Microsoft Sentinel vs Splunk SOAR comparison

Microsoft and Splunk are both solutions in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category. Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.4, while Splunk is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.1. Microsoft holds a 20.2% mindshare in SOAR, compared to Splunk’s 7.2% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of Splunk users who would recommend it.

Microsoft Sentinel

Read 89 Microsoft Sentinel reviews

12,769 Views
7,610 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Splunk SOAR

Read 43 Splunk SOAR reviews

5,110 Views
3,052 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Microsoft Sentinel

Splunk SOAR

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 8, 2024

Splunk SOAR and Microsoft Sentinel are competing in the security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) category. Splunk SOAR seems to have the upper hand due to its seamless integration and user-friendly interface, while Microsoft Sentinel excels in comprehensive threat detection and machine learning-driven insights.

Features: Splunk SOAR is favored for its easy integration, a user-friendly interface, and the ability to automate mundane tasks effectively. It offers automation and orchestration of security processes through customizable playbooks and supports numerous integrations using APIs. Microsoft Sentinel, on the other hand, is praised for its extensive integration capabilities utilizing Azure Logic Apps and its ability to provide automated handling of threats with complex analytics and machine learning.

Room for Improvement: Splunk SOAR users seek better integration with external data sources, improved APIs, and more advanced analytics capabilities. They also emphasize the need for enhanced documentation and training materials, and improvements in cost structure. Microsoft Sentinel users suggest enhanced support for third-party integrations, improved documentation, and clearer customization for usability and onboarding processes, with particular attention to pricing and data ingestion costs.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Splunk SOAR offers deployment flexibility across private, hybrid, and public clouds, including on-premises options. However, some users rely heavily on community support due to varying experiences with technical support responsiveness. Microsoft Sentinel is primarily deployed in public and hybrid cloud environments and provides reliable support and documentation, facilitating relatively straightforward deployment, though its comprehensive integration options can be complex to manage.

Pricing and ROI: Splunk SOAR is generally considered expensive, with its pricing model often seen as prohibitive for smaller organizations. Nonetheless, its value is recognized in its ability to save time through automation and integration. Sentinel offers a more scalable pricing model, appreciated especially for its integration with Microsoft's existing ecosystems, despite some users finding it costly with extensive data ingesting. Both products showcase strong ROI potentials when effectively utilized, particularly through automation and increased operational efficiency.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Sentinel vs. Splunk SOAR Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Sentinel vs. Splunk SOAR

January 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 Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)

1st

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

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

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

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 Splunk SOAR is 7.2%, 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

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

Read full review

Shubham Sinha.

Senior Principal Information Security Analyst at Veritas Technologies LLC

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.

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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

"We’ve got process improvement that's happened across multiple different fronts within the organization, within our IT organization based on this tool being in place."

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

"The scalability is great. You can put unlimited logs in, as long as you can pay for it. There are commitment tiers, up to six terabytes per day, which is nowhere close to what any one of our customers is running."

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

"The machine learning and artificial intelligence on offer are great."

"The solution has features that helped improve the security posture of our clients. It provides the ability to correlate a large variety of log sources very cost-effectively, especially for Microsoft sources."

"It has a lot of great features."

"One of the most valuable features is that it creates a kind of a single pane of glass for organizations that already use Microsoft software. So, when they have things like Microsoft 365, it is very easy for them to kind of plug in or enroll those endpoints into the Azure Sentinel service."

More Microsoft Sentinel pros

"The product’s integration with other Splunk products is valuable."

"When you design a playbook, you can integrate multiple log sources and define rules... After that, the platform automatically compiles all these activities and, based on the results, the analyst only has to indicate whether the result is a true or false positive. That reduces the time and effort involved."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is the playbook automation just because it allows us to reduce the manual actions that SOC has to handle."

"Before its use, analyzing each email would take at least 15 to 20 minutes, with some complex cases taking up to 30 minutes...With the automation provided by Splunk Phantom, we could significantly reduce the amount of time and human effort required to complete this task."

"The most valuable feature is the API connector, depending on how it's formatted and who made the actual app offering for it. The REST API is my favorite component. It's very easy to use. The filters are also really valuable. Those are the two primary features but I enjoy using the rest of it."

"The solution allows us to customize playbooks and incorporate custom code, allowing us to drag and drop elements while still writing code to build the integrations we need."

"Our customers find it easy to conduct searches and consider it an excellent content management system."

"So far, the interface is very easy to use."

More Splunk SOAR pros

Cons

"There are certain delays. For example, if an alert has been rated on Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, it might take up to an hour for that alert to reach Sentinel. This should ideally take no more than one or two seconds."

