We performed a comparison between Microsoft Defender for Identity and Microsoft Sentinel based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Microsoft Security Suite solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The best feature is security monitoring, which detects and investigates suspicious user activities. It can easily detect advanced attacks based on the behavior. The credentials are securely stored, so it reduces the risk of compromise. It will monitor user behavior based on artificial intelligence to protect the identities in your organization. It will even help secure the on-premise Active Directory. It syncs from the cloud to on-premise, and on-premise modifications will be reflected in the cloud."
"The most valuable aspect is its connection to Microsoft Sentinel and Defender for Endpoint, and giving exact timelines for incidents and when certain events occured during an incident."
"Defender for Identity has not affected the end-user experience."
"All the integration it has with different Microsoft packages, like Teams and Office, is good."
"Microsoft Defender for Identity provides excellent visibility into threats by leveraging real-time analytics and data intelligence."
"One of our users had the same password for every personal and company account. That was a problem because she started receiving phishing emails that could compromise all of her accounts. Defender told us that the user was not changing their password."
"The feature I like most is that you can create your own customized detection rules. It has a lot of default alerts and rules, but you can customize them according to your business needs."
"It is easy to set up. Based on the number of devices you would like to set up, you can use scripts, Group Policy, etc. It takes five minutes to set up."
"The features that stand out are the detection engine and its integration with multiple data sources."
"It's pretty powerful and its performance is pretty good."
"Sentinel is a SIEM and SOAR tool, so its automation is the best feature; we can reduce human interaction, freeing up our human resources."
"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."
"The Log analytics are useful."
"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."
"Sentinel has an intuitive, user-friendly way to visualize the data properly. It gives me a solid overview of all the logs. We get a more detailed view that I can't get from the other SIEM tools. It has some IP and URL-specific allow listing"
"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."
"Microsoft should look at what competing vendors like CrowdStrike and Broadcom are doing and incorporate those features into Sentinel and Defender. At the same time, I think the intelligence inside the product is improving fast. They should incorporate more zero-trust and hybrid trust approaches. They need to build up threat intelligence based on threats and methods used in attacks on other companies."
"When the data leaves the cloud, there are security issues."
"The technical support needs significant improvement. Documentation for more minor issues in the form of guides or walkthroughs could help to resolve this issue. The number of tickets raised would decrease, removing some pressure from the support team and making it easier to clear the remaining tickets."
"The tracking instance needs to be configured appropriately."
"The impact of the sensors on the domain controllers can be quite high depending on your loads. I don't know if there's any room for improvement there, but that's one of the things that might be improved."
"One potential area for improvement could be exploring flexibility in the installation of Microsoft Defender for Identity agents."
"And when you are working in a priority IP address, Identity is not able to know that those IPs are from the company. It sees that the IPs are from Taiwan or from Hong Kong or from India, even though they are internal IPs, resulting in a lot of false positives."
"The solution could be better at using group-managed access and they could replace it with broad-based access controls."
"The playbook is a bit difficult and could be improved."
"The solution should allow for a streamlined CI/CD procedure."
"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."
"Multi-tenancy, in my opinion, needs to be improved. I believe it can do better as a managed service provider."
"We've seen delays in getting the logs from third-party solutions and sometimes Microsoft products as well. It would be helpful if Microsoft created a list of the delays. That would make things more transparent for customers."
"There are certain delays. For example, if an alert has been rated on Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, it might take up to an hour for that alert to reach Sentinel. This should ideally take no more than one or two seconds."
"The performance could be improved. If I create 15 to 20 lines for a single-use case in KQL, sometimes it takes more time to execute. If I create use cases within a certain timeline, the result will show in .01 seconds. A complex query takes more time to get results."
"Not all information shows up in Sentinel. Sometimes there are items provided in 365 and if you looked in Sentinel you would not see them and therefore think they do not exist. There can be discrepancies between Microsoft tools."
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Microsoft Defender for Identity is ranked 8th in Microsoft Security Suite with 13 reviews while Microsoft Sentinel is ranked 5th in Microsoft Security Suite with 85 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Identity is rated 9.0, while Microsoft Sentinel is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Identity writes "Offers robust protection from insider threats, but the customer support is poor". 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". Microsoft Defender for Identity is most compared with Microsoft Entra ID Protection, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Microsoft Entra Verified ID, Splunk User Behavior Analytics and Rapid7 InsightIDR, whereas Microsoft Sentinel is most compared with AWS Security Hub, IBM Security QRadar, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Splunk Enterprise Security and Elastic Security. See our Microsoft Defender for Identity vs. Microsoft Sentinel report.
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