We performed a comparison between Fortinet FortiSIEM 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: Microsoft is considered one of the industry leaders in the SIEM space. Microsoft Sentinel allows users to investigate threats seamlessly and manage them quickly, all from one single place. Microsoft Sentinel is a complete solution. Many users feel Fortinet FortiSIEM's learning curve takes too long and tell us the solution should have better integrations with other third-party solutions.
"The ability to write my own parsers for the devices that are not supported by Fortinet is the most valuable feature."
"FortiSIEM is a great tool for making security processes transparent."
"The most valuable feature is the dashboard. CMDB database collects data from a lot of pre-configured devices."
"Fortinet FortiSIEM is easy to use."
"It's a very nice solution to work with."
"FortiSIEM sends an email or SMS notifications to admins when there are significant incidents. It's a highly efficient way of responding to incidents."
"We like the integration of all of these Fortinet platforms together. Everything is integrated well, and we are able to sell that as a service to our customers."
"It works well with medium to large-scale enterprises."
"The log analysis is excellent; it can predict what can or will happen regarding use patterns and vulnerabilities."
"There are some very powerful features to Sentinel, such as the integration of various connectors. We have a lot of departments that use both IaaS and SaaS services, including M365 as well as Azure services. The ability to leverage connectors into these environments allows for large-scale data injection."
"Investigations are something really remarkable. We can drill down right to the raw logs by running different queries and getting those on the console itself."
"There are a lot of things you can explore as a user. You can even go and actively hunt for threats. You can go on the offensive rather than on the defensive."
"I like the unified security console. You can close incidents using Sentinel in all other Microsoft Security portals, when it comes to incident response."
"The most valuable feature is the alert notifications, which are categorized by severity levels: informational, low, medium, and high."
"What is most useful, is that it has a good connection to the Microsoft ecosystem, and I think that's the key part."
"The most valuable feature is the UEBA. It's very easy for a security operations analyst. It has a one-touch analysis where you can search for a particular entity, and you can get a complete overview of that entity or user."
"The interface needs some improvements because it's a bit cumbersome when you're trying to view items. It takes some time to get used to. Additionally, sometimes the scrolling does not work."
"Sometimes, if there are changes made by a user on a database server, it can be difficult to get that information on the fly. I would like to see a situation where once I specify a user with the database server I need, and with the changes they have performed on that, I don't need to continue my search pattern to drill down just to get the information."
"The solution needs to do a better job with third party integration. Right now, that's lacking on the solution. I specifically am talking about the AWS environment. Most of the AWS environment products do not have that capability to integrate."
"Fortinet FortiSIEM could improve by having a signature update."
"They could work on their documentation. If there's anything about the solution that needs improvement, it's that. For example, documentation already is on a very high level but specifically on the CLI there are tons of features which can be fine-tuned and thousands of commands are very difficult to document. If they could make this easier, it would improve the overall solution."
"We expect the latest patch from Fortinet FortiSIEM to give the ability to work with signature files."
"I would like to see more integration with other platforms."
"Areas for improvement would be the ease of use and the integration with Fortinet's own products."
"I would like to see more AI used in processes."
"Sentinel could improve its ticketing and management. A few customers I have worked with liked to take the data created in Sentinel. You can make some basic efforts around that, but the customers wanted to push it to a third-party system so they could set up a proper ticketing management system, like ServiceNow, Jira, etc."
"The built-in SOAR is not really good out-of-the-box. The SOAR relies on logic apps and you almost need to have some kind of developer background to be able to make these logic apps. Most security people cannot develop anything..."
"They need to work with other security vendors. For example, we replaced our email gateway with Symantec, but we couldn't collect these logs with Azure Sentinel. Instead of collecting these logs with Azure Sentinel, we are collecting them on Qradar. We couldn't do it with Sentinel, which is a problem for us."
"Its documentation is not so simple. It is easy for somebody who is Microsoft certified or more closely attached to Microsoft solutions. It is not easy for those who are working on open-source platforms. There isn't a central point where everything is documented, and there is no specific training or certification."
"We do have in-built or out-of-the-box metrics that are shown on the dashboard, but it doesn't give the kind of metrics that we need from our environment whereby we need to check the meantime to detect and meantime to resolve an incident. I have to do it manually. I have to pull all the logs or all the alerts that are fed into Sentinel over a certain period. We do this on a monthly basis, so I go into Microsoft Sentinel and pull all the alerts or incidents we closed over a period of thirty days."
"Sometimes, it is hard for us to estimate the costs of Microsoft Sentinel."
"The on-prem log sources still require a lot of development."
Fortinet FortiSIEM is ranked 9th in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 64 reviews while Microsoft Sentinel is ranked 2nd in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 85 reviews. Fortinet FortiSIEM is rated 7.6, while Microsoft Sentinel is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Fortinet FortiSIEM writes "It's cheaper than other solutions with the same features but lacks integration with many third-party vendors". 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". Fortinet FortiSIEM is most compared with IBM Security QRadar, Splunk Enterprise Security, Wazuh, LogRhythm SIEM and ThousandEyes, whereas Microsoft Sentinel is most compared with AWS Security Hub, IBM Security QRadar, Splunk Enterprise Security, Microsoft Defender for Cloud and LogRhythm SIEM. See our Fortinet FortiSIEM vs. Microsoft Sentinel report.
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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.
