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Microsoft Sentinel vs Splunk SOAR comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 8, 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
6.6
Splunk SOAR offers varied ROI, with notable time-saving but challenges in quantifying benefits and initial deployment for new users.
 

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
7.1
Splunk SOAR's improved customer service is praised for responsiveness and documentation, despite occasional slow telecom-related responses.
Their solutions' integration simplifies resolving issues compared to those caused by third-party products.
Working with a Sentinel engineer helped us tune settings effectively.
Splunk's technical support is very good and generally not needed often due to the stable environment.
 

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
7.1
Splunk SOAR is scalable, flexible, and resource-efficient, but some users face hardware bottlenecks at larger scales.
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
7.5
Splunk SOAR is highly stable with minimal downtime, minor issues, and receives positive feedback for robust data performance.
So far, we have not experienced any issues, and it has been stable from the beginning.
Sentinel's stability is great.
Splunk SOAR provides a stable environment and technology.
 

Room For Improvement

Microsoft Sentinel users seek improved third-party integration, user-friendly features, enhanced threat intelligence, and streamlined data management to reduce costs.
Splunk SOAR users desire improved integration, better documentation, and user-friendly features for enhanced efficiency and usability.
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.
Although it enhances alert handling, it still has a journey to compete with Palo Alto SOAR and FortiSOAR.
 

Setup Cost

Microsoft Sentinel offers cost-effective, consumption-based pricing, benefiting from Azure integration with careful data management to control expenses.
Splunk SOAR's subscription pricing is seen as costly by some, but it offers valuable workflow automation and efficiency.
We already had the necessary licensing for Sentinel, so we didn't need to spend extra money.
Splunk SOAR is affordable cost-wise only.
 

Valuable Features

Microsoft Sentinel offers seamless integration, AI-driven threat detection, and automation, providing comprehensive security and ease of setup for organizations.
Splunk SOAR offers customizable playbooks, seamless integration, facilitates automation, enhances incident response, and improves user experience and efficiency.
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 stable environment and the community provide strong support, reducing the need for technical support.
 

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)
Splunk SOAR
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category, the mindshare of Microsoft Sentinel is 19.6%, down from 20.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk SOAR is 7.3%, down from 8.7% 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
Shubham Sinha. - PeerSpot reviewer
Helped eliminate repetitive and redundant tasks, but custom functions and reporting need a lot of work
The visibility of the solution’s playbook viewer depends on the right you assign to the analyst. SOAR has the flexibility to distinguish between the roles of analyst and owner. If the analyst's role is to just work on a ticket, they cannot view the playbook design platform. That is limited to the owner. That can be both a good and bad thing. A major problem I have faced in SOAR's rights distribution is roles and responsibilities. Suppose I am initially granted user rights or analyst rights, but later on, I also get admin rights. SOAR is unable to amend the limitations of my role. I raised a support ticket with Splunk about this. They said it's a bug in their 5.3.5 version. To fix this, I had to reinstall the entire platform from scratch, just to amend the rights and responsibilities of one role. This bug was not fixed. Also, the latest GUI is terrible. The previous one was better. Another point is that while using Splunk SOAR in an investigation is not difficult, there are some complex parameters. We have SOAR case management, but the licensing is going to put a big hole in your pocket. Also, there is an issue with investigation node addition. When you are doing node additions you cannot grant the entire environment to have SOAR visibility into the incident. So when you integrate it with an ITSM tool, like ServiceNow or Jira for ticketing purposes, there is a challenge. When you do nodes for investigation on a regular basis, sometimes it does not update our ServiceNow platform, which is terrible. It is a redundant activity for an analyst to update that in the case management as well as in the ITSM tool. Although SOAR provides integration, the functionality of investigation and nodes is terrible when it comes to integration. An additional area for improvement is custom function creation. It's terrible. A newbie cannot create custom functions right away. They would require a solid understanding first. Also, the reporting is really awful. If I want to do a report for a customized time period, such as the last three days or the last four days, or from the 10th to the 12th of June, that is not available in SOAR at all. That kind of feature is available in Cortex XSOAR. Reporting is a real challenge.
report
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
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 Splunk Phantom?
Splunk SOAR's quick response to incidents is the most valuable part.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Splunk Phantom?
I rate Splunk SOAR two out of 10 for affordability. Splunk is a fast enterprise tool, but it costs too much. At the same time, it's worth what we pay, in my opinion. We can efficiently perform all ...
What needs improvement with Splunk Phantom?
The dashboard could be improved and some other features. SOAR should integrate network capabilities, allowing us to also monitor the WLAN network. Splunk is also expensive and difficult for beginne...
 

Also Known As

Azure Sentinel
Phantom
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft Sentinel is trusted by companies of all sizes including ABM, ASOS, Uniper, First West Credit Union, Avanade, and more.
Recorded Future, Blackstone
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Sentinel vs. Splunk SOAR and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
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