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 risk level notifications are most valuable. We get to know what kind of intrusion or attack is there, and we can fix a problem on time."
"Some of the valuable features on the email side are anti-phishing, anti-malware, and Safe Links."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is a stable solution."
"The good part is that you don't have to configure it, which is very convenient."
"The two main features that prove most beneficial for us are URL scanning and attachment scanning."
"At the moment we are satisfied with this product. It's a stable, scalable, and resilient solution for us."
"The basic features are okay and I'm satisfied with the Defender."
"The solution is very easy to use. All you have to do is to assign the license to the end-user and it's done. The customer will only have the feature activated, and the solution will monitor the emails to determine if they are a threat or not."
"We are able to detect a lot of things, actually, and see what is happening in our network."
"The most valuable feature is the alerts. The alerts are meaningful. The event rolls up into meaningful and actionable alerts rather than just being noise."
"Darktrace is very useful for us because it has a large number of models for detecting threats."
"The platform has many modules, and each module examines a different situation in the behavior."
"One member of staff is enough for deployment and maintenance because Darkforce is AI-driven. It does a lot of things by itself."
"A very useful feature in Darktrace for real-time threat analysis is the packet inspection that analyzes the packet traffic in real time."
"The most valuable feature has been the behavioral analytics that allows us to monitor all the traffic."
"Darktrace is extremely stable."
"I have been a Mac guy for twenty years, and the feature parity and the capabilities of a Macintosh agent are unparalleled in the industry. It is the first anti-malware and antivirus that does not make you feel that you bought the wrong processor. It is really good and lightweight."
"Malware detection is valuable."
"It has saved us from a couple of ransomware attacks already."
"The external drive scanning is great."
"The ability to get queries by pressing the "tab" button is a plus for SentinelOne."
"Our clients have been able to survive a ransomware attack without even knowing that they had had files encrypted and automatically rolled back - even their Point of Sale (POS) system did not miss a beat and the business continued as normal without interruption."
"The product can scale as needed."
"The XDR capability is quite good."
"The only thing they should improve is the licensing model. They should stop changing it. A year ago, the five features I mentioned were included in one product. Now, three of them are bundled into one product, and you have to pay extra for the other two. I don't mind paying extra, but I don't want them to change it every year or every six months. I need to know what I'm looking at and not worry about it next year."
"The pre-sales cost calculations could be more transparent."
"We noticed that from time to time, Microsoft's stability does have problems. Sometimes the service goes up and down. Sometimes they change without prior notice."
"The product must provide better malware detection."
"The certification training for Defender for 365 needs to be deeper and incorporate Sentinel. I took all the security courses except one, and Sentinel isn't included."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 could improve by giving customers information on techniques to prevent threats. For example, information about best practices on how to protect their own devices against hackers and scammers, such as educational information or training. This would help others have a better understanding of cyber security. Additionally, there can be more security features added."
"It would be better if it were more scalable. It depends on the architecture, but we would like to make it more scalable for both data centers."
"Microsoft wants its well-paying customers to finish testing some of its half-baked products, find bugs, and report bugs back to Microsoft's team, which is a little frustrating for those who have to manage it and roll it up to thousands of people across the organization."
"Darktrace needs to automate the reports of false positives, botnets and everything."
"They just need to work on their price. In terms of features, we are trying to understand all the features that we have. We're still exploring everything that we have so that we can fully utilize it. At this point in time, it is not about the features. It is more about utilization. We're just trying to utilize everything to full capacity."
"I believe their network monitoring device licensing module could use some improvement."
"Darktrace does not have any capabilities to configure."
"In the next version, I'd like to see penetration testing."
"The interface and dashboards could be improved for ease-of-use."
"It would be helpful if they could recognize incidents and simplify the customer's challenge to identify what is happening."
"I was under impression that Darktrace's automatic blocking would be an out-of-the-box feature, but we had to integrate it with our firewall to get it to block automatically. The salesperson should be upfront and explain that you need to integrate it with your network. I would also like to see more reporting on risk. Banks in my region want to see at a glance the risk level of various assets."
"SentinelOne Singularity Complete needs more connectors for integration with more solutions."
"The mobile agents need improvement, especially in their integration with the dashboard of the normal Windows Image-based agents."
"It is complicated to do certain tasks."
"Security could always be better."
"The ability to have more direct purchasing for smaller groups and smaller businesses would be great."
"I would like to see something a little more sophisticated than simply being able to mark a false positive as safe or there's usually just one or two options in certain areas and they're a little rudimentary at this stage."
"The documentation provided for implementation is not adequate and has caused us challenges."
"I encountered issues running Singularity Complete alongside other machine-learning tools."
More Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Pricing and Cost Advice →
More SentinelOne Singularity Complete Pricing and Cost Advice →
Darktrace is ranked 12th in Email Security with 66 reviews while SentinelOne Singularity Complete is ranked 2nd in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) with 178 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, ExtraHop Reveal(x) and Cisco Secure Network Analytics, 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.