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Microsoft Defender for IoT vs Microsoft Sentinel comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Microsoft Defender for IoT
Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite
27th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
IoT Security (5th), Operational Technology (OT) Security (6th)
Microsoft Sentinel
Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
97
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (3rd), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (1st), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Microsoft Security Suite category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender for IoT is 0.4%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Sentinel is 5.0%, down from 6.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Microsoft Security Suite
 

Featured Reviews

William Tuleja - PeerSpot reviewer
Integration with existing tools boosts management efficiency
The only improvement I see is that some detection explanations are vaguely provided by Microsoft, resulting in generic IoT detections that alert me to an issue yet don't specify what's wrong. Often, it just links back to a generic KB article without additional information. When it happens, it requires extra detective work. This issue doesn't occur often but can be annoying.
Ivan Angelov - PeerSpot reviewer
Threat detection and response capabilities enhance investigation processes
My security team has been using Microsoft Sentinel for around two years. We also have Bastion and SolarWinds as part of our monitoring tools. We use a three-way tool, alongside Microsoft Sentinel, in our environment The most valuable features for us include threat collection, threat detection,…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"As a cybersecurity consultant, the best part of Microsoft Defender for IoT is the capability to integrate with other tools such as Microsoft Sentinel and receive real-time alerts from the product."
"It is manageable and integrates with other Microsoft products, which is crucial for me."
"Some advantages of Microsoft Defender for IoT are that it's easy to install on any OS, and you can create any custom use cases easily."
"I believe it is best suited for cloud services and is unmatched by other cloud security solutions."
"Mainly, it is manageable and integrates with other Microsoft products, which is crucial for me."
"I find Microsoft Defender very effective in vulnerability management and it provides good attack reduction, making it a next-generation protection solution."
"The graphics and analysis in Microsoft Defender for IoT are very representative."
"The signal correlation and dashboards features of Microsoft Sentinel are fantastic because it correlates the signal logs with other products."
"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."
"We’ve got process improvement that's happened across multiple different fronts within the organization, within our IT organization based on this tool being in place."
"The data connectors that Microsoft Sentinel provides are easy to integrate when we work with a Microsoft agent."
"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"
"Free ingestion for Azure logs (with E5 licence)"
"The most valuable features are its threat handling and detection. It's a powerful tool because it's based on machine learning and on the behavior of malware."
"The main benefit is the ease of integration."
 

Cons

"The only improvement I see is that some detection explanations are vaguely provided by Microsoft, resulting in generic IoT detections that alert me to an issue yet don't specify what's wrong."
"Customer service and support from Microsoft are costly. The execution by engineers is expensive, and the service is neither free nor toll-free, making it less accessible for customers."
"There are a few limitations with Microsoft Defender for IoT. We raised concerns with the product team because they don't capture all the information regarding command execution or processes executed on certain endpoints."
"The only improvement I see is that some detection explanations are vaguely provided by Microsoft, resulting in generic IoT detections that alert me to an issue yet don't specify what's wrong."
"The documentation for Microsoft Defender for IoT is lacking. There are no clear steps or guidance, and updates are frequent, which adds to the confusion."
"Microsoft Defender for IoT is not scalable. If you want to monitor another industrial network, you need an additional server, making it less scalable."
"The primary area that needs improvement is compatibility with the latest IoT technologies."
"There is room for improvement in terms of integrations."
"From a client perspective, they'd like to see more cost savings."
"The solution could improve the playbooks."
"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."
"I would like to see more AI used in processes."
"The dashboards can be improved. Creating dashboards is very easy, but the visualizations are not as good as Microsoft Power BI. People who are using Microsoft Power BI do not like Sentinel's dashboards."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Pricing for Microsoft Sentinel could always be lower, but it's workable. The ingestion costs for the data analytics is usually the highest cost, but the licensing per Microsoft Sentinel is fairly straightforward and transparent."
"I have had mixed feedback. At one point, I heard a client say that it sometimes seems more expensive. Most of the clients are on Office 365 or M365, and they are forced to take Azure SIEM because of the integration."
"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."
"It is a consumption-based license model. bands at 100, 200, 400 GB per day etc. Azure Sentinel Pricing | Microsoft Azure"
"The pricing is fair... With a traditional SIEM, you pay a lump sum for licenses. But with Sentinel, it's pay-as-you-go according to the amount of data you inject."
"Microsoft Sentinel's pricing is relatively expensive and extremely confusing."
"The price is reasonable because Sentinel includes features like user behavior analytics and SOAR that are typically sold separately. Overall, a standalone on-prem solution would require some high-end servers, and there's a different cost. It is a cloud-based solution, so there are backend cloud computing costs, but they are negligible."
"The pricing is reasonable, and we think Sentinel is worth what we pay for it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Energy/Utilities Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
5%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Microsoft Defender for IoT?
I don't think I have any recommendation on improvements for Microsoft Defender for IoT because we don't use it too extensively. There are a few limitations with Microsoft Defender for IoT. We raise...
What is your primary use case for Microsoft Defender for IoT?
Clients mainly use Microsoft Defender for IoT for unfamiliar sign-in attempts and Microsoft Defender EDRs. We are using use cases for unfamiliar sign-in and malicious activity, such as user sign-in...
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

Azure Defender for IoT
Azure Sentinel
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
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 Microsoft Defender for IoT vs. Microsoft Sentinel and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.