We performed a comparison between Elastic Security and Microsoft Sentinel based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Both solutions are extremely reliable. Elastic Security is very flexible and very customizable. Microsoft Sentinel is a more comprehensive solution, provides more user options, and is very easy to use. Additionally, Microsoft Sentinel is the best option for organizations that are heavily vested in a Microsoft ecosystem.
"The performance is good and it is faster than IBM QRadar."
"ELK is open-source, and it will give you the framework you need to build everything from scratch."
"Its flexibility is most valuable. We can have a number of scenarios, and we can get logs from anything. If we know how to use Logstash, we can tweak it in many ways. This makes the logging search on Elastic very easy."
"The most valuable thing is that this solution is widely used for work management and research. It's easy to jump into the security use case with the same technology."
"What customers found most valuable in Elastic Security feature-wise is the search capability, in particular, the way of writing the search query and the speed of searching for results."
"The most valuable features are the speed, detail, and visualization. It has the latest standards."
"ELK Logstash is easy and fast, at least for the initial setup with the out of box uses."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the prevention methods and the incident alerts."
"Previously, it was a little bit difficult to find where an incident came from, including which IP address and which country. So in Sentinel, it's very easy to find where the incident came from since we can easily get the information from the dashboard, after which we take action quickly."
"The in-built SOAR of Sentinel is valuable. Kusto Query Language is also valuable for the ease of writing queries and ease of getting insights from the logs. Schedule-based queries within Sentinel are also valuable. I found these three features most useful for my projects."
"The part that was very unexpected was Sentinel's ability to integrate with Azure Lighthouse, which, as a managed services solution provider, gives us the ability to also manage our customers' Sentinel environments or Sentinel workspaces. It is a big plus for us. With its integration with Lighthouse, we get the ability to monitor multiple workspaces from one portal. A lot of the Microsoft Sentinel workbooks already integrate with that capability, and we save countless amounts of money by simply being able to almost immediately realize multitenant capabilities. That alone is a big plus for us."
"Another area where it is helping us is in creating a single dashboard for our environment. We can collect all the logs into a log analytics workset and run queries on top of it. We get all the results in the dashboard. Even a layman can understand this stuff. The way Microsoft presents it is really incredible."
"I believe one of the main advantages is Microsoft Sentinel's seamless integration with other Microsoft products."
"The native integration of the Microsoft security solution has been essential because it helps reduce some false positives, especially with some of the impossible travel rules that may be configured in Microsoft 365. For some organizations, that might be benign because they're using VPNs, etc."
"I like the unified security console. You can close incidents using Sentinel in all other Microsoft Security portals, when it comes to incident response."
"What is most useful, is that it has a good connection to the Microsoft ecosystem, and I think that's the key part."
"We are paying dearly for the guy who is working on the ELK Stack. That knowledge is quite rare and hard to come by. For difficulty and availability of resources, I would rate it a five out of 10."
"The training that is offered for Elastic is in need of improvement because there is no depth to it."
"The solution could also use better dashboards. They need to be more graphical, more matrix-like."
"Improvements in Elastic Security could include refining and normalizing queries to make them more user-friendly, enhancing the user experience with better documentation, and addressing any latency issues."
"I would like the process of retrieving archived data and viewing it in Kibana to be simplified."
"This solution is very hard to implement."
"Elastic Security has a steep learning curve, so it takes some time to tune it and set it up for your environment. There are some costs associated with logging things that don't have value. So you need to be cautious to only log things that make sense and keep them around for as long as you need. You shouldn't hold onto things just because you think you might need them."
"Elastic has one problem. In the past, Elastic Security was free. Now, they currently only offer the basic license or a certain period of time."
"We'd like to see more connectors."
"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."
"I can't think of anything other than just getting the name out there. I think a lot of customers don't fully understand the full capabilities of Azure Sentinel yet. It is kind of like when they're first starting to use Azure, it might not be something they first think about. So, they should just kind of get to the point where it is more widely used."
"They're giving us the queries so we can plug them right into Sentinel. They need to have a streamlined process for updating them in the tool and knowing when things are updated and knowing when there are new detections available from Microsoft."
"They should just add more and more out-of-the-box connectors. It is quite a new product, and it has a lot of connectors, and even more would be good."
"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."
"It could have a better API to be able to automate many things more extensively and get more extensive data and more expensive deployment possibilities. It can gain some points on the automation part and the integration part. The API is very limited, and I would like to see it extended a bit more."
"The only thing is sometimes you can have a false positive."
Elastic Security is ranked 5th in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 59 reviews while Microsoft Sentinel is ranked 2nd in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 85 reviews. Elastic Security is rated 7.6, while Microsoft Sentinel is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Elastic Security writes "A stable and scalable tool that provides visibility along with the consolidation of logs to its users". 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". Elastic Security is most compared with Wazuh, Splunk Enterprise Security, IBM Security QRadar, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and CrowdStrike Falcon, whereas Microsoft Sentinel is most compared with AWS Security Hub, IBM Security QRadar, Splunk Enterprise Security, Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Wazuh. See our Elastic Security vs. Microsoft Sentinel report.
See our list of best Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) vendors and best Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) vendors.
We monitor all Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) 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.