconfigurations.
It provides a high level of security and avoids phishing and scam emails.
I need to be aware of deprecated connectors as they may disconnect, but the data continues to be sent with a need for quick adaptation.
So far, we have not experienced any issues, and it has been stable from the beginning.
In the past two years, our team hasn't encountered any issues with the stability of Microsoft Sentinel from an operations perspective.
 

Room For Improvement

Improving pricing, integration, stability, and support could enhance Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence's market accessibility and effectiveness.
Users recommend improvements to multi-tenancy, log ingestion, interface intuitiveness, and integration, with concerns over pricing and AI enhancement.
Providing code customization would help keep pace with new vulnerabilities and threats.
There are complexities in calculating the right pricing tier for different customers, which makes it difficult for me as a consultant during upfront pricing.
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.
We lack integration for Syslogs into Sentinel.
 

Setup Cost

Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence offers cost-effective bundling with E5 licenses, beneficial for enterprises but challenging for SMEs preferring E3.
Microsoft Sentinel offers scalable, cost-effective pricing with discounts, especially beneficial for E5 users and high-volume data ingestion.
Setting up the right cost model for customers is intricate, requiring careful consideration of various components and licensing tiers.
Microsoft Sentinel offers more capabilities than Bastion, with a more intuitive experience.
We already had the necessary licensing for Sentinel, so we didn't need to spend extra money.
 

Valuable Features

Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence offers advanced detection, seamless integration, robust security, proactive monitoring, and effective zero-day vulnerability management.
Microsoft Sentinel offers seamless integration, AI-driven threat detection, automated responses, and scalability for efficient, comprehensive security management.
One of the best features is that it provides a certain level of customization, allowing us to set our spam confidence levels.
The best feature of Microsoft Sentinel is its ability to unify all dashboards or functions into one modern SecOps dashboard.
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.
The most valuable features for us include threat collection, threat detection, response, and the knowledge base for investigation.
 

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
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
91
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (3rd), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (1st), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 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 5.2%, down from 6.8% 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
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Educational Organization
11%
Government
10%
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?
Some of the customization features could be improved by providing a portion of it as open source. This would allow integration with other solutions, enhancing Threat Intelligence. Providing code cu...
What is your primary use case for Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence?
We are using Microsoft Defender ATP specifically as an email security solution, as well as for our critical servers as a web security solution. We have almost eleven hundred users utilizing it for ...
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: March 2025.
848,716 professionals have used our research since 2012.