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Microsoft Defender XDR vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Defender XDR
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
89
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (5th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (5th), Microsoft Security Suite (2nd)
Splunk Enterprise Security
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
301
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (1st), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Security Software solutions, they serve different purposes. Microsoft Defender XDR is designed for Extended Detection and Response (XDR) and holds a mindshare of 10.2%, up 6.2% compared to last year.
Splunk Enterprise Security, on the other hand, focuses on Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), holds 10.9% mindshare, down 14.3% since last year.
Extended Detection and Response (XDR)
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

Desray Liu - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 28, 2023
A time-saving and easy-to-integrate product that needs to offer a control center to users
As a part of Microsoft's attempt to reduce costs, there has been a direct cut down of the local technical support team. Sometimes, you have to use the technical support offered by Microsoft from other countries, but at times, we speak different languages, just like how people speak in Chinese or Mandarin, but there are still some differences between them. The front-line support from Microsoft has only limited technical abilities or access to their internal system. Sometimes, my company cannot even escalate an issue to Microsoft's senior team members. The support team of Microsoft is nice as they attempt to solve the problems together with you, but I believe that due to some cost-related issues, they don't have enough permissions. Sometimes, users might feel blocked when trying to connect with the support team. I rate the technical support a seven out of ten.
Avinash Gopu. - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 1, 2024
Offers good visibility into multiple environments, significantly reduces our alert volume, and speeds up our security investigations
There are limitations with Splunk not detecting all user activity, especially on mainframes and network devices. This is because Splunk relies on agents, which cannot access certain workstations. In these cases, we have to rely on application data. For example, with mainframes, manual reports are generated and sent to Splunk, limiting visibility to what's manually reported. This lack of automation for specific platforms needs improvement from Splunk. Additionally, API access is limited for other applications that rely on API calls and requests. This requires heavy customization on Splunk's end. These are the main challenges we've encountered. Monitoring multiple cloud platforms, like Azure, GCP, and AWS, with Splunk Enterprise Security presents some challenges. While Splunk provides different connectors for each provider, consolidating data from two domains across distinct cloud environments can be complex. However, leveraging pre-built templates and Splunk's data collation capabilities can help overcome these hurdles. Despite initial difficulties, I believe Splunk can effectively address this task, earning it an eight out of ten rating for its multi-cloud monitoring capabilities. While Splunk Enterprise Security offers insider threat detection capabilities, its effectiveness could be enhanced by integrating with additional tools, such as endpoint security solutions. This integrated approach is particularly crucial for financial institutions, which often require dedicated endpoint security teams. While using multiple tools is valuable, further improvements within Splunk itself are also necessary. Considering both external integration and internal development, I would rate its current insider threat detection capabilities as three out of ten. Threat detection is where Splunk falls behind. While it offers tools, other use cases require additional work. PAM is an enterprise tool that centralizes information about users, servers, and everything else. It needs real-time monitoring, which I haven't seen in any of the companies I've worked for. They only rely on Splunk for alerting, but real-time monitoring should be handled by the endpoint security team's tools. This means there's no detection or analysis at the machine or endpoint level. Additionally, threat analysis reporting is also absent.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It has great stability."
"Email protection is the most valuable feature of Microsoft Defender XDR."
"The solution is well integrated with applications. It is easy to maintain and administer."
"From the perspective of Microsoft 365 XDR, the main benefit is a single, centralized dashboard offering the holistic visibility organizations crave."
"The most valuable feature is the DLP because that's where we can have an added data protection layer and extend it not just to emails but to the documents that users are working on. We can make sure that sensitive data is tagged and flagged if unauthorized parties are using it."
"The portal is quite user-friendly. There is integration with Office, Intune, and other products from the same portal. From there, we can see which policies are installed on a particular machine. We also can manage devices, groups, and tagging."
"Defender XDR can stop advanced attacks, like ransomware or business email compromise."
"The product integrates security into one tool instead of having third-party security tools."
"Splunk is a user-friendly solution."
"With good domain knowledge, one can build almost anything. If you throw in Alert Manager or an integration with ServiceNow. Then, you have your own SIEM"
"Splunk can extract all kinds of data. There's no limitation on what kind of structured and unstructured data one needs to extract — it can access any kind of data, including machine-generated data."
"The log aggregation is great."
"The user interface is excellent, and since I'm using Splunk as a power user, it's easy to create dashboards."
"Being able to track impossible travel logins and things of that nature is valuable. We can track user logins from various IPs, various countries, and at various times to see if everything adds up."
"The most valuable features in Splunk Enterprise Security are the cluster capabilities."
"It definitely does help with both auditing and as well as regular monitoring. SOC does more monitoring, but ES also gives you other features that are auditing-related. The dashboards are also beneficial."
 

