We performed a comparison between Microsoft Defender for Identity and Microsoft Sentinel based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Microsoft Security Suite solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The most valuable aspect is its connection to Microsoft Sentinel and Defender for Endpoint, and giving exact timelines for incidents and when certain events occured during an incident."
"All the integration it has with different Microsoft packages, like Teams and Office, is good."
"The feature I like most is that you can create your own customized detection rules. It has a lot of default alerts and rules, but you can customize them according to your business needs."
"It is easy to set up. Based on the number of devices you would like to set up, you can use scripts, Group Policy, etc. It takes five minutes to set up."
"Defender for Identity has not affected the end-user experience."
"The feature I like the most about Defender for Identity is the entity tags. They give you the ability to identify sensitive accounts, devices, and groups. You also have honeytoken entities, which are devices that are identified as "bait" for fraudulent actors."
"Microsoft Defender for Identity provides excellent visibility into threats by leveraging real-time analytics and data intelligence."
"The solution offers excellent visibility into threats."
"Sentinel pricing is good"
"I've worked on most of the top SIEM solutions, and Sentinel has an edge in most areas. For example, it has built-in SOAR capabilities, allowing you to run playbooks automatically. Other vendors typically offer SOAR as a separate licensed solution or module, but you get it free with Sentinel. In-depth incident integration is available out of the box."
"The best feature is that onboarding to the SIM solution is quite easy. If you are using cloud-based solutions, it's just a few clicks to migrate it."
"In Azure Sentinel, we have found, they do have a store in their capability. AI and intelligence features. We found that to be very helpful for us because some other things we do need to integrate again or find another vendor for the store"
"Native integration with Microsoft security products or other Microsoft software is also crucial. For example, we can integrate Sentinel with Office 365 with one click. Other integrations aren't as easy. Sometimes, we have to do it manually."
"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... 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."
"Sentinel is a Microsoft product, so they provide very robust use cases and analytic groups, which are very beneficial for the security team. I also like the ability to integrate data sources into the software for on-premise and cloud-based solutions."
"One of the most valuable features of Microsoft Sentinel is that it's cloud-based."
"There is no option to remedy an issue directly from the console. If we see an alert, we can't fix it from the console. Instead, we must depend on other Microsoft products, such as MDE. That is a significant drawback. It simply works as a scanner, which can sometimes put enough load on the sensors. Immediate actions should be possible from the dashboard because. It can prevent issues from spreading further."
"I would like to be able to do remediation from the platform because it is just a scanner right now. If you onboard a device, it shows you what is happening, but you can't use it to fix things. You need to go into the system to fix it instead."
"The impact of the sensors on the domain controllers can be quite high depending on your loads. I don't know if there's any room for improvement there, but that's one of the things that might be improved."
"The solution could be better at using group-managed access and they could replace it with broad-based access controls."
"An area for improvement is the administrative interface. It's basic compared to other administrative centers. They could make it more user-friendly and easier to navigate."
"Microsoft should look at what competing vendors like CrowdStrike and Broadcom are doing and incorporate those features into Sentinel and Defender. At the same time, I think the intelligence inside the product is improving fast. They should incorporate more zero-trust and hybrid trust approaches. They need to build up threat intelligence based on threats and methods used in attacks on other companies."
"And when you are working in a priority IP address, Identity is not able to know that those IPs are from the company. It sees that the IPs are from Taiwan or from Hong Kong or from India, even though they are internal IPs, resulting in a lot of false positives."
"The technical support needs significant improvement. Documentation for more minor issues in the form of guides or walkthroughs could help to resolve this issue. The number of tickets raised would decrease, removing some pressure from the support team and making it easier to clear the remaining tickets."
"The performance could be improved. If I create 15 to 20 lines for a single-use case in KQL, sometimes it takes more time to execute. If I create use cases within a certain timeline, the result will show in .01 seconds. A complex query takes more time to get results."
"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."
"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."
"The solution could be more user-friendly; some query languages are required to operate it."
"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."
"Sometimes, it is hard for us to estimate the costs of Microsoft Sentinel."
"The dashboards can be improved. Creating dashboards is very easy, but the visualizations are not as good as Microsoft Power BI. People who are using Microsoft Power BI do not like Sentinel's dashboards."
"We'd like also a better ticketing system, which is older."
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Microsoft Defender for Identity is ranked 8th in Microsoft Security Suite with 13 reviews while Microsoft Sentinel is ranked 6th in Microsoft Security Suite with 86 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Identity is rated 9.0, while Microsoft Sentinel is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Identity writes "Offers robust protection from insider threats, but the customer support is poor". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Sentinel writes "Gives a comprehensive and holistic view of the ecosystem and improves visibility and the ability to respond". Microsoft Defender for Identity is most compared with Microsoft Entra ID Protection, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Microsoft Entra Verified ID, Splunk User Behavior Analytics and BloodHound Enterprise, whereas Microsoft Sentinel is most compared with AWS Security Hub, IBM Security QRadar, Wazuh, Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Elastic Security. See our Microsoft Defender for Identity vs. Microsoft Sentinel report.
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