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.
"We've found the initial setup to be quite straightforward."
"The indexes allow you to get your results quickly. The filtering and log passing is the advantage of Logstash."
"It's not very complicated to install Elastic."
"It's very customizable, which is quite helpful."
"One of the most valuable features of this solution is that it is more flexible than AlienVault."
"The most valuable feature of Elastic Security is that you can install agents, and they are not separately licensed."
"Elastic has a lot of beats, such as Winlogbeat and Filebeat. Beats are the agents that have to be installed on the terminals to send the data. When we install beats or Elastic agents on every terminal, they don't overload the terminals. In other SIEM solutions such as Splunk or QRadar, when beats or agents are installed on endpoints, they are very heavy for the terminals. They consume a lot of power of the terminals, whereas Elastic agents hardly consume any power and don't overload the terminals."
"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."
"Having your logs put all in one place with machine learning working on those logs is a good feature. I don't need to start thinking, "Where are my logs?" My logs are in a centralized repository, like Log Analytics, which is why you can't use Sentinel without Log Analytics. Having all those logs in one place is an advantage."
"The best functionality that you can get from Azure Sentinel is the SOAR capability. So, you can estimate any type of activity, such as when an alert was triggered or an incident was found."
"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."
"The ability of all these solutions to work together natively is essential. We have an Azure subscription, including Log Analytics. This feature automatically acts as one of the security baselines and detects recommendations because it also integrates with Defender. We can pull the sysadmin logs from Azure. It's all seamless and native."
"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."
"Mainly, this is a cloud-native product. So, there are zero concerns about managing the whole infrastructure on-premises."
"Free ingestion for Azure logs (with E5 licence)"
"It's easy to use. It's a very good product. It can easily ingest data from anywhere. It has an easily understandable language to perform actions."
"If the documentation were improved and made more clear for beginners, or even professionals, then we would be more attracted to this solution."
"We set up a cron job to delete old logs so that we wouldn't hit a disk space issue. Such a feature should be available in the UI, where old logs can be deleted automatically. (Don’t know if this feature is already there)."
"Their visuals and graphs need to be better."
"The price of this product could be improved, especially the additional costs. I would also like to see better-quality graphics."
"Its documentation should be a bit better. I have to spend at least a couple of hours to find the solution for a simple thing. When we buy Elastic, training is not included for free with Elastic. We have to pay extra for the training. They should include training in the price."
"The solution's query building is not that intuitive compared to other solutions."
"Elastic Security's maintenance is hard and its scalability is a challenge. There are complications in scaling and upgrading. The solution needs to also provide periodic upgrade checks."
"It's a little bit of a learning curve to understand the logic of searching for things and trying to find what you're looking for in Elastic Security."
"We'd like also a better ticketing system, which is older."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Some of the data connectors are outdated, at least the ones that utilize Linux machines for log forwarding. I believe that Microsoft is already working on improving this."
"There is some relatively advanced knowledge that you have to have to properly leverage Sentinel's full capabilities. I'm thinking about things like the creation of workbooks, how you do threat-hunting, and the kinds of notifications you're getting... It takes time for people to ramp up on that and develop a familiarity or expertise with it."
"There is a wider thing called Jupyter Notebooks, which is around the automation side of things. It would be good if there are playbooks that you can utilize without having to have the developer experience to do it in-house. Microsoft could provide more playbooks or more Jupyter Notebooks around MITRE ATT&CK Framework."
"Sometimes, it is hard for us to estimate the costs of Microsoft Sentinel."
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.