Cons

"I'd like to see a wider solution that includes not only desktop devices but also other devices, such as servers, storage cabinets, switching equipment, et cetera."
"There are a few technical issues with Defender XDR that can be improved. Sometimes, the endpoint devices are not reporting properly to the Defender 365 portal. When you're getting all the information from the Microsoft portal, the devices are sometimes not in sync. We have hundreds of endpoint devices, some needing to be onboarded again."
"There are still some components, such as vulnerability management within the vendor product, where improved integration would be beneficial."
"Automated playbooks and automated dashboards would be preferable to the way the data is currently being presented."
"Microsoft 365 Defender does not have a unique package with emerging endpoint security technologies, such as EDR and XDR."
"Defender XDR could provide recommendations for threat-hunting queries. Some people do not know how to write an advanced threat query, so we need to spend time training them."
"It would be highly beneficial if CoPilot could identify anomalies within the network and notify the IT team."
"Stability could be improved by avoiding frequent changes to the interface."
". Having a trial version or more training on Splunk would be helpful."
"Although the technical support is adequate, there is still room for improvement."
"The product must improve insider threat detection."
"We don't have SOAR products from Splunk. I believe that's an important piece."
"Splunk does not build apps. They only go back and validate the apps that somebody has already built. They should have remote consulting support. They have a wonderful solution. They have 24/7 security. Nobody needs to depend on any third party and will therefore just buy Splunk on the cloud."
"There is a learning curve in order to start using machine learning. We have been trying to do it for three years, and we have not managed anything. It is too complex."
"It needs to improve the way to install third-party apps and enable installation without logging into splunk.com."
"Their technical support sucks."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The most valuable licensing option is expensive, so pricing could be improved. Licensing options for this solution also need to be consolidated, because they frequently change."
"The price of the solution is high compared to others and we have lost some customers because of it."
"Microsoft Defender XDR is expensive."
"The solution is affordable, and we haven't been hit with any hidden costs. The subscription model is straightforward, and it's easy to understand how much additional features cost. If we need to cancel a license or feature, we do that well in advance to avoid being charged for it, but overall, the pricing and licensing are simple and easy."
"They have moved from a licensing model to pay-per-use... The question is: What happens if, for any reason, there's not enough budget to accept this model? That could be a great problem."
"365 Defender is billed per account. I don't know the exact price, but my supervisor told me that Microsoft Defender is cheaper than the alternatives. It's bundled, so you get all the features in one place."
"Microsoft Defender falls within a mid-tier price range compared to other security solutions."
"All I can say again is the E5 gives you all the capabilities that it offers. It also gives Office 365 and one terabyte of storage. All in all, the E5 license model makes sense. There are some people who say it's quite costly, but rather than paying different vendors, it makes sense to go all in with Microsoft if you've got that licensing. From that perspective, it's cost-effective, but I can't comment much on that."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is an expensive solution."
"The tool's licensing is good and we haven't received any complaints from the team handling it."
"It can be cost-prohibitive when you start to scale and have terabytes of data. Its cost model is based on how much data it processes a day. If they're able to create scaled-down niche or custom package offerings, it may help with the cost. Instead of the full-blown features, if they can narrow the scope where it can only be used for a specific purpose, it would kind of create that market for the product, and it may help with the costing. When you start using it as a central aggregator and you're pumping tons of logs at it, pretty soon, you'll start hitting your cap on what it can process a day. Once you've got that, you're kind of defeating the purpose because you're going to have to scale back."
"The pricing model is based on the number of gigabytes that you ingest into the Splunk system. So it can be an expensive solution."
"Although Splunk is an expensive product, it is designed to be utilized across your organization in order to maximize your ROI and lower your TCO."
"Most people share the same thought that the ingestion rates can get pretty pricey. There is a lot of work we do to curate the data that we send to Splunk so that it is not too noisy or too expensive."
"Splunk Enterprise Security's pricing is pretty competitive."
"It can be expensive, especially the licensing costs. However, there is added value in what it can do, not just log aggregation."
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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Extended Detection and Response (XDR) solutions are best for your needs.
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Comparison Review

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
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 365 Defender?
Microsoft Defender XDR provides strong identity protection with comprehensive insights into risky user behavior and potential indicators of compromise.
What needs improvement with Microsoft 365 Defender?
The solution could enhance the threat Intelligence feature by making it more relevant to specific industries. Much of the threat intelligence information isn't directly applicable to our environmen...
What SOC product do you recommend?
For tools I’d recommend: -SIEM- LogRhythm -SOAR- Palo Alto XSOAR Doing commercial w/o both (or at least an XDR) is asking to miss details that are critical, and ending up a statistic. Also, rememb...
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 ...
How does Splunk compare with Azure Monitor?
Splunk handles a high amount of data very well. We use Splunk to capture information and as an aggregator for monitoring information from different sources. Splunk is very good at alerting us if we...
 

Also Known As

Microsoft 365 Defender, Microsoft Threat Protection, MS 365 Defender
No data available
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Accenture, Deloitte, ExxonMobil, General Electric, IBM, Johnson & Johnson and many others.
Splunk has more than 7,000 customers spread across over 90 countries. These customers include Telenor, UniCredit, ideeli, McKenney's, Tesco, and SurveyMonkey.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Defender XDR vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: May 2023.
815,854 professionals have used our research since 2012.