Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

ConnectWise SIEM vs Microsoft Sentinel comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

ConnectWise SIEM
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
29th
Average Rating
10.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (32nd), Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) (20th), Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (21st)
Microsoft Sentinel
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
92
Ranking in other categories
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (6th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of ConnectWise SIEM is 0.3%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Sentinel is 7.2%, down from 9.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

Giulio Valeri - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficiently monitoring and detecting suspicious activities
One valuable feature of ConnectWise Fortify is the ability to add other teams and receive notifications when customers make changes or remove multi-factor authentication in Microsoft or SAP environments. For instance, once we were connecting different parts in China, and we had to reserve resources for the blue source of the login of task no v. ConnectWise Fortify successfully mitigated the issue and monitored any suspicious activity in the Microsoft environment. Despite the inconvenience, the Microsoft environment is still active and susceptible to cyber threats. We do a lot of research and utilize ConnectWise Fortify to restart and restore the system. It's essential to have a solution like ConnectWise Fortify to protect against cyber threats.
KrishnanKartik - PeerSpot reviewer
Every rule enriched at triggering stage, easing the job of SOC analyst
It's a Big Data security analytics platform. Among the unique features is the fact that it has built-in UEBA and analytical capabilities. It allows you to use the out-of-the-box machine learning and AI capabilities, but it also allows you to bring your own AI/ML, by bringing in your own IPs and allowing the platform to accept them and run that on top of it. In addition, the SOAR component is a pay-per-use model. Compared to any other product, where customization is not available, 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. Other vendors charge heavily for the SOAR, 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. The SOAR engine also uniquely helps us to automate most of the incidents with automated enrichment and that cuts out the L1 analyst work. And combining M365 with Sentinel, if you want to call it integration, takes just a few clicks: "next, next finish." If it is all M365-native, it is a maximum of three or four steps and you'll be able to ingest all the logs into Sentinel. That is true even with AWS or GCP because most of the connectors are already available out-of-the-box. You just click, put in your subscription details, include your IAM, and you are finished. Within five to six steps, you can integrate AWS workloads and the logs can be ingested into Sentinel. When it comes to a third party specifically, such as log sources in a data center or on-premises, we need a log collector so that the logs can be forwarded to the Sentinel platform. And when it comes to servers or something where there is an agent for Windows or Linux, the agent can collect the logs and ship them to the Sentinel platform. I don't see any difficulties in integrating any of the log sources, even to the extent of collecting IoT log sources. Microsoft Defender for Cloud has multiple components such as Defender for Servers, Defender for PaaS, and Defender for databases. For customers in Azure, there are a lot of use cases specific to protecting workloads and PaaS and SaaS in Azure and beyond Azure, if a customer also has on-premises locations. There is EDR for Windows and Linux servers, and it even protects different kinds of containers. With Defender for Cloud, all these sources can be seamlessly integrated and you can then track the security incidents in Microsoft's XDR platform. That means you have one more workspace, under Azure, not Defender for Cloud, where you can see the security incidents. In addition, it can be integrated with Sentinel for EDR deep-dive analytics. It can also protect workloads in AWS. We have customers for whom we are protecting their AWS workloads. Even EKS, Elastic Kubernetes Service, on AWS can be integrated, as can the GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine). And with Defender for Cloud, security alert ingestion is free

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"We have found the solution has great functionality and it is easy to use."
"One valuable feature of ConnectWise Fortify is the ability to add other teams and receive notifications when customers make changes or remove multi-factor authentication in Microsoft or SAP environments."
"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 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."
"Mainly, this is a cloud-native product. So, there are zero concerns about managing the whole infrastructure on-premises."
"The most valuable feature is the alert notifications, which are categorized by severity levels: informational, low, medium, and high."
"Sentinel enables us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem. In addition to integrating our Cisco ASA Firewall logs, we get our Palo Alto proxy logs and some on-premises data coming from our hardware devices... That is very important and is one way Sentinel is playing a wider role in our environment."
"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"
"The AI and ML of Azure Sentinel are valuable. We can use machine learning models at the tenant level and within Office 365 and Microsoft stack. We don't need to depend upon any other connectors. It automatically provisions the native Microsoft products."
"The Log analytics are useful."
 

