Microsoft Sentinel vs NetWitness Platform comparison

Microsoft and NetWitness are both solutions in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category. Microsoft is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.3, while NetWitness is ranked #22 with an average rating of 7.6. Microsoft holds a 7.4% mindshare in SIEM, compared to NetWitness’s 0.6% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 75% of NetWitness users who would recommend it.

Microsoft Sentinel

Read 91 Microsoft Sentinel reviews

13,318 Views
8,289 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

NetWitness Platform

Read 37 NetWitness Platform reviews

1,134 Views
721 Comparison Views

75% willing to recommend

Microsoft Sentinel

NetWitness Platform

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

NetWitness Platform and Microsoft Sentinel are leading solutions in cybersecurity. Based on user reviews, Microsoft Sentinel often stands out due to its comprehensive features and integration capabilities, making it a preferred choice despite potentially higher costs.

Features: NetWitness Platform is praised for its robust threat detection and response capabilities. It offers in-depth packet capture and session analysis, providing granular visibility into network activity. The platform also includes behavior analytics to detect threats based on deviations from normal patterns. Microsoft Sentinel features advanced AI-driven analytics, automating threat detection and response processes. It includes seamless integration with other Microsoft products, enhancing its utility in Microsoft-centric environments. Additionally, Sentinel offers built-in orchestration and automation for streamlined security operations.

Room for Improvement: Users suggest that NetWitness Platform could benefit from enhanced scalability, more intuitive navigation, and better integration with third-party tools. Microsoft Sentinel users request improved alerting mechanisms, more customizable reporting options, and a more user-friendly interface. While suggestions for NetWitness are aimed at usability enhancements, Sentinel users focus on functional refinements.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: NetWitness Platform is noted for its straightforward deployment process and reliable customer support. Microsoft Sentinel receives positive feedback for deployment, especially in cloud environments, but some users find its initial setup complex. Customer service for Sentinel garners mixed reviews, with some users experiencing delays in support.

Pricing and ROI: NetWitness Platform is generally seen as requiring a significant initial investment, but users report good ROI over time. Microsoft Sentinel is perceived as more expensive, yet users feel the comprehensive feature set and integration justify the cost, leading to a strong ROI. Pricing strategies differ, with Sentinel's flexible cloud-based pricing appealing to many users. Differences in perceived value highlight each product's pricing strategy and return on investment dynamics.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Sentinel vs. NetWitness Platform Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Sentinel vs. NetWitness Platform

April 2025

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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 Sentinel

Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)

3rd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (6th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (5th)

NetWitness Platform

Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)

22nd

Average Rating

7.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Log Management (22nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of Microsoft Sentinel is 7.4%, down from 9.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetWitness Platform is 0.6%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)

Featured Reviews

KrishnanKartik

Cyber Security Consultant at Inspira Enterprise

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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MdZaman

IT manager at a agriculture with 10,001+ employees

Really scalable for enterprise customers

The solution should have more integration capabilities with different platforms. The API is nearly open and scalable, so the solution can integrate with many platforms. The solution has more than 200 log sources in the scalability to support, but this is its limit. Installation is pretty easy. However, there are a couple of modules involved, so it is not as easy as it could be. We are talking about a distributed module, not a single-module type. This is what makes things a bit complex, instead of easier. I rate it as a seven out of ten on its installation and configuration capabilities.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The in-built SOAR of Sentinel is valuable. Kusto Query Language is also valuable for the ease of writing queries and ease of getting insights from the logs. Schedule-based queries within Sentinel are also valuable. I found these three features most useful for my projects."

"The most valuable feature is the performance because unlike legacy SIEMs that were on-premises, it does not require as much maintenance."

"The query language of Microsoft Sentinel is easy to understand and use."

