We performed a comparison between Darktrace and SentinelOne based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on our users’ reviews, we would conclude that SentinelOne is a stronger, more secure solution than Darktrace. Reviewers say that SentinelOne offers a deeper and more thorough level of security. Additionally, SentinelOne provides equal protection across Windows, Linux, and macOS. It can also support legacy infrastructure as well as newer environments. The single-pane feature helps protect numerous endpoints with a very lean team, saving time and money.
"The deployment capability is a great feature."
"Threat Explorer is an invaluable tool for me, and it plays a crucial role in helping me discern the origins of various email campaigns, pinpointing where they emanate from, and identifying the individuals within our organization who are affected."
"Some of the valuable features on the email side are anti-phishing, anti-malware, and Safe Links."
"Does a thorough job of examining email and URLs for malicious content."
"Defender for 365 is a comprehensive cloud-based solution. The value of the cloud is that you aren't alone. Threat intelligence and analytics are shared in the cloud. We don't have to find the solution alone. If you face an unknown threat with traditional solutions like Trend Micro and Symantec, you need to open a case and send your information to them to analyze forensically and identify the source of the attack."
"I would say that 90% of the spam and phishing attack emails get blocked right off the bat."
"The most valuable feature is the integration. It's a single console, so we don't have to switch around between multiple products. Another valuable feature is the ease of operations and maintenance."
"The basic features are okay and I'm satisfied with the Defender."
"The most valuable feature is that it gives us visibility of rogue traffic that is on the network."
"I find the complete portfolio to be excellent."
"Darktrace's most valuable features are that it understands the network environment and is able to trace the traffic and alert on anomalies."
"The most valuable feature of Darktrace and the most valuable feature is the artificial intelligence module because that is the tool that determines automatically if there is any risk or not in the network."
"The Antigena feature is most valuable. Once it learns your environment, Antigena can step in and block a denial of service attack, a ransomware attack, or just about anything that doesn't belong in the environment. It can detect any type of attack that hits the environment because it understands what normal looks like for the network. It is very useful for an autonomous response."
"I like the Antigena feature in Darktrace, as it offers immediate response and is helpful."
"The most valuable feature has been the behavioral analytics that allows us to monitor all the traffic."
"We have found the product to be stable and issue-free."
"SentinelOne Singularity Complete, together with SentinelOne Vigilance, is an EDR tool with capabilities such as these, which I found valuable: the dashboard that shows you all the information and the power to either manually or automatically quarantine issues or threats in the environment."
"We love the API. We use it to generate robust reporting, and we also developed tools to perform agent actions remotely without needing to provide all IT staff with console access."
"The portal is the most valuable feature because it provides us with a single pane of glass view and is highly intuitive."
"Offers good protection against ransomware."
"The deep visibility feature is valuable. It is helping enrich our IR team in their investigations."
"The tool's most valuable feature is EDR."
"All of the features are valuable. The way that it integrates into management with fault correction capabilities over is especially valuable. Any of the full gamut of the features that it provides are useful to us."
"I like Singularity's rollback features, threat-hunting, and Ranger Insights. The Ranger feature scans the network and provides visibility into all the unsecured assets."
"The visibility for the weaknesses in the system and unauthorized access can be improved."
"We need to be able to whitelist data at the backend."
"The pre-sales cost calculations could be more transparent."
"There is room for improvement with the UI."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 must improve the overall management style, including the GUI. It also needs to change the filters so that it is easy to whitelist and blacklist data."
"I'd like some additional features any product can give me to protect our environment in a better way."
"Microsoft security solutions work as expected. They are constantly updating the solutions to make them better. At the same time, the changes can impact a customer's environment, and we need to adjust settings. Sometimes we aren't aware of the changes, and nothing is pushed from the backend automatically."
"Too many false positives and lacks an accurate capability to detect malicious SharePoint sites."
"This is quite an expensive product so the pricing is something that can be improved."
"The module can improve so that every time it's more intelligent."
