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Microsoft Defender XDR 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
7.0
Microsoft Defender XDR offers cost savings, enhanced security, and efficiency by consolidating measures, reducing cyberattack losses, and streamlining processes.
Sentiment score
7.3
Users find Microsoft Sentinel offers positive ROI through improved visibility, automation, and efficiency, despite initial costs and quantification challenges.
Ever since we turned on the M5 feature set back in June, we have seen a reduced number of potentially malicious clicks and faster alerting when incidents occur.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.3
Microsoft Defender XDR support varies; larger organizations benefit more, with issues in responsiveness and knowledge sharing for smaller companies.
Sentiment score
6.7
Microsoft Sentinel support is mixed; premium plans and better Microsoft relationships yield favorable experiences despite some challenges.
You get stuck in low-level support for way longer than you should, instead of them escalating the issue up the chain.
It's critical to escalate SEV B issues immediately to a domestic engineer.
The technical support from Microsoft Defender XDR has been disappointingly slow.
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 XDR offers scalable solutions for diverse organizations, with strengths in cloud setups and dashboard management despite some challenges.
Sentiment score
8.1
Microsoft Sentinel's cloud architecture ensures scalable, flexible data handling with minimal management, supporting large user bases and easy integration.
Microsoft Defender XDR shows tremendous scalability, much more so than on-premises solutions.
It is suitable for enterprise-level deployment but has room for improvement.
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
7.8
Microsoft Defender XDR is praised for stability and reliability, with minor issues quickly resolved and high user satisfaction.
Sentiment score
7.8
Microsoft Sentinel is highly stable and reliable, with users praising its performance and noting rare, minor configuration issues.
The services within our ecosystem have been reliable, meeting their SLAs.
The service has remained consistently online, with any issues isolated to specific components, suggesting a well-designed and modular architecture.
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 XDR needs faster scanning, better integration, simpler licensing, and improved automation for user-friendly threat management.
Microsoft Sentinel users seek improved third-party integration, user-friendly features, enhanced threat intelligence, and streamlined data management to reduce costs.
Improvements are needed in automated response capabilities.
The licensing process needs improvement and clarification.
Microsoft could improve on threat hunting and build more on threat detection and handling.
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 XDR is cost-effective with an E5 bundle but costly separately, influenced by complex licensing and geographic factors.
Microsoft Sentinel offers cost-effective, consumption-based pricing, benefiting from Azure integration with careful data management to control expenses.
Microsoft purposefully obfuscates this through marketing ploys to hide costs.
I would rate the pricing as eight out of ten, indicating it is a reasonable cost for the product.
Licensing is somewhat confusing, particularly when presenting our pitch decks to stakeholders and leveraging key features in premium SKUs, but we managed with some assistance from Microsoft.
We already had the necessary licensing for Sentinel, so we didn't need to spend extra money.
 

Valuable Features

Microsoft Defender XDR offers seamless integration, advanced threat hunting, and AI protection, streamlining operations and reducing costs.
Microsoft Sentinel offers seamless integration, AI-driven threat detection, and automation, providing comprehensive security and ease of setup for organizations.
With Microsoft threat intelligence information, it detects various types of threats, including insider attacks, malicious content, and data exfiltration.
The email protection feature is the most valuable because our risks primarily lie there, and it seems to be the most popular target.
Vulnerability assessment and just-in-time access are some valuable features of Defender for server plans.
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 XDR
Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
96
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (5th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (5th)
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 January 2025, in the Microsoft Security Suite category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender XDR is 4.9%, down from 10.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Sentinel is 5.4%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Microsoft Security Suite
 

Featured Reviews

Gabor Nyerd - PeerSpot reviewer
Includes four services and four products, which can help organizations a lot
We found that sometimes integrations work, but testing them can take some time. Sometimes, configurations take much longer than expected. We have a configuration in place that needs to be synchronized with another server. However, the servers are four hours apart, so this can cause delays. In general, I believe that the time it takes to configure and test a service should be shorter. Sometimes, it can take a couple of hours to test a single configuration setting. Other times, it is only ten or fifteen minutes, which is normal. However, sometimes, even immediate actions can be triggered by configuration changes, and some settings can take up to eight hours to complete. I believe that this time can be improved. Microsoft is making a lot of improvements to its services in a short period of time. This is a good thing, as it means that the services are constantly being updated and improved. However, it can be challenging for customers to keep up with the changes. For example, a customer may read about an update, understand it, and share it with their colleagues and boss. However, it may take days or weeks to test the update and get the necessary approvals. This can be especially challenging for large customers with many users or machines. In some cases, Microsoft may change a service before the customer has had a chance to implement the previous update. This can be frustrating for customers, as it means that they have to constantly learn new things and adjust their workflows. On the one hand, it is important for Microsoft to keep updating and improving its services. This helps to ensure that the services are meeting the customers' needs and that they are staying ahead of the competition. Microsoft should also be mindful of the challenges that these changes can create for customers. One way to address this challenge is to provide customers with more time to implement changes. Microsoft could also provide more information about upcoming changes so that customers can plan ahead. Ultimately, Microsoft needs to strike a balance between keeping its services up-to-date and providing customers with a smooth transition to new features.
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
17%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
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 365 Defender?
Microsoft Defender XDR provides strong identity protection with comprehensive insights into risky user behavior and potential indicators of compromise.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft 365 Defender?
Licensing is somewhat confusing, particularly when presenting our pitch decks to stakeholders and leveraging key features in premium SKUs, but we managed with some assistance from Microsoft.
What needs improvement with Microsoft 365 Defender?
It would be beneficial to reduce the number of clicks required to navigate between blades, as the current navigation and breadcrumb system can be a bit confusing. Some inconsistencies exist between...
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

Microsoft 365 Defender, Microsoft Threat Protection, MS 365 Defender
Azure Sentinel
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Accenture, Deloitte, ExxonMobil, General Electric, IBM, Johnson & Johnson and many others.
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 XDR vs. Microsoft Sentinel and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.