"The part that was very unexpected was Sentinel's ability to integrate with Azure Lighthouse, which, as a managed services solution provider, gives us the ability to also manage our customers' Sentinel environments or Sentinel workspaces. It is a big plus for us. With its integration with Lighthouse, we get the ability to monitor multiple workspaces from one portal. A lot of the Microsoft Sentinel workbooks already integrate with that capability, and we save countless amounts of money by simply being able to almost immediately realize multitenant capabilities. That alone is a big plus for us."

"Free ingestion for Azure logs (with E5 licence)"

"While Microsoft Sentinel provides a log of security events, its true power lies in its integration with Microsoft Defender."

"Log aggregation and data connectors are the most valuable features."

"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."

More Microsoft Sentinel pros

"Alerting Module: It provides real-time event processing language on all the logs/packets stream for advanced alerting, i.e., using SQL LIKE statements."

"The product's initial setup phase was not at all difficult."

"Incident management is its most valuable feature."

"Performance and reporting are very good."

"The most valuable features are the integration and ease of use."

"The most valuable feature is that we can create our own connectors for any application, and NetWitness provides the training and tools to do it."

"It's fully scalable. There is no limit. Of course, the license limits per day the number of terabytes. In my opinion, it's very flexible."

"The packet capture aspect of it is a valuable feature because it is quite different from a traditional SIEM solution that only carries out investigations based on captured logs."

More NetWitness Platform pros

Cons

"The on-prem log sources still require a lot of development."

"I think the number one area of improvement for Sentinel would be the cost."

"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."

"Sentinel provides decent visibility, but it's sometimes a little cumbersome to get to the information I want because there is so much information. I would also like to see more seamless integration between Sentinel and third-party security products."

"For certain vendors, some of the data that Microsoft Sentinel captures is redacted due to privacy reasons."

"Azure Sentinel will be directly competing with tools such as Splunk or Qradar. These are very established kinds of a product that have been around for the last seven, eight years or more."

"Microsoft Defender has a built-in threat expert option that enables you to contact an expert. That feature isn't available in Sentinel because it's a huge product that integrates all the technologies. I would like Microsoft to add the threat expert option so we can contact them. There are a few other features, like threat assessment that the PG team is working on. I expect them to release this feature in the next quarter."

"The pricing tiers of Microsoft Sentinel should be improved. There are complexities in calculating the right pricing tier for different customers, which makes it difficult for me as a consultant during upfront pricing."

More Microsoft Sentinel cons

"The solution should have more integration capabilities with different platforms."

"It should have a monitoring feature. It would help us analyze the current state of attacks faster from a single platform."

"Security needs improvement."

"I'd like to see improvement in its ease of use. It's basically unusable. It's overly complex."

"Technical support could be improved."

"The initial setup is complex. There are other solutions that are easier to implement."

"More customizability is required, which is something that they need to improve on."

"Lots of competing products have vulnerability protection built into their products, and this solution would be improved by including that support."

More NetWitness Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It comes with a Microsoft subscription which the customer has, so they don't have to invest somewhere else."

"It is priced fairly given the value that you get from the use of the product. The biggest mistake people make with Microsoft Sentinel is not understanding the pricing model and the amount of data that they are going to be running through the tool because you are paying based on the flow. You are paying based on the amount of data that is moving through the tool. People do not plan, and therefore, they get surprised by the cost associated with using the tool. They connect everything because they want to know everything, but connecting everything is very expensive."

"It is certainly the most expensive solution. The cost is very high. We need to do an assessment using the one-month trial so that we can study the cost side. Before implementing it, we must do a careful calculation."

"I am not involved on the financial side, but from an enterprise-wide use perspective, I think the price is good enough."

"From a cost perspective, Microsoft Sentinel is quite costly."

"We only pay for the amount of data we bring in, which is fair."

"There are no additional costs other than the initial costs of Sentinel."

"Sentinel is costly."

More Microsoft Sentinel pricing and cost advice

"We are on an annual license for the use of the solution."

"This is a pricey solution; it's not cheap."

"It is cheap."

"In comparison to other SIEM solutions such as Splunk, NetWitness is less costly."