"In terms of improvements, fine-tuning is the area where we have to spend some time because it works on unsupervised machine learning. It would be good if they can improve their algorithm or technical functionality to reduce the fine-tuning effort. They can also come up with something at the endpoint level. So far, Darktrace has been a network detection response (NDR) solution. It does not offer much at the endpoint level or on user-client devices or servers. There should be more visibility at the endpoint level. It would be good to have the detection and response at the endpoint level by Darktrace. It should also have integration with an agile environment so that we can have continuous development and continuous integration in the application development environment. This is currently not there. It should also have internet-facing platform visibility, which is currently missing. They also need to improve the reporting and management dashboards. Currently, these are not so easy for a non-technical person. All these features would make Darktrace much better, and they would also be helpful in selling more solutions."
"It's a very complex platform."
"A reporting portal could be a great addition to help customize reports."
"I would like to see some additional enhancements."
"It should be easier to access the Darktrace portal and its documentation. Only the customer can access their portal and support. It could be cheaper."
"Darktrace is a closed technology, meaning we know very little about how it works, including the architecture, which is significant. As a result, when we implement the system and find we're getting many false positives, we have minimal insight into why it's happening and what we can do to fix it. We don't know how the solution is configured, the criteria for threats to be determined, or the product's inner workings. We understand that they have to ensure privacy and their copyright, but we want to see some documentation or public research into the security Darktrace provides."
"We need to analyze the threats and make decisions based on that, so the analytics could be better at analyzing exactly where the threats are coming from."
"The only problem I have is they don't manually review the threat files. That's the only thing I'm concerned about."
"It's good on Linux, and Windows is pretty good except that the Windows agents sometimes ask for a lot of resources on the endpoints. That could be in the fine-tuning for scanning. In Mac, they are complaining about the same problems, that it's using a lot of resources, but that could also be that we have to configure what it is scanning and what it should not scan. Currently it scans everything."
"I would like to have the same features such as ransomware that are available on the cloud version of SentinelOne also made available for the on-prem version because a lot of people in our region are not ready for cloud solutions."
"The product must provide the ability to update applications from the SentinelOne Management Console."
"My biggest complaint is that when you're logged into the console there is the Help section where you can review all the documentation. But when you log in to the support portal, there is documentation there as well. They need to sync those two into one place so that I don't have to search in two different locations for an answer."
"The training for SentinelOne Singularity should be free. The solution has a lot of features but we do not know how to use them all. The moment someone purchases the solution they should contact them and provide them with a feature session on how to use the features."
"There is an area of improvement is agent health monitoring, which would give us the ability to cap and manage resources used by the SentinelOne agent. We had issues with this in our environment. We reached out to SentinelOne about it, and they were very prompt in adding it into their roadmap."
More Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Pricing and Cost Advice →
More SentinelOne Singularity Complete Pricing and Cost Advice →
Darktrace is ranked 11th in Email Security with 65 reviews while SentinelOne Singularity Complete is ranked 2nd in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) with 177 reviews. Darktrace is rated 8.2, while SentinelOne Singularity Complete is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Darktrace writes "Great autonomous support, offers an easy setup, and has responsive support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SentinelOne Singularity Complete writes "Provides peace of mind and is good at ingesting data and correlating". Darktrace is most compared with CrowdStrike Falcon, Vectra AI, Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks, Cisco Secure Network Analytics and ExtraHop Reveal(x), whereas SentinelOne Singularity Complete is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, CrowdStrike Falcon, ThreatLocker Protect, Datto Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) and Bitdefender GravityZone EDR.
We monitor all Email Security reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
You should not compare SentinelOne to Darktrace - they solve completely different problems. These types of questions show the ongoing challenges in cybersecurity. As written below, SentinelOne is an Endpoint Detection and Response tool. It is to protect a laptop or workstation from an attack. EDR is a core requirement for cyber defense.
Darktrace is a network detection and response tool. NDR tools detect attacks occurring against the network. NDR is also a core requirement for cyber defense.
Regardless of the quality of either tool, you need to cover both your endpoint and your network. So if you decide one is better and choose it, you remain vulnerable to attack.