Cons

"The manage portion of the solution is complicated and should be simplified by having different versions to meet the needs of different size companies."
"ConnectWise Fortify could work on covering more areas, like phishing messages, which have become more complicated to detect."
"At the network level, there is a limitation in integrating some of the switches or routers with Microsoft Sentinel. Currently, SPAN traffic monitoring is not available in Microsoft Sentinel. I have heard that it is available in Defender for Identity, which is a different product. It would be good if LAN traffic monitoring or SPAN traffic monitoring is available in Microsoft Sentinel. It would add a lot of value. It is available in some of the competitor products in the market."
"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."
"Its implementation could be simpler. It is not really simple or straightforward. It is in the middle. Sometimes, connectors are a little bit complex."
"I would like to see more AI used in processes."
"When it comes to ingesting Azure native log sources, some of the log sources are specific to the subscription, and it is not always very clear."
"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."
"If Azure Sentinel had the ability to ingest Azure services from different tenants into another tenant that was hosting Azure Sentinel, and not lose any metadata, that would be a huge benefit to a lot of companies."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive."
"Sentinel is costly compared to other solutions, but it's fair. SIEM solutions like CrowdStrike charge based on daily log volume. They generally process a set number of logs for free before they start charging. Microsoft's pricing is clearer. It's free under five gigabytes. Some of these logs we ingest have a cost, so they don't hide it. I believe the tenant pays the price, and Microsoft helps create awareness of the cost."
"Sentinel is pretty competitive. The pricing is at the level of other SIEM solutions."
"Cost-wise, Sentinel is based on the volume of information being ingested, so it can be quite pricey. The ability to use strategies to control what data is being ingested is important."
"Sentinel can be expensive. When you ingest data from sources that are outside of the cloud, you're paying a fair amount for that data ingestion. When you're ingesting data sources from within the cloud, depending on what your retention periods are, it's not that expensive."
"Microsoft Sentinel is expensive."
"It is consumption-based pricing. It is an affordable solution."
"I'm not happy with the pricing on the integration with Defender for Endpoint. Defender for Endpoint is log-rich. There is a lot of information coming through, and it is needed information. The price point at which you ingest those logs has made a lot of my customers make the decision to leave that within the Defender stack."
"From a cost perspective, there are some additional charges in addition to the licensing."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions are best for your needs.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
19%
Wholesaler/Distributor
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
Is there a common threat intelligence tool that aggregates multiple threat intelligence sources?
Yes, Azure Sentinel is a SIEM on the Cloud. Multiple data sources can be uploaded and analyzed with Azure Sentinel and its Threat Hunting functionality with AI available as templates or customized ...
What is a better choice, Splunk or Azure Sentinel?
It would really depend on (1) which logs you need to ingest and (2) what are your use cases Splunk is easy for ingestion of anything, but the charge per GB/Day Indexed and it gets expensive as log ...
Which is better - Azure Sentinel or AWS Security Hub?
We like that Azure Sentinel does not require as much maintenance as legacy SIEMs that are on-premises. Azure Sentinel is auto-scaling - you will not have to worry about performance impact, you will...
 

Also Known As

ConnectWise Security Management, ConnectWise Fortify, Continuum Fortify, ConnectWise SIEM, ConnectWise SASE
Azure Sentinel
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Techvera, Syrex, Clark Integrated Technologies
Microsoft Sentinel is trusted by companies of all sizes including ABM, ASOS, Uniper, First West Credit Union, Avanade, and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about ConnectWise SIEM vs. Microsoft Sentinel and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.