"Only one thing is missing: NDR is not available out-of-the-box. The competitive cloud-native SIEM providers have the NDR component. Currently, Sentinel needs NDR to be powered from either Corelight or some other NDR provider."

"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."

"One key area that can be improved is by building a strong integration with our XDR platform."

"At the network level, there is a limitation in integrating some of the switches or routers with Microsoft Sentinel. Currently, SPAN traffic monitoring is not available in Microsoft Sentinel. I have heard that it is available in Defender for Identity, which is a different product. It would be good if LAN traffic monitoring or SPAN traffic monitoring is available in Microsoft Sentinel. It would add a lot of value. It is available in some of the competitor products in the market."

"The playbook development environment is not as rich as it should be. There are multiple occasions when we face problems while creating the playbook."

"I believe one of the challenges I encountered was the absence of live training sessions, even with the option to pay for them."

"The KQL query does not function effectively with Windows 11 machines, and in the majority of machine-based investigations, KQL queries are essential for organizing the data during investigations."

More Microsoft Sentinel cons

"Some of the training materials are on a basic level."

"The UI can be more customizable for the clients."

"Splunk SOAR has room to improve its offering for small-sized customers. The price is not fair for smaller-sized customers."

"We have playbooks written to extract these events and put them into the workflow since it wasn't structured as expected. It was a miss for us. We couldn't figure out why it broke or what actually happened there. It was something in this feed with legitimate and security events, so we tried to understand the names and what we would call them."

"It could be easier to implement."

"I haven't used it fully, but based on my usage, I could not find simulation tools and features. It currently lacks simulation features, which are important for me for creating a playbook. It is also very expensive for my region."

"The application does not work properly and does not pass the log-based configuration. I feel that some kind of review should happen in the application. This review should validate things so that we can get the right information. Splunk does not tell us where the IP address is associated with."

"The font used in the interface could be changed and made easier to read."

More Splunk SOAR cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"Currently, given our use case, the cost of Sentinel is justified, but it is expensive."

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

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

"The pricing is based on how much you ingest, so it's pretty straightforward. There are no tiers, and you pay for what you use unlike with other types of SIEM solutions that are usually based on tiers."

"Microsoft Sentinel requires an E5 license."

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

"It's costly to maintain and renew."

More Microsoft Sentinel pricing and cost advice

"Splunk SOAR is an expensive solution for an organization of our size."

"I don't know the exact price, but for my region, it is very expensive."

"While I can't confirm the exact pricing, some colleagues have mentioned that Splunk SOAR may be on the costlier side."

"The cost is high and the licensing is on an annual basis."

"It's very overpriced because it is based on the number of users. There is no bulk licensing."

"Splunk SOAR is more expensive compared to other options for SOAR."

"The licensing cost is reasonable."

"In my opinion, the price is high, but if you want good products, you have to be willing to pay for them."

More Splunk SOAR pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

11%

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 ...

See all answers

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 Splunk Phantom?

Splunk SOAR's quick response to incidents is the most valuable part.

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

AWS Security Hub vs Microsoft Sentinel

Compared 22% of the time

IBM Security QRadar vs Microsoft Sentinel

Compared 10% 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

Cortex XSIAM vs Splunk SOAR

Compared 27% of the time

Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR vs Splunk SOAR

Compared 17% of the time

Tines vs Splunk SOAR

Compared 10% of the time

Fortinet FortiSOAR vs Splunk SOAR

Compared 9% of the time

Google Security Operations vs Splunk SOAR

Compared 4% of the time

More Splunk SOAR Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Sentinel

January 2025

Download Microsoft Sentinel product report

Buyer's Guide

Splunk SOAR

January 2025

Download Splunk SOAR product report

Also Known As

Azure Sentinel

Phantom

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

Splunk SOAR offers features like automation and orchestration of manual tasks, speeding up work, detection and response to advanced and emerging threats.

Go from overwhelmed to in-control

Automate manual tasks. Address every alert, every day. Establish repeatable procedures that allow security analysts to stop being reactive and focus on mission-critical objectives to protect your business.

Force multiply your team

Orchestrate and automate repetitive tasks, investigation and response to increase efficiency and productivity, and do more with the people you already have. Make a team of three feel like a team of 10.

From 30 minutes to 30 seconds

Work faster with Splunk SOAR. Respond to threats in seconds. Lower your mean time to respond (MTTR) by automating security tasks and workflows across all of your security tools.

End-to-end security operations made easy

Take advantage of Splunk Enterprise Security and Splunk SOAR joining forces to provide a seamless and intuitive SecOps platform to prevent, detect and respond to advanced and emerging threats.

Splunk

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

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Sentinel vs. Splunk SOAR

January 2025

Free Report: Microsoft Sentinel vs. Splunk SOAR

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