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 #23 with an average rating of 7.8. Microsoft holds a 7.5% 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 90 Microsoft Sentinel reviews

14,032 Views
8,568 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

NetWitness Platform

Read 37 NetWitness Platform reviews

1,157 Views
725 Comparison Views

75% willing to recommend

Microsoft Sentinel

NetWitness Platform

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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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: February 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Sentinel vs. NetWitness Platform

February 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 (5th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (6th)

NetWitness Platform

Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)

23rd

Average Rating

7.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Log Management (22nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of Microsoft Sentinel is 7.5%, down from 9.5% 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 SOAR playbooks are Sentinel's most valuable feature. It gives you a unified toolset for detecting, investigating, and responding to incidents. That's what clearly differentiates Sentinels from its competitors. It's cloud-native, offering end-to-end coverage with more than 120 connectors. All types of data logs can be poured into the system so analysis can happen. That end-to-end visibility gives it the advantage."

"The most valuable feature is the alert notifications, which are categorized by severity levels: informational, low, medium, and high."

"It is always correlating to IOCs for normal attacks, using Azure-related resources. For example, if any illegitimate IP starts unusual activity on our Azure firewall, then it automatically generates an alarm for us."

"The Log analytics are useful."

"It's pretty powerful and its performance is pretty good."

"Azure Application Gateway makes things a lot easier. You can create dashboards, alert rules, hunting and custom queries, and functions with it."

"The log analysis is excellent; it can predict what can or will happen regarding use patterns and vulnerabilities."

"Sentinel also enables you to ingest data from your entire ecosystem and not just from the Microsoft ecosystem. It can receive data from third-party vendors' products such firewalls, network devices, and antivirus solutions. It's not only a Microsoft solution, it's for everything."

More Microsoft Sentinel pros

"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."

"Incident management is its most valuable feature."

"It gives the capability for the incident response team to correlate logs to identify any kind of problem like malware and incidents in a general sense, both for logs and packets."

"The most valuable feature of RSA NetWitness Logs and Packets are the alerts and correlations tools."

"Performance and reporting are very good."

"NetWitness Platform is valuable for creating rules that the solution must detect."

"The most valuable features are the packet inspection and the automated incident response."

"The most valuable features are the packet decoder, log decoder, and concentrator."

More NetWitness Platform pros

Cons

"It would be good to have some connectors for third-party SIEM solutions. Many customers are struggling with the integration of Azure Sentinel with their on-premise SIEM. Microsoft is changing the log structure many times a year, which can corrupt a custom integration. It would be good to have some connectors developed by Microsoft or supply vendors, but they are not providing such functionality or tools."

"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."

"I would like to be able to monitor applications outside of the Azure Cloud."

"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."

"Microsoft Sentinel is relatively expensive, and its cost should be improved."

"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."

"Sentinel can be used in two ways. With other tools like QRadar, I don't need to run queries. Using Sentinel requires users to learn KQL to run technical queries and check things. If they don't know KQL, they can't fully utilize the solution."

"They only classify alerts into three categories: high, medium, and low. So, from the user's point of view, having another critical category would be awesome."

More Microsoft Sentinel cons

"Log aggregation is an issue with this solution because there are a huge number of alerts in a single instance."

"The threat detection capability and centralizing and upgrading capability need to be improved. The threat alert capability needs to be improved as well because there is some lag time at present. They need to work on their database search too."

"The log system is a bit complex and has room for improvement."

"The implementation needs assistance."

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

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

"Technical support could be improved."

"The initial setup is very complex and should be simplified."

More NetWitness Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"The combination of the ease of accessibility and the free cost of the service is great. But we buy storage based on our events per second and on how many sources are integrated into the solution."

"Microsoft Sentinel is pretty expensive, and they recently announced that they will increase the price of all Microsoft services running in Azure by 11 percent. Luckily, I'm not responsible for the financial side. For one of my clients, the estimated cost is 880,000 euros for one year. There are additional costs for the service agreement."

"Sentinel's pricing is on the higher side, but you can get a discount if you can predict your usage. You have to pay ingestion and storage fees. There are also fees for Logic Apps and particular features. It seems heavily focused on microtransactions, but they may be slightly optional. By contrast, Splunk requires no additional fee for their equivalent of Logic. You have a little more flexibility, but Sentinel's costs add up."

"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 consumption-based pricing. It is an affordable solution."

"Microsoft Sentinel can be costly, particularly for data management."

"Sentinel can be expensive. When you ingest data from sources that are outside of the cloud, you're paying a fair amount for that data ingestion. When you're ingesting data sources from within the cloud, depending on what your retention periods are, it's not that expensive."

More Microsoft Sentinel pricing and cost advice

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

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

"The licenses are good but the cost is very expensive."

"It is cheap."

"We have yearly licensing costs. The license fee can be based on the volume of EPS. Some organizations may have, as a gentlemanly gesture, 10,000 EPS and get a 3,000 EPS license but actually use 5,000 EPS."

"Many clients are not able to purchase the packet capability because there is a huge amount of data, and the cost depends on the number of EPS (Events per second), as well as the number of gigabytes of data per day."

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

"RSA NetWitness Logs and Packets do not have a subscription model, it's a one-time purchase. There is only a perpetual license."

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

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

17%

Government

Insurance Company

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...

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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 product price was reasonable for my region and the market.

See all answers

What needs improvement with NetWitness Platform?

From an improvement perspective, the NetWitness Platform needs to release new features and improve in areas like log correlation. The tool needs to have easier integrations with the cloud. Building...

See all answers

Comparisons

AWS Security Hub vs Microsoft Sentinel

Compared 21% of the time

IBM Security QRadar vs Microsoft Sentinel

Compared 9% 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 33% of the time

IBM Security QRadar vs NetWitness Platform

Compared 18% of the time

RSA enVision vs NetWitness Platform

Compared 12% of the time

Cisco Secure Network Analytics vs NetWitness Platform

Compared 11% of the time

More NetWitness Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Sentinel

March 2025

Download Microsoft Sentinel product report

Buyer's Guide

NetWitness Platform

March 2025

Download NetWitness Platform product report

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

February 2025

Free Report: Microsoft Sentinel vs. NetWitness Platform

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