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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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Entra ID Protection
Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
14
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
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 Entra ID Protection is 4.8%, up from 3.4% 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

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

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"These features ease the job of security analysts, providing a better vision of user activities and potential risks."
"The solution helps us with authentication."
"As an end-user, I find the experience to be quite seamless. My main advantage is that I only need to manage one login and one two-factor authentication method to access all the necessary tools. I don't have to set up separate logins and authentication for each application."
"The tool is simple and you can find a lot of tutorials, and videos on YouTube that can help you."
"The solution's technical support offers great assistance to users."
"The deployment process is straightforward. It takes a few hours to complete."
"The most valuable features are the API apps, which I use to connect to my cloud Protection."
"The valuable features include multifactor authentication, accessory capabilities, and conditional access for specific applications."
"The query language of Microsoft Sentinel is easy to understand and use."
"The native integration of the Microsoft security solution has been essential because it helps reduce some false positives, especially with some of the impossible travel rules that may be configured in Microsoft 365. For some organizations, that might be benign because they're using VPNs, etc."
"The log analysis is excellent; it can predict what can or will happen regarding use patterns and vulnerabilities."
"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... 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."
"It's pretty powerful and its performance is pretty good."
"I like the unified security console. You can close incidents using Sentinel in all other Microsoft Security portals, when it comes to incident response."
"One of the most valuable features of Microsoft Sentinel is that it's cloud-based."
"Another area where it is helping us is in creating a single dashboard for our environment. We can collect all the logs into a log analytics workset and run queries on top of it. We get all the results in the dashboard. Even a layman can understand this stuff. The way Microsoft presents it is really incredible."
 

Cons

"The solution's sync should be faster since it can take about 30 minutes to two hours to complete a simple sync. The tool needs to sync instantly. It also needs to improve scalability, support, and stability."
"The pricing could be improved."
"The recent CrowdStrike issue affected most systems."
"Entra ID lacks a function to synchronize from the cloud to the local directory. This is a significant issue since 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."
"Identity labeling and sensitivity needs improvement."
"Integrating some notifications, not necessarily all, but at least for important events or alerts, would be beneficial as it would function as a team solution or something similar."
"The solution is not optimized to work with Mac devices on a granular level. They work seamlessly with Windows but have a lot to improve to work with Mac devices. It also needs to improve stability and scalability."
"The platform's pricing and scalability need improvement."
"Microsoft should improve Sentinel, considering that from the legacy systems, it cannot collect logs."
"If we want to use more features, we have to pay more. There are multiple solutions on the cloud itself, but the pricing model package isn't consistent, which is confusing to clients."
"They should just add more and more out-of-the-box connectors. It is quite a new product, and it has a lot of connectors, and even more would be good."
"The dashboards can be improved. Creating dashboards is very easy, but the visualizations are not as good as Microsoft Power BI. People who are using Microsoft Power BI do not like Sentinel's dashboards."
"Its documentation is not so simple. It is easy for somebody who is Microsoft certified or more closely attached to Microsoft solutions. It is not easy for those who are working on open-source platforms. There isn't a central point where everything is documented, and there is no specific training or certification."
"Microsoft Sentinel should provide an alternative query language to KQL for users who lack KQL expertise."
"The interface could be more user-friendly. It''s a small improvement that they could make if they wanted to."
"The on-prem log sources still require a lot of development."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Azure Active Directory Identity Protection is not very expensive."
"The price of Azure AD is not expensive."
"The pricing is competitive in the SMA segment and runs $5-$6 per user."
"From one to ten, if one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the tool a seven out of ten."
"The product cost is on the expensive side."
"Sentinel's price is comparable to pretty much everything out there. None of it is cheap, but we didn't think we could save money by going a different route. Sentinel was part of our Azure expenditures, so it was easier to add the expense instead of having a completely separate vendor."
"Currently, given our use case, the cost of Sentinel is justified, but it is expensive."
"Sentinel is expensive relative to other products of the class, so it often isn't affordable for small-scale businesses. However, considering the solution has more extensive capabilities than others, the price is not so high. Pricing is based on GBs of ingested daily data, either by a pay-as-you-go or subscription model."
"It is kind of like a sliding scale. There are different tiers of pricing that go from $100 per day up to $3,500 per day. So, it just kind of depends on how much data is being stored. There can be additional costs to the standard license other than the additional data. It just kind of depends on what other services you're spinning up in Azure, or if you're using something like Azure log analytics."
"No license is required to make use of Sentinel, but you need to buy products to get the data. In general, the price of those products is comparable to similar products."
"I have had mixed feedback. At one point, I heard a client say that it sometimes seems more expensive. Most of the clients are on Office 365 or M365, and they are forced to take Azure SIEM because of the integration."
"The pay-as-you-go model is beneficial to customers."
"Sentinel is fairly priced and pretty cost-effective."
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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
11%
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?
Microsoft Entra ID requires additional licensing components, particularly for Entra ID governance as an add-on for those with P1 or P2 licenses.
What needs improvement with Azure Active Directory Identity Protection?
Microsoft has not offered control over how they calculate high or low-risk scenarios. While they mention if a low risk is found by Microsoft, the triggered policy isn't customizable. Enhanced confi...
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: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.