Cover your endpoint only, and I am going to hit you with an attack on your network. Cover your network only, and I will get you via an endpoint.
EDR tools - SentinelOne, Cybereason, CrowdStrike, Carbon Black to name a few.
NDR tools - Darktrace, Vectra, ExtraHop, Cyglass to name a few.
Comparisons of these tools by category would be more valuable.
An easy answer for me - pretty much exactly what @Janet Staver described.
DT was a good east-west network traffic tool that could tell you all about communications between systems (think NDR) but limited capacity, expensive boxes, that we outgrew.
S1 is an endpoint tool with deep inspection, a central console, and is cost-effective.
I have done a POC with Darktrace three different times at different orgs.
They are actually a borderline scam company. On each POC, I set up tests that even a free install of Suricata could detect. DT failed to detect anything in each case.
The other thing is that they call their alerts breaches. This is a BAD idea and they would not listen to reason on this. They will send out young, good-looking salespeople, but by the time you are done with your POC, they will be gone and replaced by someone else.
Their sales engineers are too young to have any experience with a security issue you may be dealing with. And I suspect after a few POCs they see that this does not work, at all, and leave! Stay away from Darktrace!
You can't compare these two solutions - they are different.
SentinelOne is an EDR similar to known EDRs (Sophos, Sandblast, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto XDR, etc.).
You need an agent to install to the endpoint to manage. You can integrate via API if you want to integrate to existing networks like Clearpass and micro-segmentation software like Guardicore.
Darktrace is an AI-based tool to analyze traffic for known cyber threats from the network level without any agent. Either mirror the port or redirect traffic from VLAN to the Darktrace sensor. The sensor notifies you if any devices are newly discovered to the network, or new users access the particular device. You can block that traffic or device to mobile devices or web UI. In addition, Darktrace also has a module to integrate to SaS like the Office365 email.
Both @Janet Staver and @ITSecuri7cfd are spot on.
As a security vendor, like ITSecuri7cfd points out, one tool is for the endpoint and one tool is for the network side.
If you looking for an EDR tool, you should look to compare solutions from Carbon Black, Crowdstrike, etc.
As for Darktrace, they are classified as an NDR tool. Within the NDR market, there are essentially 2 types of solutions; tools for smaller organizations that have limited resources and tools that are designed for organizations that have SOC teams that need better visibility and data.
If you want to learn more about NDR solutions in general we have written an ebook called "What to look for in an NDR platform": https://bricata.com/wp-content...
Which solution is better depends on which is more suitable specifically for your company. Darktrace, for example, is meant for smaller to medium-sized businesses. It is also a good option for organizations who have limited security resources but still need deep insights into threats and network intrusions. Darktrace also has an invaluable feature that produces weekly reports.
A unique feature Darktrace has to its name is its use of artificial intelligence for cybersecurity and machine learning capabilities. Darktrace is able to successfully detect threats over networks before it's even possible for them to spread. In addition, it notifies you with all the threat details. Although Darktrace is geared toward smaller-sized organizations, it does come with a hefty cost. The cost increases as the number of products that need to be monitored increases.
SentinelOne is a great product and effective for mitigating threats. It allows you to have granular control over your environments and your endpoints. SentinelOne has a central management console. It also provides insight into lateral movement threats, by gathering data from anything that happens to be related to the security of an endpoint. Another SentinelOne feature that’s fantastic is their one-click automation remediation, along with rollback for restoring an endpoint, which can often be very helpful.
SentinelOne is also known for its ability to decrease incident response time and has deep visibility that comes in handy quite often. However, the dashboard design isn’t wonderful. In contrast to Darktrace though, SentinelOne is efficient because minimal administrative support is required, and it offers a lot for a solution that is cost-effective.
Conclusion
While both SentinelOne and Darktrace boast many beneficial features, one outweighs the other when it comes to price. If Darktrace is within your budget, I would recommend it. But if not, SentinelOne is a great solution that makes a lot of sense.