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Microsoft Sentinel vs ServiceNow Security Operations 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:
 

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)
ServiceNow Security Operations
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
10th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Security Incident Response (2nd), Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category, the mindshare of Microsoft Sentinel is 20.2%, down from 20.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow Security Operations is 3.8%, down from 4.0% 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
KishoreKumar4 - PeerSpot reviewer
A low-cost and open-source tool for incident and change management
If we encounter challenges while deploying, we raise incidents. These incidents are categorized by priority: high, medium, and low. We assign an incident number and notify the relevant teams to address the issue. For instance, if we experience a problem with Cloud services or any other issue, we…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The ability of all these solutions to work together natively is essential. We have an Azure subscription, including Log Analytics. This feature automatically acts as one of the security baselines and detects recommendations because it also integrates with Defender. We can pull the sysadmin logs from Azure. It's all seamless and native."
"The connectivity and analytics are great."
"The most valuable feature is the performance because unlike legacy SIEMs that were on-premises, it does not require as much maintenance."
"The pricing of the product is excellent."
"It is able to connect to an ever-growing number of platforms and systems within the Microsoft ecosystem, such as Azure Active Directory and Microsoft 365 or Office 365, as well as to external services and systems that can be brought in and managed. We can manage on-premises infrastructure. We can manage not just the things that are running in Azure in the public cloud, but through Azure Arc and the hybrid capabilities, we can monitor on-premises servers and endpoints. We can monitor VMware infrastructure, for instance, running as part of a hybrid environment."
"Sentinel's most important feature is the ability to centralize all the logs in one place. There's no need to search multiple systems for information."
"The automation feature is valuable."
"The most valuable feature is the alert notifications, which are categorized by severity levels: informational, low, medium, and high."
"My favorite feature is the application vulnerability scanner."
"Multiple projects use the ServiceNow tool because it is a low-cost and open-source tool."
"The solution is stable."
"The product has a very simple UI."
"The ease of use is great."
"The "follow" feature is really good. If the user is not responding, there's an option to "follow". Just click on the button, and it will automatically trigger an email to the end user."
"We refer to the setup and installation guide provided by ServiceNow. They have good documentation, which makes it easier to handle the process."
"The solution is available over the cloud and is easy to manage."
 

Cons

"The learning curve could be improved. I am still learning it. We were able to implement the basic features to get them up and running, but there are still so many things that I don't know about all its features. They have a lot of features that we have not been able to use or apply. If they could work on reducing the solution's learning curve, that would be good. While there is a training course held by Microsoft to learn more about this solution, there is a cost associated with it."
"The solution could improve the playbooks."
"If you're looking to use canned queries, the interface could be a little more straightforward. It's not immediately intuitive regarding how you use it. You have to take a canned query and paste it into an operational box and then you hit a button... They could improve the ease of deploying these queries."
"There is a wider thing called Jupyter Notebooks, which is around the automation side of things. It would be good if there are playbooks that you can utilize without having to have the developer experience to do it in-house. Microsoft could provide more playbooks or more Jupyter Notebooks around MITRE ATT&CK Framework."
"If I can use Sentinel offline at home and use it on a local network, it would be great. I'm not sure if I can use Sentinel offline versus the tools I have."
"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."
"We've seen delays in getting the logs from third-party solutions and sometimes Microsoft products as well. It would be helpful if Microsoft created a list of the delays. That would make things more transparent for customers."
"The playbook is a bit difficult and could be improved."
"The product is called SecOps, but it is not security operations in terms of SIEM solutions."
"There is room for improvement in terms of developer support and documentation."
"An area for improvement I observed in ServiceNow Security Operations is the need to maintain correct CMDB data because if you're unable to do this, you can't perfectly maintain the vulnerability data. CMDB data in ServiceNow Security Operations needs to be accurate. As I've been working on ServiceNow Security Operations for only seven months, I still need more time to try all its modules before I can give recommendations regarding additional features I'd like to see in the solution."
"It doesn't interact with things very well."
"There are limitations for the third-parties that are providing the inputs. They should increase the robustness of the solution."
"​Process framework and best practices for ease of integration between IT and security teams via incident, problem, and change.​"
"In future releases, I would like to add a follow-up and reminder feature. For the tickets in our queue, we could set reminders. This would help us prioritize older tickets before moving on to new ones."
"The initial setup is difficult."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"From a cost point of view, it is not a cheap product. It's, like, an enterprise-level application. So if you compare it with a low-level application, it's expensive, but if you compare it with the same-level application, it's pretty much cost-effective, I think."
"Sentinel is fairly priced and pretty cost-effective."
"Sentinel is pretty competitive. The pricing is at the level of other SIEM solutions."
"From a cost perspective, Microsoft Sentinel is quite costly."
"I am not involved on the financial side, but from an enterprise-wide use perspective, I think the price is good enough."
"It is a consumption-based license model. bands at 100, 200, 400 GB per day etc. Azure Sentinel Pricing | Microsoft Azure"
"The price is reasonable because Sentinel includes features like user behavior analytics and SOAR that are typically sold separately. Overall, a standalone on-prem solution would require some high-end servers, and there's a different cost. It is a cloud-based solution, so there are backend cloud computing costs, but they are negligible."
"I don't know yet because they gave us a 30-day test window for free."
"It is an expensive product."
"If you're going to implement it on your own, there would be internal costs. If you're going to implement it through a contractor or consultant, you have to pay for that."
"The solution is more expensive than BMC Remedy, the other ITSM tool available in the market."
"Compared to competitor tools, ServiceNow Security Operations is more affordable"
"The product is more expensive than other solutions."
"This product is a good value for the money."
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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
20%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
10%
Computer Software 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 do you like most about ServiceNow Security Operations?
The most valuable aspect of working with ServiceNow is its meaningful and feature-rich product.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ServiceNow Security Operations?
The product is more expensive than other solutions like Archer but offers more features, making the pricing justifiable.
What needs improvement with ServiceNow Security Operations?
I cannot comment on areas for improvement because it is not within my core expertise. Also, the developers may have more insight into this aspect.
 

Also Known As

Azure Sentinel
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft Sentinel is trusted by companies of all sizes including ABM, ASOS, Uniper, First West Credit Union, Avanade, and more.
DXC Technology, Freedom Security Alliance, Prime Therapeutics, Seton Hall University, York Risk Services
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Sentinel vs. ServiceNow Security Operations and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
832,460 professionals have used our research since 2012.