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Microsoft Sentinel vs Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

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
7.3
Users find Microsoft Sentinel offers positive ROI through improved visibility, automation, and efficiency, despite initial costs and quantification challenges.
Sentiment score
7.4
Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR enhances ROI through automation, integration, and efficient mature SOC processes, reducing investigation time.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.7
Microsoft Sentinel support is mixed; premium plans and better Microsoft relationships yield favorable experiences despite some challenges.
Sentiment score
6.0
Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR support is knowledgeable but varies in response times and service quality, needing possible improvements.
Their solutions' integration simplifies resolving issues compared to those caused by third-party products.
Working with a Sentinel engineer helped us tune settings effectively.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Microsoft Sentinel's cloud architecture ensures scalable, flexible data handling with minimal management, supporting large user bases and easy integration.
Sentiment score
7.4
Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR is scalable, integrating well with APIs, though large deployments may face challenges and latency issues.
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
7.8
Microsoft Sentinel is highly stable and reliable, with users praising its performance and noting rare, minor configuration issues.
Sentiment score
7.8
Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR is stable and reliable, though minor bugs occur during updates and with oversized storage environments.
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 Sentinel users seek improved third-party integration, user-friendly features, enhanced threat intelligence, and streamlined data management to reduce costs.
Cortex XSOAR requires easier setup, better IoT support, improved UI, more connectors, flexible pricing, and enhanced documentation.
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.
The deployment requires integration and the development of integration modules.
 

Setup Cost

Microsoft Sentinel offers cost-effective, consumption-based pricing, benefiting from Azure integration with careful data management to control expenses.
Cortex XSOAR is seen as expensive yet valuable for security, with variable pricing and discounts post-Palo Alto acquisition.
We already had the necessary licensing for Sentinel, so we didn't need to spend extra money.
 

Valuable Features

Microsoft Sentinel offers seamless integration, AI-driven threat detection, and automation, providing comprehensive security and ease of setup for organizations.
Cortex XSOAR offers user-friendly automation, integration, and playbook creation with efficient remediation, security features, and AI-enhanced threat intelligence.
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.
Execution of automatic tasks for collecting, enriching, and correlating security events from hundreds of different technologies.
 

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Sentinel
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
89
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (3rd), Microsoft Security Suite (5th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (6th)
Palo Alto Networks Cortex X...
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
SOC as a Service (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category, the mindshare of Microsoft Sentinel is 20.9%, up from 20.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR is 13.1%, down from 15.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
 

Featured Reviews

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
NikhilSharma2 - PeerSpot reviewer
Ability to multiple playbooks to fetch data from multiple firewalls and utomated several tasks, including vulnerability scans and SOCL (Security Orchestration, Automation
Recently, they started implementing microservices in XSOAR, which has improved quality and addressed previous issues. However, they should focus more on licensing costs. The user licensing fees are quite high. For example, I received a quote for XSOAR, and it was $12,000 per user per year. If you have a SOC team of 30 members/analysts, you're looking at a substantial expense. They should consider reducing these costs since this high pricing seems to be more about profit. So, there is room for improvement in the pricing. Moreover, the reporting and dashboard features are decent but could be improved. The user interface (UI) is quite heavy and takes time to load, which is a major drawback.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

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 ...
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR?
Even though customers often comment on the price, the potential savings come from managing a large number of security events with a limited number of analysts. This leads to economic advantages des...
What needs improvement with Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR?
The complexity of Cortex XSOAR has a trade-off with its versatility. The product can be tailored for each deployment to respond to specific customer needs, and this complexity may be seen as a down...
 

Also Known As

Azure Sentinel
Demisto Enterprise, Cortex XSOAR, Demisto
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft Sentinel is trusted by companies of all sizes including ABM, ASOS, Uniper, First West Credit Union, Avanade, and more.
Cellcom Israel, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City, esri, Cylance, Flatiron Health, Veeva, ADT Cybersecurity
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Sentinel vs. Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.