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Microsoft Entra ID Protection 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
7.1
Microsoft Entra ID Protection achieved ROI in three years, enhancing efficiency and user satisfaction despite higher costs.
Sentiment score
7.2
Microsoft Sentinel enhances security and efficiency, offering cost savings and quick returns through automation and advanced analytics.
There is a return on investment in terms of time-saving, control, and ease of manageability of the environment.
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
6.1
Entra ID Protection support receives mixed reviews; while responsive for some, others report delays, reliance on documentation, and inconsistent ticket handling.
Sentiment score
6.7
Users mostly praise Microsoft's responsive Sentinel support but note delays and access issues for advanced technical assistance.
Tickets often bounce from person to person, requiring the sharing of information multiple times.
They often refer to internal blogs, which doesn't offer much new information and can limit our capabilities in troubleshooting.
My teammates have had good communication with Microsoft.
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
8.6
Microsoft Entra ID Protection offers scalable, adaptable solutions with high performance, praised for flexibility and cloud-native capabilities across industries.
Sentiment score
8.0
Microsoft Sentinel provides scalable, flexible security solutions with cloud-based efficiency, praised for cost-effective data integration and workload management.
Since it is a cloud computing product, it can accommodate a range of company sizes, from a few users to large businesses.
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
8.0
Microsoft Entra ID Protection and Azure AD are generally stable, reliable, and perform well, with minor and infrequent issues.
Sentiment score
7.8
Microsoft Sentinel offers reliable performance with minimal downtime, efficiently managed maintenance, and occasional issues during extensive customization.
In the past two years, our team hasn't encountered any issues with the stability of Microsoft Sentinel from an operations perspective.
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 Entra ID Protection needs better management, integration, scalability, and simplified user interface, with key improvements for Mac support.
Microsoft Sentinel needs better user-friendliness, integration, documentation, and cost-efficiency to enhance usability, scalability, and adoption.
Microsoft has not offered control over how they calculate high or low-risk scenarios.
There is no write-back feature from the cloud to local, which would allow me to use my own credentials from the cloud tenant securely.
There is room for improvement in the ability for Entra ID Protection to inherit roles and configurations from whatever solution I am migrating from.
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.
We choose other solutions for basic monitoring due to better cost opportunities.
 

Setup Cost

Microsoft Entra ID Protection's pricing is seen as competitive, yet sometimes perceived as complex or expensive by enterprise buyers.
Microsoft Sentinel's pay-as-you-go model suits enterprises on Microsoft but raises cost concerns for others, especially with data ingestion.
Entra ID Protection is not badly priced, but some clients, especially in medium to smaller scale companies in third-world countries, find it quite expensive.
Microsoft Entra ID requires additional licensing components.
The pricing for Microsoft Entra ID protection is not expensive.
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 Entra ID Protection integrates seamlessly, enhancing security with multifactor authentication, conditional access, and scalable user management.
Microsoft Sentinel excels with SOAR playbooks, AI automation, and integration, enhancing threat detection and response in a unified interface.
Having a single sign-on feature with Entra ID ensures seamless access to various applications, even those with significant security constraints.
These features ease the job of security analysts, providing a better vision of user activities and potential risks.
Microsoft Entra ID can detect if a user is at risk and then execute actions based on the risk level.
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 Entra ID Protection
Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
Identity Management (IM) (8th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (2nd)
Microsoft Sentinel
Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
90
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 March 2025, in the Microsoft Security Suite category, the mindshare of Microsoft Entra ID Protection is 4.8%, up from 3.6% 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

Mahender Nirwan - PeerSpot reviewer
Access to other software is just one click away and suitable for big organizations
Currently, we have limited use of Microsoft AD. We only use it to see if user blocks are available. If they are, we unblock the account and get access accordingly. AD has paid access control features. We can add access control over AD. For example, for documentation, we use an Outline tool. It's open source, and we add our company's knowledge base to it. It's an alternative to Confluence. We don't want everyone to have access to all documentation. If I create documentation for my team, only my team should have access, not support or sales. We can add these scopes or access controls over AD. Once integrated, the person will get the appropriate access control features upon logging in. Role-based access control is a great feature of Active Directory.
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
14%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Active Directory Identity Protection?
The pricing for Microsoft Entra ID protection is not expensive. It varies based on the company's size and quality.
What needs improvement with Azure Active Directory Identity Protection?
I have set up my Active Directory locally for the same domain. However, Entra ID lacks a function to synchronize from the cloud to the local directory. This is a significant issue since there is no...
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

Azure Active Directory Identity Protection, Azure AD Identity Protection
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 Entra ID Protection vs. Microsoft Sentinel and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
842,672 professionals have used our research since 2012.