"The tool is very expensive, so I rate the pricing a ten out of ten. The solution has an annual subscription."

"It provides tools to assist in selecting the appropriate license and usage scenarios."

"The new pricing and licensing mechanisms are fair. I would advise always to get the full solution (i.e., not only Logs)."

"The NetWitness Platform may be affordable only for enterprise-level customers, as it may not be within the budget of small and medium-sized businesses."

More NetWitness Platform pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

Vinod Shankar

Manager, Enterprise Risk Consulting at Deloitte & Touche

Feb 26, 2015

HP ArcSight vs. IBM QRadar vs. McAfee Nitro vs. Splunk vs. RSA Security vs. LogRhythm

We at Infosecnirvana.com have done several posts on SIEM. After the Dummies Guide on SIEM, we are following it up with a SIEM Product Comparison – 101 deck. So, here it is for your viewing pleasure. Let me know what you think by posting your comments below. The key products compared here are…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

18%

Insurance Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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 ...

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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 ...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about NetWitness Platform?

The product's initial setup phase was not at all difficult.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetWitness Platform?

The pricing is comparable to others, and I consider the cost to be intermediate. Specific cost details are unknown to me.

See all answers

What needs improvement with NetWitness Platform?

There is currently no need for improvement in the SIEM ( /categories/security-information-and-event-management-siem ), though there could be potential enhancements by integrating with AI.

See all answers

Comparisons

AWS Security Hub vs Microsoft Sentinel

Compared 21% of the time

IBM Security QRadar vs Microsoft Sentinel

Compared 8% of the time

Cortex XSIAM vs Microsoft Sentinel

Compared 8% of the time

Wazuh vs Microsoft Sentinel

Compared 6% of the time

Google Chronicle Suite vs Microsoft Sentinel

Compared 5% of the time

More Microsoft Sentinel Competitors

Splunk Enterprise Security vs NetWitness Platform

Compared 27% of the time

IBM Security QRadar vs NetWitness Platform

Compared 16% of the time

Elastic Security vs NetWitness Platform

Compared 13% of the time

Trellix Network Detection and Response vs NetWitness Platform

Compared 11% of the time

LogRhythm SIEM vs NetWitness Platform

Compared 6% of the time

More NetWitness Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Sentinel

April 2025

Download Microsoft Sentinel product report

Buyer's Guide

NetWitness Platform

April 2025

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Also Known As

Azure Sentinel

RSA Security Analytics

Overview

Microsoft Sentinel is a scalable, cloud-native, security information event management (SIEM) and security orchestration automated response (SOAR) solution that lets you see and stop threats before they cause harm. Microsoft Sentinel delivers intelligent security analytics and threat intelligence across the enterprise, providing a single solution for alert detection, threat visibility, proactive hunting, and threat response. Eliminate security infrastructure setup and maintenance, and elastically scale to meet your security needs—while reducing IT costs. With Microsoft Sentinel, you can:

- Collect data at cloud scale—across all users, devices, applications, and infrastructure, both on-premises and in multiple clouds

- Detect previously uncovered threats and minimize false positives using analytics and unparalleled threat intelligence from Microsoft

- Investigate threats with AI and hunt suspicious activities at scale, tapping into decades of cybersecurity work at Microsoft

- Respond to incidents rapidly with built-in orchestration and automation of common tasks

To learn more about our solution, ask questions, and share feedback, join our Microsoft Security, Compliance and Identity Community.

Microsoft

NetWitness Platform is an evolved SIEM and threat detection and response solution that functions as a single, unified platform for ALL your security data. It features an advanced analyst workbench for triaging alerts and incidents, and it orchestrates security operations programs end to end. In short: NetWitness Platform is all you need to run an intelligent SOC.

NetWitness

Sample Customers

Microsoft Sentinel is trusted by companies of all sizes including ABM, ASOS, Uniper, First West Credit Union, Avanade, and more.

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Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Sentinel vs. NetWitness Platform

April 2025

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