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Microsoft Purview Information 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
8.1
Microsoft Purview Information Protection enhances security, ensures compliance, reduces costs, and improves efficiency by automating data protection and governance.
Sentiment score
7.2
Microsoft Sentinel ROI is mixed; challenges exist, but benefits include automation savings, enhanced security, and reduced staffing needs.
Purview can do a quick scan, and it doesn't use human resources, so it gets time to do things that we need humans to focus on.
The cost of data loss and your data going to a competitor is potentially massive.
Customers have seen a return on investment through quicker issue detection and cost savings due to automation.
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
5.3
Users report mixed customer service experiences with Microsoft Purview, noting slow response times and inadequate communication despite some improvements.
Sentiment score
6.7
Microsoft Sentinel's support is praised for quick response, with premium tiers offering expert help and strong community resources.
Sometimes, I get a fast and knowledgeable response, while other times, I've experienced delays and received no resolution.
It's hard to be an ambassador for a product when you know it will be hard to get support.
We generally receive good support from Microsoft for this solution.
Their solutions' integration simplifies resolving issues compared to those caused by third-party products.
Working with a Sentinel engineer helped us tune settings effectively.
When my team needs to escalate issues to Microsoft, especially for Microsoft Sentinel, the response is fast through their French entity.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Microsoft Purview Information Protection is scalable for large workloads, but speed and policy update intervals could be improved.
Sentiment score
8.0
Microsoft Sentinel's cloud scalability enables effortless resource management and meets large-scale needs, making it ideal for extensive monitoring.
It can be scaled across different departments organization-wide very quickly and easily.
It can handle large collections of data without issues.
Scalability can be improved by reducing these intervals.
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
7.4
Purview remains reliable and stable, performing well at scale with minor issues and continuous upgrades through its SaaS model.
Sentiment score
7.8
Microsoft Sentinel is stable and reliable with 99.9%+ uptime; issues typically arise from external factors or misconfigurations.
Once implemented, I haven't had issues with its consistency.
The solution is stable overall.
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.
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.
 

Room For Improvement

Microsoft Purview Information Protection needs enhancements in integration, affordability, reporting, AI, feature reintroduction, and comprehensive data protection.
Users recommend improvements to multi-tenancy, log ingestion, interface intuitiveness, and integration, with concerns over pricing and AI enhancement.
Having a roadmap or updates about new releases would be helpful for demonstrating to clients.
Clarifying product features and use cases would help avoid such confusion.
Purview could better integrate with third-party tools.
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.
There are complexities in calculating the right pricing tier for different customers, which makes it difficult for me as a consultant during upfront pricing.
 

Setup Cost

Microsoft Purview Information Protection offers competitive pricing, attractive bundling, and flexible licensing options, appealing to enterprise buyers.
Microsoft Sentinel offers scalable, cost-effective pricing with discounts, especially beneficial for E5 users and high-volume data ingestion.
I talked to people who had compared it to other products on the market, and they're spending five figures to get started.
Our focus is on helping customers maximize their software investment.
The pricing is not very high and is considered fine.
Microsoft Sentinel offers more capabilities than Bastion, with a more intuitive experience.
Setting up the right cost model for customers is intricate, requiring careful consideration of various components and licensing tiers.
We already had the necessary licensing for Sentinel, so we didn't need to spend extra money.
 

Valuable Features

Microsoft Purview excels in data protection with encryption, labeling, cross-platform security, and seamless integration, enhancing compliance and efficiency.
Microsoft Sentinel offers seamless integration, AI-driven threat detection, automated responses, and scalability for efficient, comprehensive security management.
Microsoft Copilot is an advantage because it's enterprise-grade AI.
It's paramount to have a single solution for information protection.
Regardless of the education, the employee might share the information anyway, so the AI shouldn't be the first point of failure. It should be a human making good decisions.
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 best feature of Microsoft Sentinel is its ability to unify all dashboards or functions into one modern SecOps dashboard.
The most valuable features for us include threat collection, threat detection, response, and the knowledge base for investigation.
 

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Purview Informati...
Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite
14th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Data Governance (4th), Data Privacy Management Software (1st)
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 Purview Information Protection is 1.1%, down from 1.3% 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

Heidi Hasting - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides an essential audit trail that helps prevent accidental exposure of sensitive data, but the changing product names are confusing
One of the key features of Microsoft Purview Information Protection is the auto-classification functionalities, although I have found them to be less effective in complex scenarios. The policy toggle, demanding justification for downgrading labels, provides an essential audit trail that helps prevent accidental exposure of sensitive data. The security tools integrate well. I like that you can scan several data or informational assets, such as your SharePoint list, Teams, etc., and bring them into Purview as a central repository. Partnering with other products, like Sentinel, for logging capability and inventory provides a service across the board. It's essential that Purview automatically prevents highly sensitive corporate secrets and data from being ingested into generative AI models, but the reality is that AI is a tool. It's problematic if consumers rely on a tool to protect them because they must be educated first. Regardless of the education, the employee might share the information anyway, so the AI shouldn't be the first point of failure. It should be a human making good decisions.
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
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
13%
Retailer
7%
Government
7%
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 Purview Information Protection?
It ensures that sensitive data is automatically safeguarded, even for email attachments, regardless of the user or device.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Purview Information Protection?
The pricing is not very high and is considered fine. Microsoft offers different licensing options. AIP Plan 2 is used for critical users. The AIP is included in the business standard license for cl...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Purview Information Protection?
The most difficult part in the labeling solution is the lack of direct PDF support on Macs, whereas on Windows, a Purview agent can label PDFs. This should be improved to support PDF protection on ...
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 Information 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 Purview Information Protection vs. Microsoft Sentinel and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
847,646 professionals have used our research since 2012.